skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) So basically no oversight at all until someone sues? I'm sure that will go well.

2) No. I'm saying that "more surveillance" does not imply "more effective". It's true that intelligence gathering is useful. It's not true that arbitrarily spying on everyone is useful.

If you do 10 targeted wiretaps and get 5 actionable leads, that's useful. If you do 10000 arbitrary wiretaps and get 5 actionable leads, it's a pointless loss of privacy and an abuse of power.

3) I wish you would show me real dangers of limited right to travel....

Putting that aside, I'm not sure why you're so dismissive of illegal abuses. That's kind of like saying you don't understand gun laws, because the only problems are with people doing something illegal. You might disagree with gun laws, but if that's the only reason why, then your opinion is rather shallow.

Abuses are a significant issue. You should be worried about abuses happening, and you should be worried about them going unpunished. We see this stuff all the time already. It's borderline delusional to think this doesn't or won't happen with wiretaps.

Beyond that, privacy is in many ways protected for the same reasons as speech. If you can speak against a government, you can fight it (at least in theory). Likewise, private communication can be necessary to effectively fight the government. Want to stage a surprise protest? You'll probably be more effective if you aren't being listened to by the police. Or if speaking publicly is dangerous (because the government is restricting speech or because fellow citizens find your views unpalatable) privacy will allow you to speak at least to a select audience.

For one more reason, when you have the NSA mining everyone's communications for keywords, do you think there are no false alarms? Do you think that wiretaps always result in only "bad guys" getting caught? There are always going to be false positives. If 1% of wiretaps result in false positives (I'd wager the number is quite a bit higher), how many people get unjustly arrested, detained, or otherwise hassled? If only 10 people get wiretapped, possibly none. If 10000 people get wiretapped, then 100 will be unjustly interrogated.

Honestly, if you can't think of any reasons why privacy is important, then you're not trying very hard. You could probably plug "why is privacy important" into any search engine and get a lot more reasons than the ones I listed.
Incredible add-on.

This article inspired me to try Opera again. But now 10 seconds spent in the Pentadactyl quick-start guide have made it clear that I'll be back on Firefox after being a dedicated Chrome user for at least four years.
That startup time is probably the biggest turnoff for people seeking to write lightweight scripts in JVM languages. If your script's runtime is 100ms after a 5 second startup, it doesn't particularly matter if the machine code version runs at half speed.
WyckWyre finds you the best local restaurant employees and employers
Dallas, TX - OrgSync -- Full time

http://www.orgsync.com/careers

We're a Rails shop that boostrapped out of a house in Austin 4 years ago and have been growing explosively since we moved to an office in Dallas ~ 18 months ago.

We're looking for ruby, frontend (backbone.js), and iOS developers. The iOS post is not yet listed, email me for more information: clifton@orgsync.com.
I admit the Facebook iPhone app is a little buggy, though I have to hand it to them, they have made a number of UI elements which now seem to be common place on the App Store.

e.g. IIRC they were one of the first apps to have a grid based menu system (ref: Google+ app, Bump, etc) and (I think) also the first app to have sliding menus (where the main view is slid to the right to reveal the menu hidden underneath the main view).
Hey, I'm working on an open source project that I think could application for this. Its something I've termed a "web gatherer" basically it provides the framework for crawling web pages and then has workflows where custom code is written to determine certain things about each page, if it meets criteria that is programmed for that workflow then the page is added to the results queue, the others are filtered out. I'm planning to implement an NLP component at some point using one of the open source NLP libs availabe. Overall, I think of this project as sort of a web scraper / search engine that sits above the base layer (such as Google) which can be used to refine results. Anyways, you may be interested, if so feel free to contact me: https://github.com/devs1010/WebGatherer---Scraper-and-Analyz...
I'm currenty on a project, where C++ is used as "C", and I'm quite fine with this. In couple of the thread loops, there is setjmp handler waiting for longjmp... It's also waiting for the unaware new programmer on the team to use RAII, and not suspect it's failing. (We use longjmp/setjmp not only for error situations, but to handle other exceptional situations and recover from them). One of the platform we are targeting simply does not support C++ exceptions.
One of YC's two biggest successes, Airbnb, is very much not a tech company (though design is important for them).

