skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I typically land on the side of pragmatism over idealism, and as a lifelong observer of human behavior and psychology, I would say the argument carries some weight. A project I can start using without even thinking of licensing issues, and grow to become dependent on, is one I'm much more likely to contribute towards, simply out of selfish necessity and convenience.
Yes the only way to keep your skills up to date is to completely ignore your family.
Note: This is predicated on the unfortunate assumption that based on your location, a politician can be said to "represent you".
I have seen a dead chicken or fish be prepared and cooked before me. This process is not that gross, and I still had an apetite to eat afterward. I think that a lot of people who consume meat are aware that they are eating dead animals, and they have an idea in their minds about how those animals look when they're killed. When the consumers start to learn that the actual meat-manufacturing processing is a lot more disgusting, they will probably revolt (at least some).

Eventually, I predict many more people will demand better meat-handling standards, or more people will become vegetarians. It is clear that informed consumers dislike the current methods imposed by the meat industry.
He gets into the "there's an app for that" mindset.
Limiting factor there is having to get the iDevice out, turn it on, exit whatever app it was on, find the app, start the app, wait for the app to start, then do whatever is needed to approve the transaction. This must be simplified as far as possible; yes none of it is difficult, but to win it must be easier than a credit card's "open wallet, find card, grab card, swipe card[, sign here]" model. I don't know much about the state of the art in POS transactions, but do know to beat using my CC it must be no more than "grab device, wave near target[, clerk verifies picture]".
I'm pretty sure Google would have had some hot ANSI art by ACiD, not the colorized ascii.

The API quota is exceeded for search but not for "L" I'm feeling lucky.
Those restraints are stronger than you think, in all honesty. Especially if you have any insecurity whatsoever about being able to find something else or make it on your own.

Once you can get beyond that insecurity, though, your feelings change entirely.
Fully agreed. The syntactic sugar saves lots of time in total, and there are few bonuses like

for own key, value in hash

that also checks `hash.hasOwnProperty(key)`, which is good practice in JavaScript, but really boring to type in almost all `for` statements.

I also observed that using longer, more descriptive variable and function names, the difference between Coffee and compiled JS is definitely not an issue in debugging sessions. I'd say there is not a context switch even.

It feels like thinking in JavaScript and writing in a new dialect.
Resonates with me.
Web browser exploitation is much harder without JavaScript.

Keeping my computer secure is more important than using the latest ridiculous web app that slows my computer to a crawl.
I wrote a post the other day about how to think about career trajectory/growth. In my experience people generally think about it wrong.

TL;DR: Don't think about your career as a ballistic trajectory, but more as a series of interplanetary missions.

http://ceklog.kindel.com/2012/04/08/you-are-thinking-of-your...
I agree. Senior after 4 years sounds like either (1) title inflation, or (2) this person is exceptionally smart.
PHP, Perl, Haskell?
I want to do simple scripts and be able to make simple blogs and stuff. Which language should I learn next?
EDIT: tptacek on AGPL http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1273231

Your license is fine. Perhaps you should consider AGPL as it will cover the PHP-hole, too.

Stay strong, don't give in to pressure by people who are sore because their open source free lunch is ending.

(and this being HN this comment will probably be nuked by downvotes)
I like your post, and I agree with your conclusion, but I have to say I'm puzzled by your decision to back MongoDB with EBS. Were you running MongoDB atop EC2 instances as well? Can you elaborate on this a little?
There should be a little "info" icon telling you that we don't have district maps for your city council, so we're showing you everyone in it.

