skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The worst part is that reasonable-sounding people will make statements like yours, which seems to provide cover for all the bad stuff... and business continues as usual."

The worst part is that people will read statements like mine without understanding that someone in those organizations ordered the bad stuff done. Probably a number involved in sustaining it and providing immunity for it, too. An organization with plenty of good people and neutral capabilities doesn't need to be eliminated over evil leadership if we can eliminate that leadership instead.

The NSA has already changed in a major way once under Hayden. He turned it from a totally incompetent group, in an organizational sense, into a SIGINT powerhouse tearing up all kinds of technologies. Binney and others noted they were pretty cautious to respect civil liberties for the most part. Post-9/11, they took the gloves off that since it was their orders from America to prevent another 9/11 via only methods (mass surveillance) they knew how. Everything bad followed and continues to as American people are divided over issue. NSA's own culture plays into it, too.

So, just need the country to give them a more reasonable mandate and put someone in power to switch gears to get their mission back into something sane. Plus, reduce, eliminate, or thoroughly audit mass surveillance operations.
This is a nice apology. Why rake through the problems, again, here? The threads have been linked to in OP.
I'm actually surprised that Palatir paid below market rates. I heard they paid well above market rates, which justified their stance of never going public.
This is the thread in question.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633270
Lambda doesn't support SQS as an event source yet.
Google was never big on Enterprise marketing materials in the past.

Now that things have changed (re-org Alphabet, new Cloud leadership), they seem to take marketing/sales (and hopefully support) more seriously (and with more traditional approach).

It's a good sign; they're maturing.
It's not cryptic. This was all hashed out on the announcement thread. Pinboard won HN's endorsement overwhelmingly, but Pinboard itself isn't a good fit for YCF. When "Apply HN" was conceived of, it wasn't clear that the winners would still need to be interviewed by YC. It became clear that they'd need to be. An interview step was added. Maciej talked to Kevin, Kevin decided not to move forward with Pinboard.

If YC does an "Apply HN" thing again, no doubt the interview step will be in the announcement, but it wasn't this time.

The rest is just miscommunication and bad optics.
Some guy got the most upvotes for his submission, but did not "win."

Beyond that, I don't know. I hadn't followed all the action closely enough.
My theory is that when you're doing 90% cheap clickbait crap, you probably have a few dollars extra to spare and use it in paying good writers for actual good articles which will give you enough clout with people who actually cares about good articles.
How are poor people supposed to find innovative solutions to their problems and elect governments that create sustainable wealth while they're steeped in desperate poverty? I believe that education is the tip of the spear, but are there any examples where a poor majority has pulled itself up by its bootstraps?
The energy amount the rocket impacts with is dominated by its speed, not its mass. A small, fast-travelling projectile can make a hole in just about any kind of armour. The terminal velocity is quite low, but that's in part because of the way it is engineered — an ICBM would probably be able to put a hole through a ship deck with ease.

While what you've said is true, in practice it isn't a problem.

If the F9 first stage is out of control and going too fast, it will almost certainly miss the barge to begin with. The barge is small, the ocean is big, and the F9 has to maneuver very precisely to reach it.

If it does reach the barge, it will likely be moving relatively slow, and thus is less likely to sink the barge, even it things go crazy at the last moment.
Without context the threads don't add much narative. I haven't been following applyHN and it's not until quite deep into those threads that you can piece together what actually happened.

Seemed to be:

Something won a vote
People running the vote decided they didn't like the outcome so they ignored the vote.

It's basically Boaty McBoatface again with similar lessons of "don't run online polls".
BYTEVIEW: THE BEST SEARCHENGINE ON THE WEB
Good point about the lead.

Alameda naval station chose to just try to build a big metal wall in the ground to capture the leakage as opposed to spending the money to clean up the toxicity...
While this is the best outcome for all parties, I hope that future experiments have more clearly-defined rules. The outcome shows that brigading is a favorable strategy, and it may set a bad precedent in the long run. (Such as with a certain other startup voting site where vote brigading is expected because everyone else is doing it)
Its not a crazy business model. My early stage company gets nearly all of its revenue from a product no one in engineering has touched in over a year, which funds some more intensive and risky product development. Similarly, DuoLingo has a foundation in teaching languages while building up a large supervised data set for machine translation. A lot of companies are basically fronts for getting average folks to either curate a label set or provide permission to access existing data. My old company provided a vague statement like, "Improve your experience, integrate your gmail account", providing quite literally nothing to customers except remove the button, yet provided us unlimited access to contact books and emails/attachments, many of which were very private and confidential. Not proud of that one, but thats the reality and for some people, very profitable.
Wow, my respect for everyone involved is higher now than before this incident. Congratulations!
Nope, honestly. Go is dropbox's primary infrastructure programming language. There's an extensive internal library/culture/toolset around go, so it made the most sense to use that.
The stock options and perceived prestige.
I bet it's earned Google infinitely more dollars than Google Reader!
the big problem that stuck out for me is that it is an unsigned pgp key hosted on another site. Which means someone could easily replace the key with something else and man in the middle the communication. At least have a couple trust worthy public sources sign your key if you going to asking people to communicate with you about very sensitive information
HN: Have you ever dumbed down your resume to get a job?
TLDR: Have you ever dumbed down your resume? Why? How?

