skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an Indian, I am actually pretty happy that not all of our best engineers can leave the country even if they wanted to.

What makes you think that America deserves/needs a good engineer more than India itself?

Disclaimer: I am not in India right now. But having been educated practically for free in a Govt. college, I hope I will be able to repay some of my dues soon. At the very least Govt of India, should be able to tax the runaways like me.
Try to convince every other PC manufacturer to leave the consumer market.

They may even die in the end, but they'll certainly try other things before it comes to that.
"officially" being the key word there. It's available on any number of mod sites.
build something you can show off, then apply for jobs.

a lot of employers are going to also ask: what do you do to keep up with the changes in technology?

also, learn SQL. it's easy, and necessary. pick a database, install it, become somewhat familiar with it.
The kid demonstrates a specific valuable set of capabilities in living color - but the decision still has to do with "turnoff," as if this were a hookup and not a rational assessment of capability.

Moral: hiring is more like a hookup than a rational assessment of capability.
MS can't have it both ways unless they want to become Apple. You can't ask an OEM to innovate and take most of their profits away in a race to the bottom market. It's simply not fair.

Why not, exactly? As long as it increases Microsoft's profits, what prevents them from doing this?
stopped reading after "Microsoft has always been a “my way or the highway” kind of company"

this can be written just by person who wants to lie. MS backward compatibility is unmatched for this size of company. I still can run apps written 10+ years ago. In most cases I can find same menus and options where they were 10+ years ago. Try this trick with Mac. I recently switched to Mac to do development... so have not big but experience in both worlds
tossos.com was built about 6 months ago. Trying to do similar things as this. It has a Chrome Plugin... check it out.
no support for Chromium on xubuntu 12.04?
What do people think about VC firms?
Do It Yourself Porsche
Oh, I just assumed "Read the Details" would send me to the ToS! Maybe that should be renamed too :)
Congratulations to the MexicanVC team! Keep the good work!
I frequently use a couple of custom tools I created in Excel (for ease of data entry) to generate and maintain complex state machines and even-driven loop callback C code in embedded systems. That does not mean that the embedded systems were written in Excel. In this case Excel is simply leveraged as a productivity tool as I suspect might be the case for the use of Python scripts to generate chunks of code in the JPL case.
I think people want to hire young ("junior") programmers because:

1. They are cheaper

2. They are more likely to have less focus on work-life balance (i.e., willing to work crazy hours)

3. They can be more easily molded to a company's development philosophies or culture
Yes, it does. The JIT compiler doesn't work on ARM, but otherwise it's fine. This blog post explains how one person got Racket on an Android phone w/ARM: http://www.wedesoft.de/racket-on-android.html
The situation with wireless is still terrible. It took all the voodoo I could muster to get ubuntu to install the right wireless driver.

And then the battery meter is broken. The remaining life estimate is forever "coming soon".

And then there's unity. We'll put the menu bars on the top of the screen for all your programs. Except your word processor, but that's ok, end users don't use word processors that much.
It’s getting pretty annoying that Marco is consistently able to recap yesterday’s top tech news item, add no insight, and hit the top of HN.

Or am I missing something? Is there value added in this process? Or do these concerns end up reaching a much wider audience?
From Twitter: Visualizing Hadoop clusters with HDFS-DU
I get the blurred answers 100% of the time if you arrive at Quora via a Google search. Try this URL:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...

Also, the first answer is always clear - they blur subsequent answers.
I was referring more to the googles and facebooks of the world. This recent HN post made me think outside the country was the last place start-ups would look for employees: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4346351
They're required to turn over the memo as part of the discovery process. Otherwise, they get into trouble for withholding/destroying evidence
The plan is to work with the EFF's tosback https://github.com/pde/tosback2 (they need contributors too BTW) and track changes over time so we can notify people when something wrong is going on (they'd be able to subscribe to a list of services' ToS;DR)
The point of H-1bs is to depress the prices of labor for any given job. (Econ 101: Increase supply, reduce cost.)