YC was a huge magnifier of Airbnb's success. With good advice for sure, but I believe what made the really big difference was the credibility and helping hand with press and investors.

My impression is that YC isn't comfortable with startups that aren't pure technology plays. They didn't even believe in Airbnb's idea -- they only funded them because they seemed especially determined.

So it's clear YC can help companies like this, but it's obviously somewhat of a blind spot for them. They're getting along okay though :-)
It's on their website.
Netscape was pioneer but lost steam later with version wars. Firefox came much later to Mozilla which gave hopes, but performance and memory leaks caused it to never be dominant browser, and it too got into version number war and is loosing.

Webkit has won on smartphone browser war(arm), same is being repeated on Desktop
Firefox's Sync synchronizes more frequently now than it did a few releases ago. If it doesn't synchronize fast enough for you, power users can always open about:config and fuddle with the services.sync preferences. services.sync.syncInterval is the one controlling the default interval (in milliseconds).

While I'm writing this, I should also point out that browser sync is a great example of how Mozilla and Google take a different approach to solving the same problem. Firefox's sync encrypts all data locally using a cryptographically secure randomly-generated key then uploads it to Mozilla's servers. Chrome's sync, by contrast, only encrypts passwords locally by default, leaving bits like your browsing history unencrypted on Google's servers. Chrome does have an option to encrypt everything, but you have to enable it in the preferences. (Firefox has no option to disable client-side encryption.) Even when you enable client-side encryption in Chrome, your data is encrypted with your Google password. This is less secure than Mozilla's approach because 1) your password likely isn't sufficiently complex or random 2) Google sees your password periodically (e.g. when you log in to Google services), meaning they possess the key to unlock your data. With Firefox Sync, Mozilla never sees your private key, so there is no way for them to see your data. Ever.

Google's business model means they have an inherent interest in your synced/private data. Mozilla has no such interest in it. Therefore, Mozilla locks the door and throws away the key.
You can use a large set of sample articles that are well written, the machine learning is done on these, then the search engine would compare against these for each web page if finds when searching. You could easily have a search go a few hundred pages, just have it take 20+ pages of google results. I worked on a project that used NLP (for a startup), I wasn't the one doing most NLP related stuff but it was definitely an interesting experience and the guy who was in charge of the NLP was able to get some pretty interesting results, even from fairly small data-sets.
SEEKING WORK - Remote (St. Petersburg, Russia)

Python, GAE. Relatively new to these, though I worked on a few client projects, so I know from experience I don't require mentoring to get things done with Python.

Also did several small personal projects, including one for HN [1].

Have prior experience with C# and embedded (C, asm for MCUs); also have some knowledge of maths and physics.

You can reach me at egor.ryabkov(at)gmail.com

GitHub page: https://github.com/egor83

Some more details, CV, more links:

http://egor83.wikidot.com/py-dev-looking-for-a-job

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

[1] My HN tool - poll visualizer:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2977909
iTerm2 already has the feature where you click on a filename and it opens the file. If you're running a newish iTerm2, give it a go: do an ls, then command click.

I've called it Semantic History. It also let's you drag files out of the terminal as well. Old video walkthrough: http://vimeo.com/21872771

It does not require any special ls. As long as there's a legit filename, it should work.
Uninventive? Path and Instagram are just better looking CRUDs in mobile. Come back to me when either of them improves the quality of social interactions by a multiple.
Understood, deleted.
A question that I'm surprised hasn't been asked yet: Is this really universal, or is this cultural?
Why China's Economic model is superior
Los Angeles, CA ( or REMOTE ). Full time - contract

Are you an R Guru?