Agree about the contact info -- it actually converts into a nav tab on tablet & mobile resolutions, but you're definitely right about it being out of focus initially.
Yes. I'm currently at a small shop and when my boss scheduled my 90 day review he realized he hand't mentioned there'd be such a thing so he walked over to my office after scheduling it and said, "Hey, I don't want you to freak out about the review... you're doing fine... we love your work.. we just wanna talk about stuff in depth".
the idea is older than him, but piet hein put it into verse very nicely:

A PSYCHOLOGICAL TIP

Whenever you're called on to make up your mind,
and you're hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No -- not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you're passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you're hoping.
What's your opinion of ChromeOS? (It doesn't get more deeply integrated than that.)
I have to say, an argument that a particular proposed law does nothing - literally has no effect - seems inherently dishonest on its face. Your argument then is that the proponents are, um, doing it for their health? Because they're bored and have nothing else to do? I've only ever seen such arguments made about governmental actions by the most dishonest and most self-interested parties. I would say there's a 100% overlap in the sets of people who say "pay no attention to bill 17, it does nothing" and people who stand to benefit substantially from bill 17.

ECPA is actually fairly strict. It would be both illegal and tortious for Google to, for example, share the entire contents of your Gmail archives with the MPAA, currently. But after CISPA passes, it would be neither illegal nor a tort.

As for the government, it overturns and eliminates warrant/certification requirements for a wide swath of purposes. Under ECPA, a communications provider could give data to the government only if it reasonably believed it was immediately necessary to prevent death or serious injury. Under CISPA, any internet entity can give any data to the government OR ANY OTHER ENTITY for almost any sort of reason - "ensuring the integrity" of any internet service cuts a giant, giant swath. And specifically enumerated in CISPA, but entirely absent from ECPA, are that anything relating to antipiracy efforts is also covered.

You seem to have a very confused idea about ECPA-1986 if you think it has much in common with CISPA-2012. To the extent that they overlap, CISPA is intended to overrule protections that ECPA provided.
But they aren't "preemptively scheduled concurrent execution sharing memory".

They are "cooperatively scheduled concurrent execution sharing memory".
To migrate them online, do you think what's needed is a single-click "just upload your Excel spreadsheet and it will all work, including the VBA"? That is, how important is 100% compatibility, including VBA? (The technical bar for that is pretty high.)
Original authors have the right to license their code whatever way they please. This kind of article is disgusting.

If it were a proprietary license nobody would raise a finger. HN is a very hypocritical community.
Okay, only because you have a ligature.
Ah yes, yet another service that wants my email address without ever telling me what for, no privacy policy, no promise not to spam, nothing but vague but unhelpful description of a service.

Pass, thank you very much.
It's hard to show how right you are without proving how wrong someone else is. Today you get to be the somebody who is wrong.
My OS X Rails installation using Homebrew and rbenv, step by step
What information that service providers and app providers are currently not authorized to share under the 1986 ECPA would become lawful to share under this act?
A claim that is nonsense on its face. Even if you knew absolutely nothing about any of the issues involved, the claim that the government is busy making legislation that does nothing is nonsensical.
http://www.unicodesnowmanforyou.com
Already been done a few times...

http://responsive.is/ for example.
I think that's a sign that Apple is starting to take games seriously on the desktop.

It's, in part, what made the iPhone successful after all.
You know those journalist pages where they report what's happening at an event with immediate updates? It's called "live updating". Why don't we use that term? TV news stations say "LIVE" when it's current events happening now. "Real time" as used for this Ajax technique means that the page is auto-updating with events happening now. That's "live". Any seconders?
Plot thickens in Apple “bait apps” case
TechCrunch: Startup Team ManCard Spreads The Testosterone
For home machines most of them would have been colour by 1982-3. My first paid for job was Turbo Pascal on a CGA PC in 1984 so it was pretty wide spread.
I enjoyed reading this post. The guys did pretty good job in a single weekend. However, I think it would be beneficial to do more research on female online behavior. Pinterest certainly should have been one of the first places they went to acquire users and build buzz. If there are women, the men will come. So, since women tend to be more cautious when it comes to digital dating, I would have launched in more female-oriented spaces as well as the tech world. That's just coming from a girl :)
ICANN data breach exposes gTLD applicant data, leads to deadline extension
You certainly should try "Digital, a love story": http://scoutshonour.com/digital/
Was this already in progress or made in response to meteor (and firebase)?

