skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More interestng (at least to me): what is the Logic behind that

#ifndef __OPEN_SOURCE__?

Do they normally preprocess what ends up in the public repository, and should that have been invisible? Is this the way they code stuff that is still experimental? Or is the code within those blocks not open source?
Try www.patriotsoftware.com's payroll offerings. Its cheap, and should have everything you need.
Good luck, dude. An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory as they say.
I'm not really going to argue, I guess it's a matter of opinion. I don't feel that the service is particularly positioned in the way that it's promoted to fight oppressive law - based on the landing page anyway; I'm unaware of his other marketing initiatives though, afaik, he uses word of mouth. I guess that's really all I can say.
"I'm pretty sure 20 years old and less people really don't care about their timeline privacy and if they do, they can easily change that."

People without experience to see why they should care don't know to, but that doesn't mean they won't be affected.

I didn't care about preparing my business for a recession when I first started it because I hadn't had to manage through one. I do now.

Tech people who understand data care because they know the ramifications younger, less tech-savvy people don't.

People aren't just crying wolf. Thinking about alternatives creates huge opportunities. Wikipedia and Linux came out of people foreseeing the limitations of proprietary software.

Who knows what awesome social media alternatives might come from people foreseeing the limitations of social media based on centralized servers?
How to make your VB.Net code completely unreadable but still compile.
I understand that I'm being an idealist and that there are real life complexities that prevent this naive world view, but I'm not really happy that our petty military concerns and human-wide in fighting is now keeping us and private industry from exploring our greater Universe.

I understand why it's done, but I still find it unfortunate and worthy of criticism.
And if the U.S. decides to assist with some other country's pursuit of a political dissident? Do you help then, too?

> You run this website, the US govt. comes knocking at your door looking for records - what do you do?

You truthfully say that you don't have any records to provide, because responsible privacy services don't log their customers' activities. I think that's the one part of this situation that I don't understand: why were there records in the first place?

Regardless, a lot of his customers -- the ones providing half of his revenue for this business -- are now aware that the service monitors their activities.
You don't need to be a lawyer to know whether you are breaking the law for something like this. It's very simple:
Are you trying to buy stuff? --> You're okay, unless...
Are you trying to buy stuff that you know is stolen? --> That's a crime.
Oh my god, this is awesome!

I would love it if version 2.0 would let me pick from a variety of hallmark type cards for various occasions.

Congrats on launching!
Ask HN: Feedback on new Web App idea - File Approval
Notice I said file approval, and not document approval. I was thinking about starting work on a web app that enables you to easily create an approval workflow. Say for example you have a document, and are a college student who wants a few people to review your essay. With this app, you would create a workflow, where people A,B,C and D receive your doc in an email. All they have to reply to it with update versions and you get it back. This is the simplest use case.

Here's a more complex use case. You have a new banner you want to use, but you need to get it approved by the three people in the QA team for feedback, then sent to the designer again (to implement changes), and then back to you. After you approve it again, it gets sent to the CTO, then CEO. After the CEO approves, you get a notification with any feedback they may have left.

Initially it would be a one way flow (which might be an issue for a lot of users), so if you want, you can restart the process. The aim is to keep it simple. No sign up necessary for anyone except the initiator. Just reply to the email. The initiator can also see the current status of the documents. I can think of 100s of feature I can add, but that for another time. Do you think this is worth pursuing?

http://www.agilewords.com/ is somewhat similar, but its more of a collaboration system, and only for documents. This can be used for literally anything.
Ask HN: Has search.Twitter.com been shut down?
I was going to try something out in the search API, but I noticed that the example don't work.

http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=%40twitterapi%20%40anywhere

At the same time, if I go to search.twitter.com, I'm redirected to http://twitter.com/#!/search-home

If this was in the news recently I missed it, and a search didn't find out anything. Any ponters/explanations?
The amount you pay contracting outfits to provide engineers is not at all comparable to the wages of engineers. There are some frictional costs to contracting agencies, but there's the HR expenses of the contracting house, and the engineer's insurance, vacation time, and pension.
Blockbuster Announces Streaming Service to Compete with Netflix
Glad to hear you're launching. Good luck!

I don't need to send a card to my mom.

I do need to send mail pretty regularly when I'm out of the country, but dealing with businesses that don't do the "online thing" very well, or at all.

I'd love to have a service where I can, say, email, or via a web form, create a letter, have it printed and mailed, and have it sent using specific mailing methods such as certified mail, or return receipt.

