skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What are your thoughts about consulting agencies (CS major)?
I will be graduating in Electrical Engineering and minor in Computer Science next year. I know as an foreign student there will be fewer places where I could apply for the job. I am worried nevertheless. But my friend (who is foreign as well and will be graduating in CS) is not worried at all.
He says he will go to the consulting agencies (like elocus technologies , walkwater technologies http://www.e-walkwater.com/careerswork_at_walkwater.php) and they will train him for few weeks and give you the job. He knows they will not pay him enough but he says it is better than nothing. How reliable is consulting agencies and is it that easy to get a job through them ? I would really appreciate the opinions of fellow HN users.
Oops. I deleted my response because I saw you replied and addressed the authentication issue. Apparently I wasn't fast enough. :)

The trust anchor is the --provider-key command line parameter. Any server that has the corresponding private key can encrypt a valid response. (and to be clear, its not my protocol.)
Colossal Nuclear Cleanup Challenges Japan
Sounds like you got the SEO in, but you need to have some reason for people to stick around.

Do you have Google Analytics? That should probably be your next step. Figure out what people are searching for when they come to your web site, then build niche content for those search terms.
Prime's about what, $7 a month? Each mile I drive costs $0.20 in gas. If having Prime saves me just half an hour / 35 mi of driving a month (less than two trips to Walmart), it's cheaper than going to the store.
If it runs video Skype, I am in...
Out of curiosity, do you use usually emacs for J2EE code?

I am an emacs user, but have been doing some J2EE stuff for the last few months, and have been getting really annoyed by the IDE's lately, and I was wondering if it was a wise choice to go with emacs for Java too.
It is a bit disingenuous to compare private goods (healthcare, education) with public goods (law enforcement, defense). In the case of public goods, the mechanism of freeloading prevents an optimal level of provisioning of them from a free market.

What mechanism prevents competition and free markets from providing good performance in health care or education?
I'm pretty tired of this argument. Or at least, including education and healthcare in there. Law enforcement is very different than education. A monopoly of the use of force is soooo different than optimal learning.
A school that has only profitability as it's goal will be outed as such in a free market, and will not be chosen by consumers that care more about their children's experience. Schools that provide the best long-term experience for the students will have the best profits, no shady practices required.
If healthcare really was in a free market, then consumers could choose to avoid the providers that try to bend them over backwards for their own bottomline.
Well...when you put it that way it is a little disturbing :). I'll select better photos for that site.
Math puzzle - two mathematicians guessing coin flips
Ah, of course - the JZ4770 is the big sibling of the SoC used in the Ben Nanonote series of "fully open source" mini-netbooks, and the Dingoo A320 gaming handhelds, and the like.
parents teaching victimhood and no work ethic?
3d mirror allure - no need to try out clothing (video)
Me too man, me too. I actually migrated all of my photos to the service last night in an attempt to dogfood and get all of the missing features in by being annoyed :).

Drop an email to hello@openphoto.me so you don't fall through the cracks.
sounds like it's working out for him...congrats on accomplishing so much!
They keep the lights on, but Friendfeed might be as well dead. The impression of activity is maintained by posts imported automatically from connected accounts, and the list of supported sites haven't been updated in years. For example, neither Rdio, Spotify, nor Grooveshark are available in the music section, same with Instagram and picplz in the photos section.
OK. My old complaints against package.el were as follows:

1. Packages need to be updated manually by maintainers. I can't use package.el to install the master branch of my favorite project on GitHub, or an old snippet on EmacsWiki.

2. Marmalade (the community repository) has licensing requirements for package inclusion.

Are those two assumptions incorrect?
What exactly do you have against delicious' new interface ? I continue using it as I always did, and except for the design I barely see any difference.

Maybe I'm missing some key feature here ?
Many of those books are great, and I have read shockingly many of them. However, I find all "... every x should know/have done/have read" lists very disturbing, since they seduce my ego into wasting time. Right now, my priority is reduce todo-lists, focus on less stuff that actually gets done, and use lean/just in time in as many areas as possible.
I was seriously disilusioned when I have learned that most of the design patterns make sense only in strongly-typed languages, and that the whole mess that is abstract factory can in, say, PHP be replaced with a simple

new $className();
Germany has 80% debt/gdp ratio

Yes, and...?

Lots of people have a home loan that is greater than their annual income (ie, their debt/gdp ratio is greater than 100%) - even in places that had no housing bubble.

A high debt/gdp ratio isn't bad unless you can't service your debt. Germany clearly can (as can most countries when the economy is growing)
Check out Dewars White Label - http://www.epinions.com/reviews/pr-Dewars_White_Label_Scotch... One of the better blended scotches I've had.