I'm sure a lot of us could rip the real-time/live updating/auto-synchronizing (pick your term) engine out of our current web apps and package it up in a tiny framework without much effort.
I'll tell you why I think he was there: Apple wants a 30% cut of all sales on the Steam platform. Steam purchases will soon be required to go through Apple's in-app purchase system.
http://blip.tv/clojure/dan-friedman-and-william-byrd-minikan...

19:20
Regarding GM crops, I'm generally for them. Almost all human food has been extensively modified genetically, albeit mainly through breeding and natural mutation, not gene transplantation. So I think a lot of people freaking out about GMOs have a false natural vs artificial thing going on.

However, I think people have reason to be cautious. Pretty much every new technology has a lot of surprises early on as people learn to manage it. Especially given that GM organisms generally can reproduce, it's totally plausible to me that we'll end up with at least one thalidomide or Chernobyl or cane toad or leaded gasoline sized problem for GM crops.
Ask HN: Anyone looking for immediate stop-gap Java expert? (NYC) 
Dear HN,

I misjudged my cycle of work-work and oss-work this time and have cut it way too close for the next (long term) gig. I am looking for a short term bridge gig before s.h.t.f. :-)

My expertise is serious Java server-side (you name it), but it doesn't have to be sexy work, given the duration. Not Java? I am quite versatile and will let you know upfront if I can or can not deliver what you want if you have something else in mind.

Please leave a reply here with specifics of what you need and your (verifiable) contact info, if you are comfortable with that. Otherwise, please contact me by email with same information and I will reply with my (verifiable) email and pointers to github, stackoverflow, etc. Your privacy is respected and I expect the same in return.

If it helps motivate, I have contributed in my minor way to Java/NoSQL community with my free OSS software that some of you may in fact be using.

location: NYC - onsite or not (up to you)
available: Immediate

Serious inquiries only, please. (I hope it is not inappropriate to post this to forum. If it is, my sincere apologies.)
Thank you.

hn_action@hushmail.com
The current implementations are cooperatively scheduled, but nothing in the specification prevents a preemptively scheduled implementation. After all, gccgo had a preemptively scheduled implementation until a few months ago.

That being said, I prefer my goroutines to be cooperatively scheduled.
I would agree with you. If we all labeled our food, we might live in a "brave new world" where eating pink slime is fine - but only because we are used to it.

Health effects aside - if the meat had been labeled for the last 20 years there wouldn't have been such a "surprise" and a "reaction" when they found out.
While LORD was popular, I always enjoyed a game run on an Amiga BBS called "Hack & Slash". Even has a modern Linux port. http://robert.hurst-ri.us/games/rpgd/
As someone who has actually had dialog with an attorney after having his mail stolen by a provider incident to a (bogus) security investigation, I believe you're wrong.

Service providers have broad authority to capture, read, and even disclose information carried on their networks incident to their (sweeping) duties to operate their services and protect their property.

Also: your understanding of warrant requirements under ECPA is skewed; service providers also have broad authority to disclose information to people acting under color of law in the course of criminal investigations. Again: under the restrictive 1986 ECPA (which is not the current law of the land).

Also, you're mistaken about the argument I'm making. I don't think CISPA replaces ECPA.
I know depression, and it makes you a cold, heartless realist. Yes, your skills, your town and the job market are, unfortunately, as you have described. But depression also makes you discount the positive. You have two years gross in the bank! You could walk out of that job, party for twenty-three months and then start to look for a job.

But you're not going to do that. You're going to take a few months holiday and rest. Breathe. Get that fire back. If you go back to work now you'll just hate your job again, and let down the nice people that hired you. Rather convalesce, and then take some time once you're thinking less like a depressed person to brush up on your skills, to see what the market is like in town now that you feel hopeful, or what the best city to move to is.