If there were such a service, they'd get all of my mail business.... because there's nothing I like less than going to the post office, even when I am in the country.
Rethinking the Exercise ‘Talk Test’
Microsoft shakes up 'blue sky ' development team in Cambridge
In addition a major factor for gov't employees is paying for all the non-performers plus pensions. Given that a good programmer is 10 to 100 times more productive than a poor programmer it's probably a good bargain for the money to pay twice as much.
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Clickable: http://enstoria.com/
I'm not sure. I have not been in contact with him since 2008 and it would be weird to contact him out of the blue based on this situation - although, I'm very tempted. If I do decide to look into it, I'll let you know.
D of earth = 12756km, and assuming a sphere (my physics prof would be proud), I'm computing that 730km covers a ~6.6 degree arc. Also assuming a 100m underground tunnel, the distance would be 21m shorter than its above-ground measurement. Someone needs to recheck my math, though.
Massage Therapy Marketing Success
Mathematicians' favorite jokes.
"U.S. healthcare system the envy of the modern world." I greatly prefer the UK's NHS, the US system is an expensive nightmare.
> isn't switching between contexts and mindsets and levels of abstraction a core part of being a developer?

Sure, but you can only do that so rapidly. Why not just let me stay in the flow, and test the changes I expect, and pump out more code and bugfixes, and let the QA look at things I might not catch?

I'd rather do a quick test of my code and send it off to QA than spend two hours second-guessing myself as to whether I've tested everything in-depth enough.
The story is based on DePodesta's talk at the Strata Summit. The video's not posted yet, but there are videos available from many interesting presentations at the Summit, so definitely check out the link Bravura posted to the O'Reilly video page.
This made me thing of a possible use case you could monetize - sending "Thank you" notes post interview. This is something that I always forget to do, although the last 2 times I interviewed I got the job anyways :)

An FAQ would be nice, otherwise it's a bit scary just emailing you a street address...
Feedback: only after step 3 of the signup process I discover that "The Netherlands" isn't in your list of states.

Of course I should've seen that coming, given how early launch this is and the cost of overseas mail, but still it's a late anticlimax.
as i understand it, they were doing experiments to watch how neutrinos change between "electron", "muon" and "tau" flavors. the timing of when the neutrino was sent from cern and viewed by the experiment was required to match what the neutrino was before and after.
A law declaring patents invalid would not be taking private property for public use.
This isn't new information we're talking about. It's information that's been on your account since you started using FaceBook. Why are you suddenly worried about them sharing your data with the world?
Well put! I've just embarked on a bootstrapped startup myself with the aim to get out an MVP as soon as possible. We have a good small founding team and with the age of free/almost free tools and resources, there's no reason we couldn't bootstrap until we get the MVP into the hands of customers...
This is not exclusive to the government: most large companies pay contractors double the employee salary for the equivalent job
He has US based servers - perhaps it was "give us your logs, or we take your servers" (speculation). I just figured I know the guy more than the people here - or at least, used to and from what I could tell he was a good guy who tried to to do the right thing. That's all I can say.
I believe 37signals is buying ads now.

Jason talked about it in his Mixergy interview.
This is exactly the same as companies. When you hire contractors, you don't have to pay for their taxes, benefits, desk space, training, recruiter commissions, computer, office supplies, etc., etc., etc.
According to Appendix A of the study, they baked in 36.5% for fringe benefits including retirement, healthcare, medicaid, and life insurance.

The study does neglect vacation time, which appears to be an oversight by the researchers.
Cool Idea. Congrats on launching. Some feedback:

* Increase the quality of the video you have, and please show the control bar. It feels weird when I can't go back and forth.

* The black background on "your message here" icon looks out of place. Sticking to the blue theme might help

* login button is way too far to the right. Have another wrapper div, and keep the width somewhat narrow. Feels weird when I have to go all the way to the bottom right to login.

Just my $0.03 :D
I can see why you would say that, especially back when we initially started looking at it (before Yehuda went over to Strobe), but more recently the docs/tutorials have become much better. We have invested a decent amount of time learning the framework and it has become really productive for us. Also, I haven't seen anyone using statecharts with the other frameworks. Not that they aren't, just haven't seen it. If you don't really know what statecharts are or what it means to have one backing your application, I would recommend just looking into it. It was eye-opening (for me at least).
Agree. Having a seperate department can be helpful for large organizations, so that you can have one team supporting many products. However, if you prefer to hire generalists[1][2], then you can do away with it. Which is also a great away to mitigate Conway's Law[3]

[1] http://jessicamah.com/the-ceos-job-part-2

[2] http://blog.eladgil.com/2010/12/5-myths-to-building-awesome-...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Law
You're in luck: https://click2mail.com/

They even have an API.