Granted it's pompous but if you're going to spend the money a single malt is probably a good investment. Stop by a quality store and they'll be able to pick one out to fit your tastes.
Facebook snaps up Gowalla’s team
Even at a rate of 1 name per second, this would take almost 11.5 days to read out all the names non-stop. Is there some kind of time limit for this kind of thing?
How the cult of the Lean Startup model has grown
Yes you are right. I was in UK this summer to attend a wedding. I visited a few liquor stores in Hayes to get a feel, they instantly bought the game. Unfortunately I just had few samples.
http://youtu.be/lFwJNuaydJE
(1) having no facts to back the opposite assertion either, I'll take intuition as an heuristic.

(2) I explicitly noted the caveat that taste may be cheated. Now, taste was developed by evolution, and is cheated by the food industry, not (normally) nature. So I wouldn't trust taste of Doritos (artificial) over natural foods, but if I actually like vegetable soup better, I'm not going to look up what's the latest trend on nutrition to assume my choice is healthier.
The kill ring. I would marry the kill ring and have its babies. Why have other editors not adopted this? Have they?
Given that JavaScript and Python are very mainstream now, we need some sort of text that covers functional techniques for the average programmer in scripting languages. SICP is dated and doesn't really match what modern languages can do.

Mark-Jason Dominus' "Higher-Order Perl" is fantastic, but unfortunately specific to a language that's most programmers are not choosing in 2011. There was an attempt at a JavaScript port. Maybe someone should take that up again.
Procatinator, where all the productivity meets its end.
One of the best teams in LA. Congrats, guys.
Facebook - if you don't like the monster, then don't feed it
I don't build J2EE apps; I just break them. We built our own code reviewing tool internally, which is what I use now, but I spent a few months reviewing things in Emacs deliberately once I learned about hi-lock mode.

I still do all my real dev in Emacs and have more than once put hi-lock to good use there.

I'd rather eat a bug than use Eclipse.
I haven't, but I don't have a problem with grep, so much as I find there's exactly enough friction with Emacs grep integration to prevent me from ever taking advantage of it.
"Uh huh. In what way meaningful to human health is the fat from conventional beef better for you than the fat from "organic" beef?'

It's the ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 fatty acids that's different. Grass-fed beef is well documented to have a higher Omega 3:6 ratio than grain-fed beef.
With pushState you can actually push a URL without the hash. It looks like I'm GETting /about, while it's really just / with the content of /about fetched via AJAX.

A HTTP GET /about should of course give the same content as the AJAX version.
Microsoft moved my cheese again and I don't really care to find it.
There's no time limit, but a 60% vote can force him to stop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_in_the_United_States...

Edit: That's 60% of all Senators, not just those currently there.
I found "The End of Education" (http://www.amazon.com/End-Education-Redefining-Value-School/...) an interesting (if not completely persuasive) argument that earlier education should be more about teaching values (for example, consider the "American dream" vs how elementary schoolers learn to ask "will this be on the test?") than facts.
> "I don’t think conversations start with “I don’t smoke, want 3 children, and am Catholic”. But this is basically what online dating sites do: they put a ton of information in a person’s profile, and ask other users to evaluate this data. There are certainly busy people who can’t be bothered with speaking to people, and want a dating service to run algorithms and find them someone. Maybe these people have played the dating game, and have had enough. They actively want something unnatural, and don’t mind if the computer sifts out people who aren’t their carbon copy."

I don't necessarily disagree with most of what else you say in the blog post, but if this is seriously your conception of how people use dating sites, then you are doomed to fail.

Speaking from the experience of living with various roommates who have done e-dating with the popular services, none of them have ever approached them in this mechanical way. The data helps refine the search, but they're still looking for attractive people to chat with.

And that data part is important. If you're a 20-year-old looking to have fun, you're going to want to weed out anyone who is in an age demographic that wants to have a life-long relationship. And vice versa. So not having that data is a disadvantage that you have to make up for.
I'm with you on your guess. There are hundreds of reasons why a paid service may stop to exist. Still I would argue that running a paid service gives you more options compared to free/freemium: if you balance right you should not go bankrupt, it's cheaper to run (less users -> cheaper hosting and less support), better position to fend off acquisition or during acquisition-negotiations, easier to bootstrap.
This is essentially a mobile advertising-supported implementation of HotOrNot's MeetMe service.