A friend of mine quit his job with two years salary in the bank, and he's been doing odd contract work. After a year he looks and behaves like a different person. He's healthy, he smiles, he is engaging. You are burnt out, but it is not the end of the road, it is the low point, and you have a great opportunity to turn it around.
Partitioned gem; activerecord support for postgres table partitioning
Automated UI Testing with Jenkins and Selenium
I would bet that there are many apps out there that don't do any reconciliation, and the data will forever be lost unknown. Sadly only 1% of the customers will notice something weird, 0.001% of those will call support saying something is off, and then 99% of those calls will be ignored as customer incompetence. Scary indeed.
I've been thinking about Apple as a payment company for a while, and one roadblock that's occurred to me is this: I can't see Apple ever making an Android app. It will be tough to dominate the offline payment space without an Android app.
Great work, and I'm impressed at how quickly Chris Granger created Light Table. I wonder how hard it would be to build an IDE for Meteor (EDIT: I mean get JS support in Light Table, since Meteor is just JS) - how amazing would that be. Or port Meteor to Clojure and wow ... these combined would be amazing.

I've believed for a long time that files were archaic and agree completely - and we should extend that idea to version control. If we version functions (and classes, stored procs, etc...) then you can create a type of failover to a last known good version down to that logical function.

As for the rest of the ideas - the table, organize and layout related code, the documentation and the interface are all terrific ideas and I can't wait to see where it goes. Imagine laying out all that code on a nice huge touch tablet with multi-touch support ... drool....
Surprisingly enjoyable read. Thanks!
No, there are generally not separate quotas for national and international in Australia, at least not any longer.

(Checked: Telstra, Internode, iiNET, TPG, Optus.)

That said, they do tend to have bandwidth quotas in the order of 50-500 GB/month depending on the plan you have.

And it is dirty expensive here. I currently pay $89.95/month for 300 GB/month via ADSL2 (20/1 Mbit/s) including line rental.
How The Pebble Smart Watch Hit $2 Million On Kickstarter [Q&A]
> Ants have very complex social structure and engineering abilities - but are they intelligent?

They are differently enabled. Evolution gave them all they need to thrive and be successful. Intelligence is, in evolutionary terms, very expensive, hi-maintenance and often counter-productive. So is individuality. These things are not the natural end-product of an evolutionary process like they are assumed to be. In fact, its normally the exception rather than the rule. Simplicity (seldom complexity, except for a short while and in niche settings) is the end result of a perfected organism in harmony with its environment.

You get what you need for the time frame in which you need it. After that, as soon as you don't need it so much, it will go. Like flight in birds. Dodo's didn't need it, lost it rapidly and then humans arrived. We killed them, tried to eat them and our technology (ships) brought vermin predators (rats and cats) to their world which they had no defence against -- and that was the end of them. Our `intelligence' didn't pan out too well for them. And they're just one example of this sort of thing. Its happening all the time.

When you are sitting in the shattered and burned-out remains of your world (literally or metaphorically), intelligence looks overrated. The same will eventually, inevitably, happen to us. An AI, or our own avaricious greed and ambition, will probably finish us all off.

Big brains, language and tool-making abilities are not necessarily the best or inevitable end outcomes in evolutionary processes. They happen because they need to. Then again, sometimes they don't, and that can pan out OK as well. When it does happen it also tends toward the self-limiting, as well. Just what you need and no more.

The evolution of an AI will be as much an accident as a design. And that's good because it won't be forced into a form that is trying to mimic our own imperfect intelligence.
I whole-heartedly agree with all of that.

As soon as there is ambiguity there is also legal risk, and attorneys tend to recommend a conservative position. The only way to avoid such ambiguity is to limit yourself to the well proven "crystal clear" GPL use cases. As has been demonstrated in this thread, even those "crystal clear" use cases are often misunderstood by many (proprietary program linking to a GPL library comes to mind).