I recently moved to a new city. I have just 4 years of experience in my field. I believe I have a fantastic skill set. Until recently, I've interviewed 5 times in my field and received job offers for all 5. I'm 27.

In this new city I've sent off my resume to about 15 companies. I've been ignored by most of them that didn't have a job opening. 2 told me my experience is great and they'd like to keep my resume on file. 1 flew me out (before I moved) to interview. 2 had recruiters follow-up with me via phone. And among this, I was also approached by 1 recruiter but I was uninterested due to the low salary and their inability to be flexible with it.

I'm just really frustrated. I've worked hard and have been rewarded accordingly up until now--and a dark part of me thinks that it's because my potential supervisor may feel threatened and I'm not playing "the game" properly. I've checked out the LinkedIn accounts for numerous team members I'd work with and my potential supervisors and none of them have the skill set I do--or they have vague profiles.

For the 1 company that flew me out, I had previously talked on the phone with a recruiter and then the supervisor-of-my-potential-supervisor. I never communicated with my potential supervisor until that day.

For 1 of the companies that I had a follow-up with from a recruiter, I discovered that my potential supervisor had the exact same years of experience as me (even though he had a Director title) but appeared to have poorer experience and skills on their LinkedIn.

I just don't know what to do. I thought my experience was really great and everyone would want me to work at their company, but I've become a bit jaded and frustrated now. So, I'm considering dumbing down my resume--not lying or anything, just playing down my level of skill--and applying just to see if that works. Thoughts?
Seems like a manifestation of Moloch: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.

I agree that the changing the incentive structure is a good idea, but public shaming seems a tad harsh.
I think you misunderstood the original comment, not the other way around. It's about a place to "rest your mind," not exercise it. The comment is about how it'd be hard to be productive without consistent sleep.
Well done -- excellent resolution.
Buzzfeed can credibly do investigative journalism because despite all the clickbait, they maintain a good reputation. Gawker on the other hand is the Trump of journalism, absolutely shameless, willing to do and say anything for clicks. No amount of investigative journalism will ever allow them to free themselves of the hole they dug themselves into.
I'll add a note about the voting ring issue here, so as not to dilute the apology above.

Yes, there was a problem with vote solicitation, and we know how strongly many users feel about this. But the community support for Pinboard was unmistakeable, so there's a tradeoff here either way. In this case, the margin of that community support was so high that I think it has to win.
Easier to read too, without a background image and transparency.
What Would Happen If G.P.S. Failed?
I wasn't referring to you in particular, but Americans as a whole. The thought that if you work hard, you will always succeed. This is not the case, of course. I agree with your post.
> In meat-space, the social norm is clear

I think it is only clear most of the time.

There are plenty of odd situations.

I might ask where the restroom is in a retail store and learn I need to walk through a back storage room to get there.

What if I walk into a business an it appears empty, as if the sole proprietor just walked out and forgot to lock it.

Where exactly is the dividing line between the park or field and the similar looking lawn.

If I am hiking in the woods and I come upon the back of a sign I will walk around to the front. If it says "Tresspassers will be shot" I really start to worry what I just walked through.

Cyberspace hasn't had time to work out good samaritan laws or castle doctrine and the only property are purely technical in nature. I mean, do I own the VM on a VPS host or does the VPS host, certainly I own the software on it I wrote and they own the host OS but where is that line? Then IP laws come into play...
"I'm sure you have a source for this assertion"

Yes, did you vote in or fund politicians that were in favor of having intelligence services? If so, then you've voted for intelligence services given that will keep them going. If most of America did, then they likewise voted for intelligence services. I already know they did. :)

"I don't know anyone who agrees with the idea that spying for competitive reasons is okay. I'm sure there are plenty of people that do, but I don't think I've ever met someone who's stated as much."

Try this. Tell... "anyone" you know... to do a thought experiment. In this experiment, national schemes in economics and war have raged for thousands of years. Still happen. Many were prevented or reduced through information from intelligence services. Our competitive allies have them stealing our I.P., trying to win contracts, or trying to negotiate better positions in treaties. Our own spies have caught and reduced plenty of that. Our enemies have spies for similar and worse reasons up to and including killing a lot of us.