My understanding is that MeetMe was hackable by 'liking' every single profile just to see who likes you back (although there is still a risk that people on the other side are also 'liking' every single profile which would make the match worthless); curious if this service handles this differently.
I created a similar project (CSS docs only) after seeing the original version of this posted here and thinking of some improvements (instacss I think it was called). My version uses the HTML5 history API and runs off of static files (scraped with ruby). If anyone is interested:

http://morrow.github.com/CSS-Reference

https://github.com/morrow/CSS-Reference
It seems like every year a product comes along that "changes everything", just when I'm getting the hang of everything. :(
If you replaced "free software/service" with "person" then a sensible title could be "Don't Have No-Strings-Attached Relationships."

I think the author is giving bad advice. If you're using a free service that doesn't appear to have any revenue stream, then just assume it won't be around when you need it. There's nothing bad about using a free service. You don't have to bug the owners to monetize. It's a technological fling. Just like with interpersonal relationships, a company isn't going to tell its users "Hey, we're not going to be around in 2 years. This is just a temporary thing."

Maybe Gowalla just wasn't that into its users.
Check home appliances. Haier, despite sounding German, is Chinese.
Amazon Redefines Dick Move
None. The advantage to DNSCurve is that it's optimized for the DNS service model (it's tighter and faster). The advantage to TLS is that you already have it.

The advantage of DNSCurve over DNSSEC isn't really the ECC (DNSCurve's ECC is better than DNSSEC's crypto by a mile, but neither DNSSEC nor DNSCurve have known practical crypto attacks).

The advantage of DNSCurve is that its security model is much more realistic. Instead of trying to make every DNS record a secure document that can be verified in isolation, DNSCurve simply ensures that your browser can make a secure request do a DNS server somewhere (and, by implication, that the DNS server can itself make secure requests to other DNS servers, and on and on incrementally until the whole DNS is secure).

Think of it this way:

DNSSEC is what web security would be if it worked by signing web pages.

DNSCurve works roughly the way web security works now, with a drastically streamlined and (probably) improved crypto protocol.
Paypal's fraud detection routines have been extremely, extremely overinclusive. They are worth using for some unimportant stuff but you don't have to be doing anything unusual to trigger a warning (I was just selling IT services), so they aren't worth betting your business on.
But then you realize, some people can only barely decipher what's printed on the pages, they consider it a bible, when it is in fact, a consequence of design compromises in pseudo-OOP langs like C++ and java.

I really really hate singletons, visitors, factories, and all the lot, but I'm glad I can understand the intent of these things.

I think being disillusioned with this book is a good stepping stone for devs, it felt like one to me.
Marsh, that was the biggest warm fuzzy you could have given me. Thanks!
Amy Hoy is a big proponent of bootstrapping. Her 30x500 class seems to rock (according to the sample materials she has out there), and she has some choice words on the subject: http://unicornfree.com/2011/fuck-glory-startups-are-one-long...
I can't tell if you're talking to me. Don't bring a knife to a gun fight.

--------

Jesus Accused by His Family and by Teachers of the Law
20 Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. 21 When his family[b] heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”
22 And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Beelzebul! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.”

23 So Jesus called them over to him and began to speak to them in parables: “How can Satan drive out Satan? 24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. 26 And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. 27 In fact, no one can enter a strong man’s house without first tying him up. Then he can plunder the strong man’s house. 28 Truly I tell you, people can be forgiven all their sins and every slander they utter, 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.”

30 He said this because they were saying, “He has an impure spirit.”

31 Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. 32 A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.”

33 “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked.

34 Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”

----------

God says...

C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\BIBLE.TXT

refore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give
him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.

12:21 Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

13:1 Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no
power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.

13:2 Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance
of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.

13:3 For rulers are not a terror to good
Opera releases a CSS selector performance tool
Just to clarify: the sorts of things I'm using an HTTP Get-type library for are atypical and request is fantastic for 95% percentage of uses. And the library I wrote ( https://github.com/developmentseed/node-get ) isn't recommended for use if you aren't me. Though it does a decent job of staying out of your way.
Obama Blames The Internet For Job Losses
I wish the Windows Clipboard would implement a version of the kill ring. I really, really hate not having previous cuts and copies available. As a rather clumsy work-around I keep an emacs scratch file open on my task bar and copy stuff I might need more than once to it.
Untrusted native code isn't strictly necessary. There is no need for locally-run software to be in any particular form, so long as it doesn't depend on the developer's server to function.

Java bytecode is excellent precedent for what is broadly possible. There are problems with it, but most of what's missing for the end user is a better degree of convenience and control.
Same with the Mac clipboard.
Actually, Daniel Bernstein is far more likely to come up with a new secure hash core that withstands real world attacks than anyone is to come up with a new crypto protocol that will survive adversaries. TLS had the best peer review any publicly known crypto system ever got, and it's been a litany of failures.
That was fun!

Even though I've never written a single line of Python, the challenge was clear and simple to solve (I'm winner #17).

