skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've wondered how difficult the hiring needs to be before companies will consider hiring good engineers to work remotely. So much of the dev work I've done over the years could have been coordinated/overseen from the other side of the world via email/chat/Skype just as well as it was through the (many) useless meetings we had in person.
Here's another example of how irrational and damaging it can be to allow religion to enter government:

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/15/feds-grant-permit-t...

Really? Two beautiful animals will be killed because of a belief in the supernatural. If this is not the peak of absurdity I don't know what is.

Here's a statement from the article:

The eagle "flies higher then any other creature. It sees many things. It's closer to the Creator,"

It is a slippery slope to allow and tolerate this kind of thing. Supporting someone like Santorum, with values and ideas deeply rooted in the religious extreme, is yet one more step towards something we really don't want to see happen to this country.
> [...] notices to those customers who are accused of downloading copyrighted content illegally. If the customer doesn't stop, [...]

Stop of being accused?
It's hard to live on $75k in Manhattan, but you can live fairly comfortably on that salary in other boroughs or NJ. I would be very surprised if the offer hadn't gone up substantially since this post was written. Nowadays, new grad offers for well-paying companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) are in the ~$100k range for salary, with a bunch of stock and signing bonus thrown in. Fog Creek wouldn't be getting the top 1% of talent if they weren't matching these offers.
I can see that video direct mail would be attractive to advertisers, but I'd opt out of receiving it.

I can see people going to the extra effort of making a video mail rather than a voice mail in circumstances where synchronous conversation isn't possible and meeting in person is out of the question. But I can't see what those circumstances might be, outside the sci-fi trope of "spaceship crew keep in touch with their families back on Earth". Keeping in touch with high-security prisoners?

I can see ambient video connections being useful --- when you have a screen covering a wall showing the view into someone else's room, and visa versa, so you can get an impression of how busy and what sort of mood faraway people are in without them having to explicitly tell you; and start conversations when you're not interrupting. But that's possibly more useful for business, and not video mail.
I had a chance to see Tim O'Reilly speak at SXSW. He was giving a talk expressly about this: Creating more value than you can capture.

I took some notes on it if anyone wanted to check them out.
http://storify.com/ashbhoopathy/create-more-value-than-you-c...

I guess the real amazing thing here is that Tim's generosity and ethos trickles down to his entire company and everything they do, including customer service.

I hope more technologists and organizations work the same way. It really just is better business.
> But these are people who grew up doing the "responsible" thing and listening to the advice of teachers and parents.

I hope they won't make that mistake again, or to quote Twain: Never let your schooling interfere with your education.
Feds grant permit to kill bald eagles for religious purposes
Just some random advice, consider some, all or none:

1. Eliminate the following words and phrases: So, Now, But, In my opinion, anything you might put in a text message to shorten it, 95% of all words that end in "ly". Tighten things up. Nouns and verbs build great sentences, adverbs and adjectives stink up the joint.

2. Show, don't tell. Don't tell me it's not going to be a post about pickups. Show me it's not.

3. Effective use of parenthetical phrases is hard. Read some David Foster Wallace for great examples. When you say "Ouch" then stick the rest of the sentence in a parenthetical, it actually loses some of the punch because instead of being orthogonal to the "Ouch", it's should be the punchline of your joke.

4. Use imagery to get your point across. Instead of saying that you'd get wasted, say "If some chic said that to me, I'd be headed for a three day bender that would make Ernest Hemingway look like a teetotaler." Paint the reader a picture.

5. I don't mind the "bro" style but it's going to put a lot of people off. It's very tricky to do well but don't let that stop you if you like it. Style is in the eye of the beholder. Just tighten things up a lot if you're going to use it.