It helps a lot if the copyright holders clarify their own position, possibly in a license addendum. Like Torvalds did for the Linux kernel (regarding system calls). Now that didn't hinder the whole controversy of proprietary vs GPL kernel modules, of course.

The GPL is tricky.
That's not quite it. People pretty clearly do want to know. And they would like to believe their food is produced in a way that seems wholesome to them. So yes, I think parents did think that school hamburgers were of roughly the same quality that they'd get if they decided to make it at home.

Hoewver, I think that people a) like things to be cheap, and b) are too lazy to look into things in detail. That worked to the advantage of the meat producers for a while.

But this country has a history of panics around food, and there's been a trend for decades in the direction of less processing. So I'm not going to shed many tears for these folks. What they did may have been innovative when they started, but they shouldn't have expected it to continue happily forever.
PG on finding cofounders and being a strong team
Oh, I'm not indignant about it. It's obvious why pointing out the specifics of CISPA is bound to be unpopular here. I'm just confused by the mindset that says "what Cory Doctorow thinks about CISPA is more important than what the bill says".
My first thought was "It doesn't sound quite right", but then I remembered I was expecting the v90/56K handshake[1] with the BU-BONG BONG BONG near the end.

[1] http://808hi.com/audio/conexantwm.mp3
I'm surprised you trust or believe anyone who has a privacy policy or a promise not to spam. What, are you suing people who break these "promises"?
True, Smalltalkers were there first. The thing I like.. the further enhancement here.. is the UI. No more tiles and windows.
Is hiding an input element really more functional than just having an input field appear on the page? The simple fact that it required instruction to use: "Hint: click or drag on the page" (and rather ambiguous instruction too as there are 2 "pages") belies the functional simplification that it seems to present.
These are great! Would love to see a screencast of your next facelift.
Show HN: Roll20, a new virtual tabletop for playing RPGs online
This is a project that I have been working on in my spare time for a while now. It's a new virtual tabletop for playing pen and paper role playing games online, but it takes an entirely different approach than anything out there right now. Rather than trying to turn pen and paper games into video games, with features centered around one-click damage calculations and detailed stats tracking, Roll20 focuses on storytelling. It has completely new features like background music, player journals, and an expansive art library with a built-in web search.

The entire system runs on NodeJS, Padrino, Backbone JS, Raphael, ShareJS, and a few dozen other "HTML5" technologies. OpenTok/TokBox powers the built-in video chat.

We're trying to raise some money on Kickstarter to fund further development and get us to the finish line. If you enjoy playing pen and paper games and think this is a good idea, we'd love your support -- help us spread the word!
> sixxs.net will even give you a static ip6 address

actually, a /64 initially, and a full /48 later down the road IIRC.

(here the steps are 1. get a sixxs account, 2. apt-get install aiccu, 3. put credentials in /etc/aiccu.conf)
Here you go: http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2012/files/H03-Cryptosyst...
This is a project that I have been working on in my spare time for a while now. It's a new virtual tabletop for playing pen and paper role playing games online, but it takes an entirely different approach than anything out there right now. Rather than trying to turn pen and paper games into video games, with features centered around one-click damage calculations and detailed stats tracking, Roll20 focuses on storytelling. It has completely new features like background music, player journals, and an expansive art library with a built-in web search.

The entire system runs on NodeJS, Padrino, Backbone JS, Raphael, ShareJS, and a few dozen other "HTML5" technologies. OpenTok/TokBox powers the built-in video chat.

We're trying to raise some money on Kickstarter to fund further development and get us to the finish line. If you enjoy playing pen and paper games and think this is a good idea, we'd love your support -- help us spread the word! You can also check out a little more info on the site:

http://roll20.net
I wish I could say blog posts like this helped the cause, but my feeling after reading it is just meh. I'm fanatic about CoffeeScript but there will always be a divide between people who are willing to try it and people who won't. Writing blog posts that effectively regurgitate the documentation while being a bit religiously pushy about it just seem kind of counter to the cause.
Show HN: Clipular - an instant scissors for the web