Fellows Statistics Inc. is looking for an R programmer with expert to guru level skills for a contract position. The programmer will be involved in cutting edge R development, dealing with massive data sets, modern statistical algorithms, and user level tools for business analytics. This exciting well-funded project has wide-ranging applicability and will be deployed widely, including in fortune 500 companies. The appointment is full-time, and the contract will last 6-9 months with a likely extension. Compensation is competitive, and commensurate with experience. Telecommuting is expected.

Strong knowledge of Statistics is required and candidates with a Masters or PhD in Statistics, Computer Science, or a related field are preferred.

Fellows Statistics is a small statistical consulting/programming company birthed from the UCLA Statistics department. Learn more about us at http://www.fellstat.com

Contact:
Ian Fellows
ian@fellstat.com
I also enjoy creating small projects and would not enjoy being in the position of not being able to work on them or not being able to to release them. Even though nobody else may really care about what I do, I enjoy the ability to talk about or write about my projects without worry of losing writes to them or being fired.

I'm still a student so I haven't held many jobs yet, but of the ones that I have I have always been able to work on my own projects without worry. What I work on while at work or in the time I say that I will be working becomes the property of my employer and otherwise I can work on what I please (as long as I don't disclose confidential information).

From what I have observed, it comes down to the values of the company and how they wish to handle this issue. It is possible to find work at a company that is fine with you working on other projects on your own time (open source or otherwise). You may also be able to negotiate it in the terms of your employment or even be able to find a company willing to pay you to work on open source projects.

On the other hand, there are companies that really don't want you working on your own projects. I suppose that there are people that are okay with this or want to work at these companies enough that they are willing to sacrifice that freedom.

These are mainly observations of both of my personal experiences and those of people I know for whatever they're worth but I do believe you can find a job where your projects are not an issue.
New York, NY. Full time. We're http://www.shutterstock.com and looking for some talented "webops"/"devops" type people capable of scripting and are focused on systems automation. We've got 360 nodes managed by puppet and mcollective. We've got the ability for developers to deploy at any time. We've got real time application stats provided by a zeromq backend and node.js frontend. We're looking to build out additional datacenters and automation tools for the future and could use some more rockstars on our team :)

http://hire.jobvite.com/Jobvite/Job.aspx?b=nxNm8hwA&o=34...
Dear Akamai: Correlation vs. Causation
Are you guys thinking of taking any interns for the summer?
Structuring Mobile Application &amp; Content for Performance &amp; Revenue Gains
Yes, but these are the same people that run screaming after their first stroll through the function signatures in the collections library. The kind of people willing to man up for Haskell aren't going to be so easily discouraged.
PRINCESS KATE GOLD PLATED REPLICA ENGAGEMENT RING - SIZE 8
Just to be clear, I'm not saying they are right, I'm just trying to look at this objectively. If you read what they said, I don't think your solution works:

"During a support call a technician asks a customer to enter a short code, CIQ will be listening for it"

Without knowing a ton more, maybe there's a _much_ better way to do this..like having the user explicitly launch a program rather than having something always running and always listening. No argument there. But if you're thinking they should abstract away some "code_entered" event, ultimately something lower-level is going to be listening to each keypress and looking at sequences to raise those events.

Some of this stuff happens at a lower level than a lot of us might be use to programming nowadays. I'm not sure that there's necessarily a pretty error event they can hook into. Something about all of this reminds me of using stuf like Spy++ on Windows and you see just how much raw data is available at the lowest levels
Vancouver, BC. Full Time.

http://www.goclio.com/

Clio is a web-based practice management system targeted specifically at the needs of solo and small firm lawyers.

We're one of Vancouver's fastest-growing startups and are hiring developers (Ruby on Rails) and UI / UX Designers.

http://www.goclio.com/about/career_opportunities/
"You can't just do awesome shit in your products"

Amen!
I don't know if you saw Sarah Mei's talk[1] about getting the female population of SF Ruby from 2% to 18% in a year, but she presented a lot of interesting (and effective sounding, based on her experiences) methods of how to attract more women to conferences.

