skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, just let me repeat what the other replies to you have said, Anathem is very much worth reading. It starts out kind of confined and a little slow. But it starts picking up steam and then goes off in a wonderful direction I never ever expected.

For me it's in his top three books along with Snow Crash and Diamond Age. It's also on a very short list of "books I will definitely read again at some point".

If the Baroque Cycle doesn't appeal up front, you're probably fine skipping it. I liked them, but I really had to push myself through large parts of each book. I kind of felt like they needed to be edited down a bit.
Ask HN: Poll: What do you use for VOIP?
Just wondering what everyone here uses for their office / business lines.
SendHub
MightyCall
RingCentral
Phone.com
Twilio w/ OpenVBX
Vonage
Anathem is my favorite Stephenson book, and one of my favorites overall. Especially if you're a fan of his other work, I'd really recommend going back and checking it out.
Anyone know what is being used to display the code. First time I have seen highlight annotated code like that.
It's telling openssl to sign the CSR with sha256, making it much harder for somebody to modify your CSR in transit to the CA.

That's ok, but that's not relevant at all what the resulting certificate is concerned.
At a guess the moon will turn into a ring surrounding the earth in the longer term, curious how it will continue.
"As simple as possible as possible, but no simpler than that." - Albert Einstein

"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away" - Exupery
Currently it assumes Windows servers for Windows browsers. I'll add an override for switching to Unix shell shortly and let you know here when fixed.
What is your experience with the NSF I-Corps program? Do you know of anyone who has gone through the program and then built a successful company afterwords?

Link for those who are unfamiliar. https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/i-corps/
Maybe I just don't get the terminology right, but isn't this exactly a statistical method?
This is trending all day now, and seems to be getting killed on HN. Curious why mods feel the need to do that.
It looks like an error in the example in the page, shouldn't it have a comma after...

a = "10"
Look _right_ under the code. ;)
I think they are very applicable. During the writing process for TLS I spent an absolute metric ton of time testing, iterating, workshopping and trying to make sure that:

1) the value proposition for the book was right
and
2) that the book actually lived up to that value proposition

I am convinced the book would not have been a blockbuster without that work.

Now the tools are so much better. Kickstarter allows me to do this testing and iteration in a much bigger and more public way - and that's just the start. Now that I have a 7000+ community of people who are going on the journey with me, I have a built-in place to test concepts and make sure that what I'm recommending is actually effective.
Amazon Fire TV Now Has IMDb Built Right In
That's really Steve Blank's domain, but we just had lunch and he filled me in. It sounds absolutely incredible.
+1. I believe HSMs may even be required for CAs.
My personal feeling is that the high karma that you are speaking of is not a good use of time (for that reason). I know it has helped tptacek and some others but it takes considerable time (and is a distraction) to comment on HN and essentially if you do it, you do it for fun and to learn. And if something comes from it then that's icing on the cake.

I actually picked up a considerable amount of side consulting by being a regular commenter on a well known blog. While I make money from that side consulting (near 6 figures), it's actually a drain on how I make money in other ways. It almost doesn't pay (but it's fun). [1] However the time it took me to earn enough of a reputation which led (in an indirect way) to the consulting (and contacts) was really a poor use of my time.

A better idea time wise, to jump start reputation, and build a rep (in a community like HN if that is what you are trying to do) would be to attempt to do things that are remarkable and get attention. Then people might talk about you and you will have the reputation that you seek that will bring other things that you need.

[1] I also get to meet many interesting people and contacts as well.
Now I'm eagerly awaiting a colorist jumping into this conversation to tell us why that would be unacceptable. (Agreed that it's probably less of an issue to encode data in color than timing, but it just strikes me as funny how we've passed the buck from programmer > editor > colorist)
Just glancing through the content, it has a much greater than normal chance of getting flagged by readers. So all those flags could be killing it.