Now, with that backdrop, ask those people if they think we should have an intelligence service spying on those competitive "allies" and enemy nations. Mention that the alternative is to constantly be a victim of or behind those countries due to being in the dark with no spy agency. Which will they choose? I choose having a spy agency, using it for same purposes the rest do, and taking extra care to avoid it getting out of control or damaging.
40 points and no comments... Can we please discuss this?

I would like to know if this makes Rails worth learning for someone who knows Ruby but doesn't know rails. I have found my ruby knowledge to be less than marketable, and I want to step my game up. What do yall think?
I don't know, but I've been watching GiveDirectly for a while and assume they'll handle this similarly to how they have before. This basic income experiment looks like a minor variation on what they already do.

From https://www.givedirectly.org/basic-income

"Location: To be finalized, but likely East Africa, where we have existing operations."

They've paid people before using mobile phone networks and it's worked well for them.
Wouldn't a basic income reduce the dependency on NGOs? If the situation in Kenya is similar to what humanitarian aid workers tell me about Haiti it's basically people joining NGO programs to make a livelihood but not planning on using learned skills or connections made to make a living independently when the project ends but rather looking for the next program.

This is a sincere question, I'm fully aware that a lot of NGOs intend to do good but do more harm :(
Ah, so, that's another problem. There's no obvious way to describe the transition between "singularity" and "not a singularity." Look at the graph of 1/x. There's a singularity at x=0. You can't describe the slope between any part of the equation and the singularity, since the derivative is also singular at the origin. At x=0, you're actually outside the domain of the function and the slope between x=0 and x=a is undefined.

So what I mean is, it's not even clear that "the singularity began to expand" is a meaningful statement at all. Spacetime came into existence (as far as we can tell) with the big bang, and ordinary ideas of an "event" require a before and after. So far as anyone can tell, there might not have been a before at all, so talking about an event happening at "time zero" is... tricky.

The Big Bang theory concerns itself with all instants that the universe had some finite extent. The equations go singular if you look back far enough, but it's possible there wasn't even a singularity, and our math is wrong: the universe was very, very dense, but not infinitely dense, and then expanded. We don't know.
What happened once it (GAE) reaches 9 year? gasp ...
Indeed. It looks like modern publications need not just a separation of church and state but also the bar across the street from the church to bring some foot traffic in the area.
Possibly merely "don't run open-ended online polls with unclear rules for submission". Don't be too quick to generalize.
Dazed and confused, but trying to continue
Very interesting stuff. In the context of software development, I definitely feel the silo of programming around me. While I enjoy it, it's all I do and now I naturally have to compete with all other programmers for jobs and other forms of professional attention. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way. Having a multidisciplinary approach to the work I do in my life may open up some doors. Thanks for posting.
There was a point where Palantir became the most prestigious place to work out of school.
Except China does do the most hacking, us Americans do. We have more computers, computer scientists, money and government sanctioned orgs doing hacking.

Also this article is super-naive. If a country were not the USA and caught hacking a bunch of western businesses then the US political and military machine would start up. Look at what we pressured others to do about the pirate bay and megaupload.
> App Engine work inside China though

There is this: https://www.appscale.com/

It's an open source implementation of the App Engine APIs. The website doesn't make it very clear but the source is on Github: https://github.com/AppScale/appscale
I interviewed there a few years ago.

I can tell you that at least at the time the impression given during the interviews was that of a deep, intellectually enriching place. Mostly everyone I talked to went to Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, or a similarly ranked school. Many of those not straight out of school had come from Google or Facebook. The interview questions were among the hardest and most technically demanding I was asked. You're told of working on problems of massive scale involving true "big data".

On top of this, the budget for seeking out top engineering talent seemed to be without bound. I was flown out and put in a really overly nice hotel room. I was treated to a very expensive steak meal for lunch. I was just one of a very large group of candidates being luxuriously herded through their HQ that day and seemingly every day without end.
Actually, I don't look forward to more clearly-defined rules. What you get then are more lawyering and arguing about the meaning of words. Often, the goal, which is what got us together in the first place, is completely lost, Instead, we argue about the parsing of each word of the rules. Definitely not what startup-y or "lean" as I see it.
I believe the New Yorker did a piece about building up their news department, which included hiring a couple of Pulitzer winners to the staff, but I don't seem to be able to find the article.
They made experiments and apparently we don't overclock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_motion_perception
I read through that and I didn't really see anything that required an apology and $20k to be given to a charity.