[1] http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2010/02/20/scale-8x-slides-post... The audio is a bit long, but it's worth listening to over the slides.
No, I'm sure Verizon develops all the spyware they put on phones in-house.
What I like about this article is that it's not trying to point blame. It's not that men are actively trying to shut out women or making a hostile environment (although some probably are), it's that they do it in subtle ways without even noticing. It's not that women are too timid, it's that they are making the optimal short-term choice.

I'm reminded of a study I read a looong time back (sorry I don't remember where) that looked at how in situations where there is a shared armrest (think movie theatre or airplane) between two strangers, the men tended to be the ones who end up using it more. That wasn't malice, it was just an unthinking gesture. Ever since then, I've been hyper-aware of seat armrests. :-)

I think one takeaway from this is to be aware of the dynamics in your daily conversations and just watch. Pay attention to what's going on. If a man and a woman talk over each other, cast your eyes to the woman instead of the man if you think she has something interesting to say. Subtle things like this can make a big difference. If you do this in the office, the feel like you value them more and you will find yourself with new allies.

I would also suggest that if enough women ignored the stigma associated with being labeled a bitch, they would move the line is drawn a bit. That's not always possible but again, being aware of it helps.
What OS and browser are you using this on? On Mac OS X 10.6.x and Safari 4(?) Google Hangout would consistently crash after a few minutes of use. We use video and audio conferencing a lot, so an alternative that actually works to iChat and Skype (hate the new Skype UI) would be very welcome.
Driving test preparation
During the driving test the examiner will give you directions which you should follow. Test routes are designed to be as uniform as possible and will include a range of typical road and traffic conditions.
Censorship in images, the TIME Magazine as prime example: http://imgur.com/gallery/W2Y5u
There may be people folks who try to justify such "preferences" on evo-psych grounds, but I'd trust those citations about as far as I could throw them. Or, in other words: http://xkcd.com/775/
Buy diamonds at discounted prices online
Outside of habitually bending over for Intellectual Property, he seems OK on tech. His tech policy isn't that tech is bad, S 74 was the best net neutrality proposal I've seen in this congress (I'm not entirely happy with it, but its leaps and bounds above anything else I've seen on the issue).
They are less common if you get a job where development or software isn't their main business.

I was the lead developer at a company where I primarily worked on their e-commerce site.

The only NDA I signed was related to their core business. They didn't care about any of my side projects as long as it wasn't in direct competition.

But, these sorts of jobs are usually less fulfilling/interesting.
I'm from the north bay area, its a bit more sparsely populated than the south bay but have been around the whole bay area a lot. Actually, also my dad is a doctor so have had probably have had more exposure to medical people than the average person. I've found most doctors I came into contact with willing to answer questions, etc but doctors still always seem a bit rushed and want to move on to the next patient. However, for the most part they didn't seem to get annoyed with asking complex questions or me showing assertiveness, they just had the general attitude of "not wanting to spend too much time on a patient". I haven't had any major health issues, however, so these weren't necessarily serious life or death issues either, which may have contributed to some of the brevity
There we go again. Sense of humour is penalised on HN.
Consult a lawyer. I would be very wary about equity only deals.
China's 'Underground Great Wall' - possibly hosting up to 3000 Nuclear Warheads
This is a well written comment. The organization you described sounds really interesting. One change I've always wanted to see in Corporate America is transparent pricing. I just visited your website and there's a "contact sales" button. Is that something you guys are working on?
Apple's Quartz composer is pretty interesting. Still clumsy, but improving: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer
Is this what you're talking about?

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/10/sincerity-is-the-sincerest-...
Advocare Review Update : Advocare a Good Venture
25 Tips for Attending Online Career / Job Fairs
Euclid Elements, Palo Alto, CA. Full time.