6. Write it one day, proof and publish it the next. I find this to be terribly difficult. However, you'd be surprised how much better an essay gets with even a single revision. At the very least, write in the morning and publish in the afternoon.
I like codeigniter for simple websites and as for blogs its between wordpress and silverstripe
That being said, Silicon Valley is very bike friendly.
Thanks, I appreciate the examples. I think a lot of it comes down to organization -- with some planning I certainly could find smaller items that fit into 1 hour blocks (configuration, writing tests, documentation, etc). Depends on the nature of the project though.

Good point on capturing and reviewing progress. I'm always trying to get better at that.
I, for one, think that there ought to be a huge uproar about this. Millions of emails, calls and faxes ought to descend on Washington to prevent these animals from being killed for no reason whatsoever.
For what it's worth, I'd like to disagree with that sentiment. I don't find the informal style of the article overbearing. While I'm generally not a fan of the dudebro-speak I didn't get too tripped up on it in your article. There are a couple of minor spelling and punctuation mistakes but I'm not a spelling Nazi either so it doesn't bother me.

The part that actually slowed me down was the "These great people were implementors" argument. After a couple of sentences I was saying to myself "OK I get it, now get on with it".
Will do, I'm setting it up now. If I run into anything I'll shoot you an email. The first thing I'm seeing is a lack of pre-made themes. Maybe I'll start a repo with some community themes.
For me the last time was in 2007. And I don't miss it
Why we should celebrate the end of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s print edition.
Thank you, Pail and co. You're doing great things not only for those who apply and join YC-family but for the startup community all over the world.
The great thing is that you've found something that helped you to become more rich and to help the humanity (at least its geek part :)) in some way.
This should be made into a Myst game.
Reducing Java Memory Usage and GC with UseCompressedOops VM Option
Honestly, I just keep my checked out copy in Dropbox. If it's something I feel like keeping private, I just don't push it anywhere. Even less effort involved.
Why on earth does it look like a book?

I'm getting over my abject hate of skeuomorphism. I'm coming 'round to the idea that it can help give users confidence that they'll be able to use your product.

...but this baffles me.
Inkscape opens Illustrator files, which are based on PDF, fine, so not sure about this.

Just use SVG as the file format, then any browser can open it.
You can also be killed by a baseball bat, garden shears, or a plastic supermarket bag. Why do you consider a gun carried by someone as part of his job 'big scary'?
Running an effective PPC meeting
iOS has VoiceOver. Every app should support text to speech, at least if the developer didn’t completely ignore accessibility. I’m just now testing with Instapaper and VoiceOver seems to work perfectly with it.

I don’t know whether that’s default, but I set my iPad up in a way that pressing the home button three times activates VoiceOver. You then select what you want VoiceOver to read to you. If you want it to just continue reading forever (instead of just reading what you selected, like a headline or a paragraph) you scroll down with two fingers.

It’s an accessibility feature, so its primary use case is not reading texts to you, but it works perfectly fine for that purpose – and in the vast majority of apps it just works, even without the developer doing anything.
"Voice Answer" A Siri opponent App Rejected by Apple.
It can, yes. It's relatively rare though. The nice thing about git is that, when it happens, you can just nuke the Dropbox repository and rebuild it without losing anything. Git's checksums guarantee that the corruption results in an error and not bad data.
I have a Samsung Smart TV with a full blown suite of mediocre "apps". Some notably good apps are Netflix, Pandora, and ESPN Score Center.

This is primarily how I access Internet television.

You can get a look at their App Store here: http://www.samsung.com/us/appstore.

There's a developer SDK I'd like to crack open, as it seems like it could be fun to build something for 46" mouseless screen.
Yes, the idea of biking in Boston scares me. About 90% of the people I know who ride bikes in Boston have gotten in at least one accident. The streets are very crowded.

"In general I found having a car was a pretty key part of living in Boston."

This is true for you, but not my experience. I moved to Boston in 2008 and got rid of my car. I've been living car-free for four years now. I thought I'd need zip cars or cabs every once in a while but I don't use either. I mostly walk everywhere (I live in Cambridge) and occasionally take the T.