(Disclaimer: I used Google, I've never heard of them before now.)
If current trends continue, anthropologists will be just about the only people left that may give a shit about anything that happened 50 years prior.
I think he is a lot more upset that Valve tried to lure him to the US where he would have faced drastic punishment. Getting caught in Germany (where the punishment he received didn’t destroy his life) was the best thing that could happen to him but Valve didn’t make that happen.

That’s the truly disgusting part. Valve wanted to destroy his life.
From an edit to the article:
"We have had a few queries as to our logging policies. We only log the time you connect and disconnect from our service, we do not log in any shape or form your actual internet traffic."

So, the information possibly gained by law enforcement is that "account X was connected to our proxy service at the time the crime was committed". I don't know how large their user base is, but it seems unlikely that the above is all that informative. Unless there are enough "criminal events" to knock the total "set of users connected during all events" down to a manageable size.
Sorry--I'm not "suddenly worried," I was worried from the start, and hence don't have a Facebook account. I apologize as if I inadvertently made this seem like a "that's the last straw" moment for me.

However, I do know several regular Facebook users that do indeed view this sort of thing as too much, and (for the moment, at least) they are reconsidering whether they want to continue being users.
He states that only two things are recorded - the time you start using the service, and the time you stop.

I assume the FBI pieced that crime together based on this data. I honestly don't know much more than that, or what he has been up to in the past 2 years. I just know him from previously doing work for him, and thought I could give some insight to who he is and what he's like.
"You run this website, the US govt. comes knocking at your door looking for records - what do you do? Thought so."

I'm not sure what you're referring to in "this website", but I can tell you that jurisdictional arbitrage, and being able to protect my customers data in exactly this situation is something I spend a lot of time thinking about.

Of course, nobody wants to fight a powerful government, so a better strategy is to make it such that the powerful government never comes knocking on your door, or you don't have any useful information for that powerful government, or your site infrastructure is in the jurisdiction of a government that has no interest in rolling over to that powerful government, like say, singapore.

The US government can try to swing its weight around in singapore and will likely be told to go pound sand. And if the singapore government agrees with the US government, then what you hand over may not contain any sensitive client information (because you don't keep sensitive client information when you don't have to. If you have to, it is a different matter.)

I think every one of us working on web services should think long and hard about how we're going to deal with the reality that the US government, without cover of law, regularly demands information (using the PATRIOT act) that it doesn't have the legal right to, and regularly censors (the torrent site takedowns, etc.) content providers who have never even been charged, let alone convicted of violating the law.

You don't want your business shut down, that's true. (also a reason not to domicile your business in the USA, or keep your banking there.)

These are issues you should think about before, or early, in the period of starting your business.
The early world wide web
Getting rich quick is a valid strategical choice. It may not be your thing, but this kind of categorization is personal.
Ah, that's it! Thanks for finding it.
Q: How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: 0.999999….

A mathematician and an engineer are on a desert island. They find two palm trees with one coconut each. The engineer shinnies up one tree, gets the coconut, and eats it. The mathematician shinnies up the other tree, gets the coconut, climbs the other tree and puts it there. “Now we’ve reduced it to a problem we know how to solve.

An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are staying in a hotel. The engineer wakes up and smells smoke. He goes out into the hallway and sees a fire, so he fills a trash can from his room with water and douses the fire. He goes back to bed. Later, the physicist wakes up and smells the smoke. He opens his door and sees a fire in the hallway. He
walks down the hall to a fire hose and after calculating the flame velocity, distance, water pressure, trajectory, and so forth, extinguishes the fire with the
minimum amount of water and energy needed. Later the mathematician wakes
up and smells smoke. He goes to the hall, sees the fire and then the fire hose. He
thinks for a moment and then exclaims, “Ah, a solution exists!” and then goes
back to bed.
Is his infrastructure that complex?