Edit: I am not certain this is how HN actually works, so it's just a guess.
LEO and the NSA would like it if you add as much personal information as possible, so please do that and help them out.
I don't think it's exactly a hard and fast rule, but our team does not use the "ng-" prefix for custom components, since the purpose of the ng- prefix is to avoid naming conflicts between Angular builtins and custom directives (and built-in HTML attributes/elements). So it might be good to call this something else, at least in the code.
Considering water is common and a typically heavy substance, that gives about 89,876,000 MJ/cc. Uranium is about 19x heavier, giving a hard practical upper limit (natural occurring) of 1,710,340,280 MJ/cc ... but is much harder to come by and maintain safely.

Chemically, seems XeF2 has the upper bound on energy density, but I can't find the energy per volume (which, from molecular structure, looks astoundingly high). ...not that you want pure Fluorine as exhaust...
The Document Liberation Project
ZoomCharts for Future of Web Design London: April 27-29, 2015
Imagine to have enough money to be able to buy a sizable chunk of land, anywhere on earth.
Imagine also that you wanted to create a nation from scratch, and maybe invent a new crowd-sourced constitution, laws, etc.
Assume that great powers wouldn't see this as dangerous (otherwise, your story will be very short).
What would you do?

Sometimes I dream of owning an island and creating a new nation where rules make sense and people live in relative harmony. I think such a world shouldn't be too hard to design, but rather very hard to "bootstrap".
I know it's only a fantasy, but today I was wondering what would you do to create such a nation.

Thoughts I had so far:

1) pick an existing small nation and convince a faction to declare a secession.

2) pick an existing small nation, become its president/ruler, and de facto apply your new rules to a pre-existing nation.

3) 2) pick an existing small nation, become its president/ruler, and rule that a chunk of the country will become a separate country alltogether.

4) Buy an abandoned island or offshore oil platform, and find a loophole in the diplomacy system which will later allow you to declare your territory as an independent nation.

5) Claim that a certain territory has sovereign status based on its past (e.g. an Indian reserve in the US territory, possibly the example less likely to succeed of all places).

6) A few other thoughts that I just abandoned as they are plain impossible.
How would you be able to make glass without fossil fuels?

We've already deforested the planet... you don't get to burn biomass.

A modern, technological civilization gets one bite at the apple, no more (unless they can manage to make it to another planet, where they have all the starting blocks to work with). You don't even get to salvage much from the previous civilization, since all but the crudest products go stale pretty quickly.
> Saunt Bucker's Basket!

That was, bar none, the best reading experience in my life.
Here are a few production users: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/SAMZA/Powered+By

The Metamarkets team wrote a nice post on their use of Samza a few days ago: https://metamarkets.com/2015/simplicity-stability-and-transp...
In the Lean Startup you described Aardvark tested several different business concepts, before choosing one in the end. Do you know how they dealt with the possible need to pivot versus focusing the team's resources on one single product? Or have any other advice in terms of focus versus testing different products?
I'm a huge Stephenson fan but tend to disagree with a number of others on Anathem. I found it to be a slog, that did pick up towards the end, but only by virtue of numerous deus-ex contrivances and somewhat ridiculous jumps of reasoning by the characters as they work through the central mystery.
I perhaps should have wrapped that in some kind of disclaimer about the markets in which I think Solaris doesn't matter anymore. Though I stand by the argument that Oracle doesn't care about Solaris enough to keep it alive as a viable competitor to Linux.

The specific market I care about is web application service and development. And, in that market Solaris is so close to dead that it doesn't even matter if it's still breathing (unless you develop with Java against an Oracle database).

This is relevant because Sun and Solaris backed by Oracle databases owned the first generation of the web. They've lost it, and are exhibiting no effort to regain it, or even hold the last remaining bits of the market they still have.