So, no, I'm not really interested in increasing the supply of skilled labor any further and driving prices for my labor any lower. The "talent war" is good for everyone with skills that works in the Valley. Feature, not a bug.
Yeah "Ownership" is meant as a category rather than a title. I guess I forgot to give this one a proper title. Will fix this soon.
What do you mean by "place"? And why would you be associated with people on the boards you don't visit? (Also basically everyone on those boards are anonymous so you won't have an identity to "associate".)
Well, I am thinking of selling goods in the future. It'll be bank transfers or bitcoins. Simple.

add: if someone worries about if I have the goods or will ship, I'll offer to take a photo of me holding them next to that day's newspaper and have some testimonials up on the site. Simple.
This is very interesting. I did not know situation as dire as you described. But could you back up your claims with some sources?
I also think it's a poor choice. What do you suggest?
I think these kinds of services are great but the key logging makes me a little nervous. No... a lot nervous.
Gravatar: No Right to leave the service. Really?
Microsoft biggest problem, by far, is that they think the OS installed on PCs is what sells them. It's not.

In the 90's, it would be very hard to change, but currently two trends are converging into MS's perfect storm: users are doing more and more through web interfaces to remote servers running their apps and holding their data, and FLOSS is fast becoming a very viable alternative to what most PC users use their machines for.

Every time I debate this with my friends who work for Microsoft, they seem to think the only way to install a printer on Linux is still to open a terminal and edit a configuration file with vi, if not compile the driver yourself.
of course the issue with 2 factors is that:

- you can still social engineer your way out (!) - "oh i lost my phone and the recovery keys" "heres my name address cc number, etc please help!" (ie nothing has been solved)

- its quite annoying to use

- it doesnt solve everything, only weak passwords/brute force

- it locks you out if you lose your phone/token until you get back home to get your recovery keys

- compromising the phone (2nd factor for the general public) allow compromising both passwords and the authenticator

and the issue of passwords managers:

- they're stored everywhere because you need them (incl. your phone)

- you have a single password to decrypt them all

- compromising the phone, once again, give you all passwords, and the authenticator
In addition to the points outlined in the article, Apple is also at fault for issuing a temporary password when the caller failed to answer security questions correctly:

From Honan's post:

"In response, Apple issued a temporary password. It did this despite the caller’s inability to answer security questions I had set up. And it did this after the hacker supplied only two pieces of information that anyone with an internet connection and a phone can discover."

Sounds like Apple support needs some lessons on social engineering prevention.
You make a good argument. I was going to say that in Apple's defense, there's some expectation that a user who enables remote-wipe knows what he/she is getting into and has some responsibility to have a backup solution. But that point is mostly moot since Apple also hosts personal email/data accounts, which would be compromised by this hack. Amazon does to a lesser extent...there's data, but not terribly actionable data. Whereas if Apple is your email account used to retrieve passwords...well, then you're in Honan's terrible position.

AFAIK, though, I use the same credentials to get into my Amazon consumer account as I do my Amazon EC2 and S3 account and into my affiliate account (and Kindle, etc.). Does the security level elevate as soon as I've been flagged as a developer-user who isn't just buying books/CDs? If there is, I've seen no sign of it.
Joel Klein, Sal Khan, Sebastian Thrun: Inventing the Future of Education
As far as best practices wrt. security, I've been a long-time fan of the OWASP ASVS checklist:
http://code.google.com/p/owasp-asvs/wiki/Verification

Both apple and amazon are in violation of V2.9: "Verify that users can safely change their credentials using a mechanism that is at least as resistant to attack as the primary authentication mechanism."

Clearly the secondary authentication controls are weaker than the primary authentication controls.

It would be so awesome if all the common web app providers published ASVS compliance reports. Never gonna happen though.
I went to high school in Virginia where a failing grade was an E.
Alright, I just think it's important not to call a copyright license "ownership".
It's on the same level as putting content on the page in a 1pt white-on-white font. Sure, the content is technically there, but humans can't read it.