- Front End Web Developer
- Platform Engineer

Details at http://euclidelements.com/jobs
Some people love Kaiser, others hate it, it seems you never find someone in the middle. I've never been a member of theirs myself so don't know first-hand.
I was there last night. Rand is a supremely talented presenter and did a great job of explaining how early stage startups can gain traction through organic (inbound) marketing.

He explained the basic concepts of online marketing and the basics of marketing strategy in a supremely succinct and inspiring way. It was golden! It was entertaining! Highly recommended!
Poll: What salary would you work for?
I'm analyzing some of the Ackwire data, and I'm looking for a larger response pool: what's a reasonable startup salary? I'm not including equity stake because while that's important, it's not immediately available to employees in most startups. These salaries are also limited to engineering positions.

If you're presently working for one, feel free to just select your salary. Otherwise, select the lowest one you'd be comfortable working for.
20,000-30,000
30,500-40,000
40,500-50,000
50,500-60,000
60,500-70,000
70,500-80,000
80,500-90,000
90,500-100,000
110,000-120,000
120,500-130,000
130,000+
>Serious question: is there a game-theoretic name for this?

From the view of evolutionary game theory he might be called a "neutrally fit cooperator" or "nearly-neutrally fit cooperator".

In public goods games cooperators increase the amount of public goods available to everyone, but if there is some cost to producing the good they can be subject to invasion by defectors. Amit's campaign definitely benefits everyone in the community more or less equally, but the cost to him (determined by the additional opportunities he might have had to find a donor for himself through some other means) are presumably quite low to the point where we can consider them to be zero. Since both cooperators and defectors pay nothing but receive the same benefit, they are equally fit and no relative fraction of strategies employed by the population is preferred (although having more cooperators should contribute to a higher overall payoff).

The interesting little twist to the story, if we are thinking in terms of evolutionary game theory, is that players that reach a certain payoff (e.g., by getting there transplant), leave the game with some probability! This is the opposite of what usually happens in games in evolutionary biology, since higher absolute payoff is typically associated with larger population sizes.
Why I use Path
Honest question: did you notice any differences between the reactions of your male coworkers vs. the reactions of your female coworkers?

I've noticed while watching my sisters and various girlfriends interact with other women that women seem to be faster to label each other negatively than most men I know would label other men negatively. Perhaps, however, I just hang out with mean women.
Could you cite the repeated examination/discrediting?
SEEKING WORK - NYC or remote.

I am a passionate Android developer. I have worked on several large applications and some smaller ones as well. My portfolio and Github are listed below:

http://www.bricolsoftconsulting.com/category/portfolio/

https://github.com/bricolsoftconsulting/

Depending on the project I can also do C/C++, PHP and Access/VBA.
I'll give you a pity upvote.

It's not sense of humor that's penalized, though. It's comments without content. (Generally.)
Firefox's track record in regard to privacy is a great reason to use. What I don't like is the support of products based on vague values that can't be tested. What does it really mean that Mozilla only cares about the web and not profits? This is a silly as using Android because it is "open". The way google uss open is kind of meaningless.
Right, a naive implementation of anything going up a finely tuned one will generally behave accordingly even if the naive one is using fundamentally better CS :). I would naturally assume that J3 on VMKit is more a proof of concept of VMKit, at least until a lot of people start hacking on it. The other use of LLVM in OpenJDK Shark is about portability rather than pure speed.

The Sun JVM is pretty well tuned. A lot of people have a lot of money riding on top of it performing well. There is room for improvement (see Azul) but I would be surprised if a FOSS project would break much ground without major commercial backing.

Static compilation would have a lot of benefits for short lived programs. I know IBM's i OS (OS/400) used to use statically compiled Java and was quite a bit faster than that era JRE, but it's somewhat cloudy as the whole machine was quasi-VM with the MI level. Not sure if they retained this but it would be interesting to compare now days to i.e. HotSpot in Java 7.