And, I think it's relevant that so few people know Solaris. I'm reasonably comfortable with it, as I cut my teeth in the sysadmin world when Sun systems still showed up now and then. But, it's been more than a decade since I've seen a Sun in the wild. Lack of new developers and new IT folks working with Solaris systems virtually guarantees it will continue to become less popular. Nobody starting a new web or mobile app thinks, "I know, I'll buy a bunch of Sun servers!"

So, I think you're arguing that Solaris is "good", while I'm arguing that it is irrelevant. We can both be right.

Except about this:

"The pkg system is well thought out."

That's hilarious.
The entire body is letterspaced and bold, that's the main problem. If you're in chrome you can edit styles on the fly, so try adding:

letter-spacing: 0;
font-weight: 300;
line-height: 1.5em;
Just make the pipe colossal. Or multiple smaller pipes that distribute the load. Throw a node.js server behind it and you'll get scale! Don't forget to use Mongo also.
Samtrosku specification
Except for the fact that this is a TV show, and the majority of people who want to begin watching it will want to start at the beginning with season 1.
It's a whole new world. It reminds me a bit of 2007, but even more intense. And although I wasn't in Silicon Valley in 1999, it has some of those overtones, too.

But the biggest change is not in all that noise, it's in the fact that entrepreneurial know-how is widely available. When I first started blogging in 2008, there weren't that many startup blogs. Almost no VCs blogged. YC was just beginning and PG's essays were about many different topics, with startups appearing only rarely.

Now new founders are swimming in a sea of knowledge that was previously considered esoteric. I think we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg of what will happen to the global economy now that the genie is out of the bottle. (mixing metaphors a wee bit)
Thanks for the reply! I start the program next week and based on the paperwork and conversations I've had it seems like it will be a massive amount of work with potentially massive returns on my time investment.
I worked remotely in my previous job for 3 years and noticed team cohesion suffered. There is something about being in close proximity with coworkers help people care more about each other.
Are you planning to setup a program for consultants, advisors or trainers to get certified on the-lean-startup-approach?
Smart fabric generates electricity
It was totally obvious that Aardvark was a better product than the previous ones they had tested. They could feel it in their bones once customers started using it. I do think it's possible to quantify that result, but it's almost always unnecessary if you are able to step out of your own reality distortion field.
Floating figure placement has been possible for ages, but with the caveat that the figure has to be anchored to a particular paragraph and Word makes sure that the anchored paragraph and the figure appear on the same page, sometimes moving both the paragraph and the figure on the next page, e.g.

...... ......
...... ......
...... ......
┌────┐
<space>│ │
└────┘

That's about the only annoyance. Not that LaTeX is without fault here either, oftentimes giving up on figure placement (even with »here«) and putting them at the end of the section.

Math typesetting has been possible since 2007 in an integrated form (whereas the old formula editor was just an embedded OLE object, which you couldn't style, and which often didn't match the surrounding text in size and font). The syntax is similar to LaTeX, although (in my opinion) easier and faster to type because of a few syntactic niceties (see UTN #28).

And if you wanted automatic ToC generation your option has always (back at least several versions and two or three decades) been to use the proper styles Heading 1–9. Generally, if you want to keep your sanity you should be using styles everywhere and always. I don't use physical formatting at all. The benefits of that are the same as in LaTeX: You can change styles at will without going through all of your document and it's far easier to achieve a consistent look of the document.

But yes, every now and then I see people who approach »I want to make this a heading« as »I need to make this bold and larger«. I'm not sure how they are thinking (especially since Word since 2007 made styles much more prominent than the physical formatting), but there are such people. LaTeX's advantage here is that it needs education to use at all, which means that's the point where one can basically say »There are no ways of making things bold, only ways of emphasising more, which may be rendered as bold«. Word can and will be used without training and the results are exactly what you'd expect in that case.
Turning Old Aircraft Carriers into a Bridge Is a Bad Idea
> there _is_ value in requiring all traffic to go over HTTPS.