The real story is not how bikable Boston is, but how walkable it is.
Apple as hegemonic swarm
Can anyone recommend a good VPN or other solution to encrypt all of my traffic?
It's still common at Bristol airport in UK.

I'm not worried that police has them. I'm more worried how trained are they, since they're in a crowded area. Automatic weapons don't go well with crowded areas full of civilians in my mind. They're even worse if there's a possibility of someone going through the security without any issue, taking out the armed guy with a simple blow to the head and then taking his gun...
The rail lines (red and green respectively) go straight through Somerville and Allston. Obviously there are some places in both towns without nearby rail access, but it's sort of a stretch to claim "multiple transfers" for that ride.

The roads are in no worse shape than any other northeast city (potholes are a fact of life in that climate). The drivers are agressive but broadly competant. Maybe a better complaint would be lack of bike lanes, which is true: old streets don't always fit them.

I grew up in Boston; lived, studied and worked there until I was 27; and never once felt the need to own a car.
Rapid App Creation Tool, TheAppBuilder, is featured on Engadget.com
>the weather is truly depressing.

It's not that bad in my opinion. We have a mild climate. Looking on the bright side we don't get heavy snowfall or droughts or heat waves. Personally I like the lack of extremes.
(,,)Stormers vs Blues live Stre aming RBS maRch 2012 | Care2 Share
Out of interest, how is this on the app store? I thought apple had a general "no interpreters accessible to users" rule. Has that changed?
Not sure if it's SaaS 2.0, or just the reality of what SaaS provides the worker/business owner. It's good for both the company and that startup selling to the company, but there is a lot of education needed.
HBOT/Wound Care EHR
The HBOT-specific EHR system includes clinically defined templates for common HBOT care complaints, a history of present illness and a review of systems.
The issue is that in the last generation the age of maturity/critical thinking has gone from early teens to late teens. I find it amazing that 17 year olds have been so isolated from the world that they believe that no matter what they study in college, they can graduate and easily get a high paying job no matter what they studied.
Technically they are just doing open sourcing for the most basic part. They are not starting a project, they are simply donating the code to those who want to start a project with it (read the post).

Being open-sourced doesn't prevent any codebase turning into some kind of abandonware. Certainly for me I have used a lot of software that turned out to be abandoned no matter they are open-sourced or not. But here is the problem, if it's a service, it's worse than abandoned. You simply can't use it. If it is just some desktop software, I can stick with an ancient version until I fill sick maintaining the running environment. For a service, that is it.

So to my own end, open-sourcing it, is at least, better than simply vaporize the service (which many of Google's services have been like that for the past months.)
I was also in Yugoslavia in the summer of '88, and it was quite pleasant. We came in by bus, also from Italy.
I'm sure the point was that it was a shared repository among a private group, not a personal thing.
Are (Gaming) Consoles Dead?
I think there is a natural air of doom over everyone who works at an airport.
But US immigration at YVR is the worst. I think it's because they are forced to be in Vancouver while still working for ICE.
It's like being forced to work at a soup kitchen inside a Purdeys chocolate shop!
If they had some completely unknown attack, I doubt they would leak it during an interview about their new facility... which is going to draw a lot of attention from privacy advocates and tin foil hatters.

Possibilities include:

1. Disinformation. Maybe it's about hashes, either SHA-1 (unlikely since there are known, feasible, collision attacks) or an unknown vulnerability in SHA-2 variants, and the NSA is trying to make people look elsewhere by talking about how they're going to decrypt mountains of old data.

2. GSM. I don't think the entities the NSA cares about consider GSM secure, so I doubt it.

3. RSA, DSA, plain DH. It's no secret that the NSA has been strongly encouraging suite B (EC-based) variants of older ciphersuites. But why would they encourage people to be skeptical about security of existing non-EC public key crypto just a few years after they're able to start cracking it?

4. AES. Nightmare scenario (no replacement in the pipeline).

Perhaps someone else has discovered whatever the vulnerability is, and they're too visible and cannot be coerced into shutting up, but were induced to shut up temporarily; in that case this could be part of a disclosure strategy by the NSA, possibly about a factoring/DLP advance enabling cracking of plain RSA and/or DH.