'What' did Pinboard supposedly win? I can't find any poll or submission that appears to be contentious. I searched HN https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22apply%20hn%22&sort=byPopula... and found this joke submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441480

I mean, I think I've pieced together what's happened, but I'm still fairly confused and feel like I'm missing a lot of context.
It became clear that they'd need to be. An interview step was added. Maciej talked to Kevin, Kevin decided not to move forward with Pinboard.

I think this interpretation gives YC too much credit -- it was clearly stated that all discussion would happen in public on HN, then they added a private interview without announcing that change, and the reason given for Maciej not passing the interview was that he made Kevin "uncomfortable" (which as many people noted in the thread, is basically Unconscious Bias 101). The optics of the affair were that the contest had been redesigned to exclude Maciej specifically.

I hope that for the next Apply HN there's no final vaperoom stage -- putting something to a vote them sending it off for final decision by the elite is not going to go well a second time. A better process might be an "Ask HN" for each finalist where the YC gatekeepers (along with HN members) could interview the applicant(s) in a public way.
The explanation I've seen is that a palantir itself is value-neutral. However, because Sauron and Saruman each had one and used them regularly, using any of them became risky, because they were a channel through which information and influence could leak.

But that, in turn, is arguably a great metaphor for the chilling effects of advanced persistent threats and abuse of surveillance capabilities by our ostensible/former allies.
A few years ago I sat in on a CS course at Stanford and was able to count 4(!) identical palantir t-shirts on the same day.

It was ridiculous, I probably have the picture somewhere.
Now might be a good time to add a suitably abstract and all-encompassing sentence to the guidelines about mentioning submissions, comments, and poll entries on other sites in the hopes of gathering support.

There are very few community management problems Wikipedia hasn't had to tackle, and, unsurprisingly, this is one of the earliest ones:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing
If you're really a ruby pro then you should really check out rails. I'd say that 80% or more of the 'ruby' work out there is really 'rails' work.
It's when you do software development for services that are constantly changing and need to be up all the time, and you are not only responsible for the development, but also for the services being up all the time.
If any of you have suggestions for how to do better, I'd like to hear them.

1. Make this "HN selects startups which get invited for YC interviews", i.e., a feeder into the existing system. Essentially, use HN to supplement the network of YC alumni who help out with the application-filtering.

2. Since YC will explicitly still have the final say, open this to both Fellowships and YC Core applications.

3. Have a standardized form. Or possibly even a "make this application public" checkbox on the regular YC application form.

4. Use a more sophisticated voting system. I think a "which of these two looks better" combined with a form of Elo rating could work quite well.

EDIT: To the people voting this comment up: Do you agree with all four of those suggestions, just some of them, or are you voting it up because you like the fact that I'm offering ideas despite thinking that these four are all bad ones? As Dan has said a few times recently, discussion is more useful than votes. :-)
I'm a big Python evangelist for reasons lost to history, but even I would recommend learning Ruby on Rails if you want to make yourself marketable. I'm not sure how much of a market there is out there right now for people with Rails experience, but it never hurts to learn something new.

Besides, whether you chose to use Rails, or Sinatra, or move to some other language, as long as you are doing web development you'll be able to apply the concepts learned. So I say go for it!
Using Triggers to Add an Audit Log to Postgres Databases
At the same time, think of all the energy lost to the stress of not knowing where those basic things are coming from. Think of what could be done with that energy.
Wow, $20k to the Coalition is a great choice. That's fantastic news.
Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split (2010)
It's weird. I read that thread and gave it a lot of thought over the last couple of days, and I was just deciding that I respected your choice (even if it wasn't necessarily one I would have made myself). Then this unqualified mea culpa shows up and I don't know what to think.

In the world of PR, there's a very strong bias towards appeasement. If a controversy gets big enough companies tend to just 'give in.' But these victories are hollow ones as the true rightness or wrongness of the controversial actions become irrelevant. It's impossible to know whether a corporate/organizational apology is genuine or if the stakeholders are simply appeasing the crowd.

My gut says this phenomenon has become more powerful in the social media era as consumer voices are more easily amplified.
I'll bite. If you know Ruby, I'd definitely recommend taking the next step and learning Rails. I started with Plain Old Ruby first as well by writing small scripts and then slowly graduated to Sinatra and ultimately Rails. Unless you are using Ruby for DevOps you can almost never go without having to interact with Rails or it's components in some way.
Bergson quotes:

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/henri_bergson.ht...

I'm not sure what's more amazing - the fact that Bergson was feted as a philosophical genius in the first place, or the way that Einstein dissected his pretensions so economically.
> It's basically Boaty McBoatface again with similar lessons of "don't run online polls".

I was tempted to draw that conclusion too, but decided it's important to resist. Finding new ways to productively engage this community is a big deal to us. We obviously have a lot to learn, so screw-ups are inevitable, but we're ok with that as long as we can make them right.