I'm not so sure. It seems to me that there is almost no value in requiring all traffic to go over HTTPS compared to requiring a subset of traffic to go over HTTPS.

> We can deprecate HTTPS for a decade without actually disabling it, and in the unlikely event that we _don't_ figure it out, we can undeprecate it some years later.

If you want to deprecate it in name only, I guess I can't object since we wouldn't actually be doing anything. I'd figured this would involve trying to hinder HTTP use (similar to how we make self-signed certificates a royal PITA). At any rate, I think you're overestimating the likelihood that we'll figure it out in the short term — particularly given that the proposed happy scenario is to deprecate HTTP and then have thousands of additional for-profit actors trying to put themselves between people and the ability to have websites.
Unfortunately, the author failed to actually read the linked Wikipedia page. It's fake; no such research was actually carried out, but moreover, it doesn't actually work.

The original example is semi-intelligible, but this example (from the Wikipedia page that the article itself linked to) proves the letters do actually matter:

"Anidroccg to crad–cniyrrag lcitsiugnis planoissefors at an uemannd utisreviny in Bsitirh Cibmuloa, and crartnoy to the duoibus cmials of the ueticnd rcraeseh, a slpmie, macinahcel ioisrevnn of ianretnl cretcarahs araepps sneiciffut to csufnoe the eadyrevy oekoolnr."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typoglycemia
BYOD services like Anevo, Callcentric, or Voip.ms are really a much better deal than most of the choices in this poll. With a BYOD service you should expect to pay $2-$4/month for an incoming line with unlimited minutes, and under $.01/minute for termination (outbound calls).

Services like Grasshopper or RingCentral have extremely high markup for very little added value.
This isn't material to the actual content of the post, but:

> Uber for cats

Isn't Uber the Uber for cats? http://blog.uber.com/KITTENS
SpaceX to Launch Dragon Capsule, Try Rocket Landing [video, live]
The moon blew up with out warning and for no apparent reason.

TIL that "with out" is two words.

(I mean, seriously. How do you screw up your very first sentence?)
Could be. Either way, kind of proves the point.
very insightful answer-- thank you so much for your reply, i look forward to your new book!
This depends on the company, though. I worked from home for a while for a company that didn't have a culture of allowing it. I talked my way into it due to some unique circumstances. I found that I was actually chained to my desk more there than I've ever been for an office job, because I felt like I constantly had to "prove" that I was actually working and present. Any time I didn't answer an IM or phone call quickly could be spun into a discussion about me not being "available" because I was remote. And worse, they were in a different time zone, and expected me to be around from the time the work day started in their location, until the end of the work day in MY location. So it made for a long day. None of these things were outright stated, but certainly little comments or behaviors reinforced them. A healthy company wouldn't operate like that, but my point is just that you have to know what you're getting into if you're going to work from home.
True, but the parent commenter is getting at something important. The article suggests that researchers have found a new, much more concise way to express the solutions to difficult problems. That's different from a library, which merely packages pre-built solutions to a finite set of problems.

It's like the difference between a complete kitchen that fits in your pocket and an iPhone app that lets you order a burrito. The article suggests something like the former. A library which encapsulates 1000 lines of code into a single function call is like the latter.
You might make everyone on an even footing; but the people around the table would have been more effective around the table than in their separate cubes with a headset.
Source for this? I did some quick digging and this seems to indicate that the Mojave desert has been a desert for several thousand years.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2004/1007/geologic.html
Tell me more about this. Where can you go to "bail on your student loans"? I would think there would be hurdles to this, but I don't really know anything about it.
I don't watch game of thrones. If I was going to start watching it, I would start at the beginning of the series instead of just jumping straight into the leaked episodes. By the time I get to the latest season, they would be formally released.
Claiming you can't have a perfect circle because pi is irrational makes no sense. The physical world isn't built on the decimal system. Similarly, the golden ratio being an irrational number has no bearing on the article's claims at all.
If dependencies don't count as code, then I can implement the entire Linux kernel in one line.
I don't know, but the white text started sort of "flickering" between bright and dark after a while; a paragraph might look pretty bright, then it would suddenly seem darker again while the paragraph above looked brighter. It messed with my head and eventually I had to stop.
Do Federal Taxes Reduce Income Inequality?
That's pretty cool! But being able to connect a physical keyboard is important to me; I want to be able to actually code/admin/email/whatever, preferrably replacing a laptop for extended periods of time. :)
I couldn't find any source for the OP's statement either.