Is this not just some deploy script on a bunch of VPSs?
Tricked a Windows virus scammer into revealing details of their call center
We the People: Your Voice in Our Government | Petition Tool Service Integration
They mentioned a lot of colos, but you can actually lease space in the NYSE building itself. You don't get much faster than parking your server next to the one logging the transactions!
I have massive respect for Armstrong and Cernan but disagree with their positions. I think they're both wrong on this issue, they're distorting the actual state of things, and at a deeper level they're romanticizing the shuttle so much and looking so much through the lens and context of the 60's US-Soviet space race that their prescription is nearly the opposite of what we should be doing. I and a lot of techies I know are way more happy with the state of US space affairs now than say 20 years ago precisely because there's so much private enterprise innovation now, while, at the same time, NASA is still doing new missions and research. NASA ain't perfect, govt ain't perfect, market ain't perfect, but there are lots of things going right at the moment. And I think they're overlooking it.
Great idea! I think receiving a physical card does mean more to people. Down the line, maybe people can purchase credits. I wouldn't mind opening an account, putting in let's say, $30 worth of credits and then over the year send cards out using the credits I've already purchased. At the end of the year I can buy more. Heck you could go a step further and allow users to set up reminders for any special occasions if they want.
Well, nobody is perfect and mistakes can and will happen, espicially on something like twitter.
I agree, but it should be noted that a recruiter gets commission if you use a recruiter to hire an employee ...
It's easy to blame someone for who their friends are, but that's ignoring social norms which end up being set by the Facebook sluts. I think in actuality most people only rarely add friends, but tend to accept almost any friend request from someone they've met in person—it's awkward not to.

My solution to this problem is just to post anything questionable or private to Facebook at all; it's a much more comprehensive solution than hemming and hawing over friend requests.
Kliq, making Facebook events better.
Yes, the quote in question comes from her notes. (IIRC, Lovelace's addenda are actually longer than the original translated text. She had the advantage of being friends with Charles Babbage.)
I don't think we are communicating vary well.

"Dollars spent to pay off a loan are worth less than dollars you get at the beginning of the loan." (This is Correct)

"This means, the asset you put your money into, needs to return not only enough to cover the interests & fees on the credit cards over the time period, but" (up to here everything is fine) "the monetary inflation rate over the time period." (This is literally true, but misses the point while inflation makes this easier not harder if inflation is meaningful your not doing arbitration.)

The point I am trying to make is if you have a 0 interest loan for 1 year and you buy a 1 year bond that pays 1% interest then great you have arbitrage. But, if you have that same loan buy a 2 year bond with a that pays 2% it's become speculation because the value of a 2 year bond in at 1 years is dependent on inflation and you either need to sell that bond at market rates or get a new loan. So, if inflation is important your not doing arbitration.
This opens up the door to some pretty nice automation.

You know, the kind that makes me look like less of a negligent husband/father/son/friend/uncle/etc...

(startups take their toll in many ways)
Having been a government contractor, the agency I worked worked for hired us because their own staff were incapable of performing the job and typical government beauracracy meant that firing/hiring would have taken longer than the required deadlines for their projects. End result? A full staff of nearly useless government employees and a full staff of contracted workers who resented them and were treated as second class citizens in the work environment.

Sure, the contracting company billed huge amounts, but our individual pay was always less than a comparable government employee pay grade. Most us would have gladly switched over to federal payroll if given the chance. The contractor churn rate was abysmal because of the work environment and pay.
Maintaining our privacy on facebook is like eating healthy. We all say we want to do it, but eventually we all eat a hamburger and fries.
I honestly find it hard to believe that people are actively looking for a specific investment but don't know what they would do with the money if they got it. It sounds like they want to be a startup groupie and raising funds is their entry ticket.
My own Facebook developer story...going from 21MM MAU to less than 500k. In our case, we were booted off of key pages (profile pages) and replaced by Facebook's own functionality.

http://www.paulallen.net/advice-to-facebook-time-to-launch-o...

I do think Platforms, in the long run, if they want to win, need to treat developers fairly and honestly, as much as possible. Like other developers, I'm glad to see other social and mobile platforms to build for.
I'm the single founder of http://www.supersaas.com, an appointment scheduling system. Made enough money last year to add an extra floor to my house as an office, so I can still say I work from home. Kids are downstairs with a nanny, so I get to see them whenever I go for coffee. Loving every minute of it. Growth is still exponential, I now have representatives in 6 countries. It's a plain vanilla rails+MySql app, and I had not programmed anything for over a decade before starting on it (I was a CS major in the eighties), investment was just my time since expenses are still negligible.
In-App Purchases in iTunes Down (first time?)
How do you make your income on iconfinder? When I search for icons, the ads display below the results--I won't see them if the icon I'm looking for is in the top few rows. What percentage of income comes from merch?
Sign-up by email was among the worst decisions I made on a web "startup" years ago, because I was oblivious to how non-obvious this was for your average person. It's good that you seem to be aware of this barrier.

Potential users didn't understand the registration process at all when I told them to send an email to register. From talking to some of them later, many figured the sign-up email address was one that I was reading & acting on manually. Perhaps in the years since, average people are more at ease with the idea that a computer can just as easily process email as it can a web form. The lesson I learned is that there are some places where it's better to be conventional than clever, and on-boarding users is one of them.

Congrats on launching, and good luck.