The article doesn't say anything was cracked, and the "breakthrough" is mentioned when talking about supercomputing. It would take a mind-boggling supercomputing breakthrough to put 128 bit block ciphers at risk. Could this be Bamford trying to sell more books by creating drama?
For textmate there is 2.0 alpha actively updated: http://blog.macromates.com/2011/textmate-2-0-alpha/
I can't wait for scala's macros! Every time expressiveness, conciseness, and performance converge it is a thing of beauty.
Iran.

Deal with it.
Windows exploit leaked -- by Microsoft?
> Get a job. Any job.

There's even more competition for the shitty jobs than for the good/specialized ones.
2 million a second? That must be with cached data, no way it's picking up from disk that fast, even in the case where it has all the data lined up.

Edit:

I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm curious to see if they can do it and what I can learn from it.
I managed to screw up a git repo in Dropbox. I believe it was by making a commit on a non-connected computer than making another commit before the first one had synced to dropbox.

It was not the end of the world, but I would not recommend storing git repo in dropbox. If it's really something so small and insignificant that it doesn't need a git repo, then just put it in dropbox. If you want to use git, take the time to set up a proper repository.
When I saw the title of this article I assumed it was about how to recruit the richest 1%
While we're praising O'Reilly, I should mention Safari Books Online. I'm sure you've all seen the promotions for the service in any O'Reilly book you purchase. I'm a subscriber, and it's a great service. I get electronic access to almost every book in the O'Reilly library, plus books from a number of other tech publishers, all for a little over $20 a month ($45 if you want to get rid of the 10 books/month limit).

It's been great for when I need to review some new technology (e.g., HTML5) but don't want or need to read an entire book about the topic in question. And it works great on my Kindle. Also -- and I'm sure O'Reilly is aware of this -- when I find something particularly good on Safaribooksoline, I sometimes end up purchasing the "deadtree" version of such books so I can have a physical book to read when I'm away from the computer/Kindle.
There's some info in a Stack Overflow answer here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4891642/interpreter-for-t...

"Apple started officially allowing programming language interpreters in the iOS App store late Q3 of 2010 (they changed their SDK agreement to clarify this). However interpreters (except for Javascript in a UIWebview) are not allowed to run any downloaded code. Only code built into the app, or typed in by the user."

Not sure where he's getting that from, though.
I'd be more worried about the cheerleader. The marine has a lot of training so unless I do something stupid they will most likely stay in control and not use their power over me. A gun can make any idiot as deadly as a well trained marine - but the idiot may not have the same amount of control making them more dangerous.
As someone from South America, I'm amazed that in the U.S. you're out of health coverage if you're not employed.

You're not. The tax structure encourages this kind of behavior, but the day I quit my job 5 years ago I started cutting a check for my own health insurance. If people actually looked into the cost of catastrophic coverage with a high deductible (the point of "insurance" in the first place), they'd see that it's not as expensive as they think. It's getting more expensive thanks to government interference, but all insurance is affected similarly.

Pay cash for regular visits. Save money instead of buying toys, and magically you don't fall into the trap of "I have to choose between food and health coverage."
Vaguely related, my mother in law wakes up one day and finds over 20 box of various cookies delivered to her apartment. She contacted the company to let them know of the mistake. They answered that it would cost too much to get them back in inventory.

I've been eating cookies for the past month now; what a happy mistake :)
Most if not all TSA officers are not sworn officers, I believe. If you notice at airport security checkpoints, no TSA agents have weapons, a few actual police officers stationed there do.
It's hard for people to realize now how inconsequential YC seemed at the time. I can't blame people who didn't take us seriously, because we ourselves didn't take that first summer program seriously in the very beginning.