To the people complaining about them not marking all solutions as correct, it does state in the "About" tab that you have to solve it by either editing one line or adding a new one.

That being said, they should've made it clearer and more visible. I actually failed all the qualifiers except for one because I added/changed more than one line.

If you're gonna participate (which you should!), make sure you take a look at the "About" page.
The private vs public good debate is arbitrary. The social cost of free high quality ___ may vary well be negative based on ____. You have costs and both public and private benefits and that my change based on cost over time.

EX: There is significant evidence the cheapest way to improve the public education system is to provide free, healthy, and tasty foods to students. Students are both better behaved, have better attendance, and are better able to learn. However, people seem more willing to pay for apple laptops than apples.
As far as I remember, this multiplier is not valid anymore. When it comes to estimating the number of users, another post[1] on a Pinboard blog sheds some light on that.

[1] http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/10/spikes_logs_and_the_power_cl...
That's correct. The original poster said lets look years out to see if someone had 100k in debt, but if they are repaying the loan the balance should not be getting bigger even with interest accruing (it's not accumulating since a payment should cover current interest plus some principle). I wasn't very clear with my wording.
This 'logical conclusion' assumes I would make a comparison between two completely different use cases: wanting to encrypt my dns traffic and not wanting to encrypt my dns traffic. Saying one is better than the other is stupid because they're completely different things.
(Hiring)Senior Front-End Javascript Developer
As far as I remember, this multiplier is not valid anymore. When it comes to estimating the number of users, another post[1] on the Pinboard blog sheds some light on that.

[1] http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/10/spikes_logs_and_the_power_cl...
So from what I get good blended is more expensive than good pure/single malt?

I have never been able to appreciate blended as much as I appreciate pure malt, but my sample is really limited. My favorite so far is Glenlivet 18 years.

edit: pure->pure/single
"You might call this the anti-free-software movement."

While I agree with his argument (and I'm a pinboard customer), I am not for mixing the term 'free software' with 'free, unmodifiable, supported, centrally hosted web service'.

To me, free software means code sharing and the ability to modify software and run it personally as I choose. The difference boils down to resources. With free software I do get the source; however, I need to provide the environment, time, and self reliance support-wise (or a decent community).
Just so you know, there are very, very few experts competent to evaluate the DNSCurve cryptosystem.

Since DNSCrypt relies on a proxy written in C, you'd want that reviewed, and can hope for a "looks clean" from the usual vulnerability research suspects. But you should understand that the people who submit Metasploit modules and the people who do real cryptosystem review are for the most part disjoint sets.
Funny, my reaction was more like: It seems like every year a product comes along that "changes everything", just when all seems lost to boring, staid, centralized services that I don't have control over. Yay!
While I agree that some degree of emotional detachment is necessary to succeed, this is a bit too harsh of a judgement...
A company that feels a need with an amazing product is getting bought and there is no altenative (i.e. no competitors), I don't get it. can someone give me a hint.
UPS has something called My Choice that lets you see when packages are arriving, schedule their delivery etc. There's supposedly a free version.

http://www.ups.com/mychoice
Do you have a launching company? Feature it here
PHP Fog is Free Forever, and Now Even More Free
"Representing herself in court, Cox had argued..."

Coders and bloggers are good at what they do and in those spheres it would generally be a good idea to defer to them for advice, however, in the sphere of law it's generally a good idea to defer to someone with expertise in that field.
typo: feels<--fills
Acer LCD HR274H 3D, HD monitor with support for 3D content
The goal of a healthcare system ought to maximizing the health of the people. The goal of an educational system ought to be maximizing learning.

Perhaps a free market system (used very loosely) with the goal of pursuing profits would, as a byproduct, maximize the health of the people or of learning. I see no evidence that this is the case or that it should be the case. Indeed, in the case of healthcare I have very strong evidence that profit seeking isn't a great motivator.

The U.S. spends by far the most on healthcare as a percent of GDP. It spends far more for certain drugs than socialized systems, has worse health outcomes, and far greater health access inequality.

There is also a moral aspect. It is morally wrong for someone to profit from denying someone else healthcare. Unless a free market system can be devised in such a way that maximizing profit = maximizing healthcare then such a system is immoral. Cartels and cartel pricing come to mind as something that would prevent such a system from ever being successfully implemented.
One thing this article doesn't address (as far as I can see) is the efficiency of updates to a document in a key-value store in Postgres. If I'm using hstore/PLV8/XML, how efficient is it to add to or update the document incrementally? (Say I am dealing with large, multi-megabyte documents.)
They can raise prices by making points more expensive, and don't have to re-price everything else.