Really wish people would back up their statements with a quick reference when it's proposed as a fact and not an opinion.
Yesterday's discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9362509
The difference is that China has a Great Firewall and now a "Great Cannon". China has demonstrated that they are willing to use it to weaponize Baidu against github merely for hosting content China don't like. Now that this is known and demonstrated, anyone outside China that uses Baidu's analytics or ad product would be behaving irresponsibly. Basically, you can't trust any traffic going through the great firewall, so you absolutely should not link to a Javascript hosted within China as a non-China-based business.

Within China, China can weaponize Baidu, Google, or anything else they choose. That's the nature of their internet connectivity and their ownership of CNNIC, which recently issued certificates that can be used to impersonate Google, Facebook, etc.
Here's my read on the tea leaves that hint at what's going on at Google:

It looks to me like they're probably dumping ~$3 million/year into a battery lab, which gives them state-of-the-art testing facilities and in-house expertise, and thus the ability to knowledgeably stay on top of what's going on in the battery space, what's real and what's not, and the strengths and weaknesses of different technologies.

The probability that Google will invent something important is low, but the business value of having a battery group justifies the cost, given the importance of batteries in portable devices, electric cars, solar energy storage, etc.
The term "surfaced insights" does need to be permanently memorialized, after all.
Yep, exactly. Stephenson has a crazy lot of potential - Diamond Age hit pretty well for me, Anthem hit, but some of his other stuff are simply not for me. Readme was a straight forward action story in the middle and I just gave up. He seems to have very very different writing modes.
edit: Apparently [0] is for VB.net and C++ but I would think including VB.net would mean the CLR. If so, then C# should be the same. A further SO post on the topic with no official sources confirms the same at [1]

---

Found more details at [0]

Apparently the CLR runtime catches them and then causes your exception filter to return false, as if you had done so yourself.

[0] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms182337%28v=vs.80%...
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28879320/what-happens-if-...
In reality, yes, which is why we don't actually see black circles. See http://dneg.com/dneg_vfx/blackhole/
"I don't know the founders but I can assume that if they would have work somewhere else they had much higher salary/ benefits etc"

I think you'd be surprised. The A-round term sheets I've had come my way over the years specified a salary for founders bigger than any I've ever received working for other companies. It was more of a suggestion than a requirement of the deal, I think, but it gave some clues about the salaries the investors would be comfortable with the founders being paid. It was always generous. Not "C-level at Google" high, but certainly better than "low or mid-level developer at almost any company in the US, including good ones".

By the time you are raising millions of dollars, you are drawing a decent salary. Maybe you could make more somewhere else, but I believe it's more likely you'd make less.
There has been a lot of effort to try to shift programming into a clerical work mindset, a process to be Taylorized rather than a craft to be mastered. But given the nature of the work, there's a fairly narrow gap between "This kind of code can be Taylorized" versus "This kind of code can be automated out of human hands altogether".
"so I wound up making my own mistakes "

I've always thought that it's not entirely good idea to not make your own mistakes. While painful it provides a better gut than simply being told or reading about things and getting quick answers.

You know in traditional businesses there is a reason that even in many cases family members (in family businesses) spend time at the bottom before they are put into higher level positions. It gives you a chance to see exactly why and how things are done and to experience them and fully understand nuance. Things that can't be learned in school or passed by anecdote.