I attended the "How to Start a Startup" talk in 2005. I remember going home and reading pg's website, the whole thing, cover-to-cover. Later that year I met Steve Wozniak at the first Startup School held in Cambridge. Woz, Chris Sacca and pg left a lasting impression on me. I had never witnessed that level of information density and knowledge sharing. Amazing to look back at those humble beginnings. Always grateful for YC and the HN community.
You were downvoted for relatively shallow and reflexive criticism. You're not disagreeing with the article; you didn't read the article. If you genuinely want to know if it's a good article, read it. You're not saving anyone any time by instead initiating a conversation about how you didn't like a sentence in the second paragraph.

There was a great article recently on being a good reader. I can't seem to find it again, but the general point was that you have to assume some level of good faith and try to see through inevitably fuzzy wording to assess the fundamental points that constitute real value and insight. In reading, you win if you learn something, not if you defeat an argument.

(Or maybe there's a broader problem if an article making the front page of HN doesn't count as sufficient endorsement in itself...?)
Time to short GOOG ...
Dead? No. Not as mainstream anymore? Quite possibly.
Just as PC gaming isn't dead, just less popular, the same will happen to consoles. The issue is whether big companies will be able to continue to justify spending huge sums of money on the platform. I think that for the meantime they definitely can.
SendHub (YC W12) Starts to Take Off
This sort of thing makes me wonder what those of us in the lifestyle would be subjected to under such a president. Midnight raids in our homes?
But it's a power efficienty issue. The black areas are covering up backlight areas that otherwise would show through as useful illumination. There was a discussion yesterday about this in the iPad teardown thread. I was surprised about the apparent power consumption, and this was posited as one of the reasons.
Shopping primarily based on price isn't the only reason I want to see prices very early in the process; I also want to eliminate things I obviously can't afford.

If I wanted a car and had no pricing information, I'd start with the cars that appealed to me most - likely Ferrari, Koenigsegg and Hennessey. I'd have to waste hours or days setting up calls or meetings with salesmen and doing the "who mentions a number first" dance to figure out that I can't afford these cars and should be looking at a Mazda Miata instead.

If I wasn't sure I really needed a car yet and had some idea what the process would be like, there's a good chance I'd put it off. Cars don't work this way though. I might not know exactly what options I'll get or how much I'll pay down to the dollar, but I know a Miata is about $25k. There's room for a little more transparency in enterprise software pricing without going to a fully self-service model. I should be able to find out in a few seconds whether your product is something I can even consider.
Watch new iPads flood America in real-time
Puppet Labs Helps Manage Server Proliferation
Great job guys. I like the interface, its nice and clean all throughout the site. The only thing that was a bit distracting were the light-blue buttons on the dark-grey background on the front page.
A glimpse inside Microsoft’s high-tech Global Security Operations Center
Fog creek is going to be competing with other companies in NYC, not in the bay area. I expect that the majority of candidates on the west coast are not willing to move.

Also consider that Facebook is in a bidding war with Google, MS, and Apple - which has spiked starting salaries in that market.
Check out now.js (http://nowjs.com/) as well, makes it really easy to make realtime apps
After five years in the UK I can say the rain is one of the things I miss the most!

On an anecdotal note most of the CS graduates that I know are not in Ireland any more but are split evenly between the UK and Australia. Also, Dublin is obscenely expensive in my experience.
When I worked at a store with a book section, it was often times cheaper just to eat the mistake than to hassle the customer and pay for return shipping (especially for the store's self published titles).

In fact its probably the cheapest way you can get customer loyalty. If you really take care of a customer, they'll often times stick with you even if you're slightly more expensive than their alternatives.
Digital Natives Are Slow to Pick Up Nonverbal Cues
Why bother with dropox? Install jgit and push it on your S3 account for $0.01 per month. Or use Bitbucket's free private git repos.
But a court can order DNS changes too (and they have, on many occasions and for many purposes, all over the world). The worry about SOPA was that it introduced that as an unsupervised bureaucratic mechanism available to law enforcement. This isn't the same thing.