Expert sex change at least has the content on the page, unadulterated, after you scroll past a bunch of ad blocks. Totally different from what Quora does.
Nutrition Blogger Fights North Carolina Licensing Rebuke
I use Mozy for full backup and Google Drive + Picasa for photos and videos. Hopefully both of them wouldn't fail me at once.
AGPL is our JS+HTML+CSS code. The data itself (JSON) is CC-BY-SA.
Your education is in your hands. Identify the resources which are available to you in college for improving your skills. Don't just coast along in your classes and complain about how they aren't doing a great job, that is normal. Put in extra time outside of your coursework or you will not have an education to match your degree. Keep doing it for 4 years and you will have a great education no matter what kind of backwater you are in.

Also, be sure to pursue internships and if you have opportunities to network/get connected in areas that relate to your professional specialty, take them.

Unfortunately this thread shows very clearly that whether you get good grades or bad, and whether you learn a lot or a little, your actual (even vividly demonstrated!) capabilities are comparatively much less important than the emotional tone and images you use to market yourself. So start also to think about those things.
As someone with experience hiring developers, my concerns about "older developers" were two-fold.

First, the cultural fit. If the company is all mid 20-somethings, would you fit in with the team. ?

Secondly, are you really set in your wise regarding your code and almost as important, what SDLC you're comfortable with (because we aren't using waterfall here!)

So I wouldn't ever not hire someone just for being old, but those are two concerns that I'd have with any candidate and they're a little more of an issue with older developers.

That said, regardless of your age, what is going to get your a job is networking. Start getting involved in the community now. Take on freelancing projects. Attend meetups. Get to know people.
You're right, but that is essentially Marco's point. My view is that Amazon did the same thing (let hackers add an email account, to which it sent the password reset), and required slightly less information to do so.
I (or perhaps what I was reading) may have had the descent cam's stats confused with the high-quality mast cam, which won't be deployed until next week. Still exciting, though.
Deletion liberation
Still don't want to read it.
The category is explained http://tos-dr.info/topics.html#ownership also, see http://tos-dr.info/topics.html#copyright-scope
Maybe "more details" or "expand" or just "More"?
All the hacks from e-commerce hack day
Anyone able to paste the text? I'd rather not visit the 4chan domain while at work.
> "There's millions of people unemployed in this country, why not find which ones of them know basic skills like math and science and train them in house to write python or java or whatever?"

Because the lead time to go from "has basic math and logic skills" to "competent programmer" is on the order of years, if not over a decade.

Do you want to put someone on your payroll for years before you see one tiny iota of productivity out of them? Or worse, have them be a negative drain on your productivity?

> "but lets be reasonable, ordinary Americans built this country and they're the reason Silicon Valley exists in this country and not someplace else"

This isn't true. The US has been extremely reliant on skilled immigration as its power base throughout the 20th century. Immigrants are over-represented in academia as well as all corners of basic research, they are also over-represented in the industries that spawned Silicon Valley (i.e., the defense and aerospace R&D that gave birth to both the funding, cultural, and educational foundation that birthed the semiconductor industry, followed by the software industry).

> "You could easily teach someone to code by October 2013 if you started now."

Then do it. I challenge you. Starting today, from someone with the proper high school level education but no relevant college education (i.e., no STEM degree), develop someone into a competent programmer capable of writing production-ready code by the end of October 2013.

Put your money where your mouth is.
There's an intern on my team that is going back to school for a second degree in CS. He's 32 and will likely have a full time offer locked up by the end of the summer.

Most of my team is in their 40s and I don't think they would have any trouble hiring an older person as long as they had talent. Honestly, you might be a better hire because you're less likely to leave the company in a couple years than a 21 year old that's still trying to figure out what to do with their life.
Actually, there's a specific pre-condition to granting an H1-B visa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Labor_Condition_Appli...

It basically states, the employee must be paid the prevailing wage or higher. There are probably employers who flout this rule, but it isn't legal. When used legitimately, H1-B does increase the supply of talent in the valley.
Yes. I have been in touch with the author and invited to cooperate. But... where is the code? how does it work exactly? How can it interoperate with other projects trying to back up archives of terms? etc. etc.
4chan was arguably born out of a combination of the FYAD (fuck you and die) and the ADTRW (anime death tentacle rape whorehouse) subforums at something awful.

ADTRW was just the anime forum. The admins called it that to annoy the anime kids. They would all hang out on 2chan, the japanese precursor to 4chan.

FYAD was the forum with no rules. It was (is?) basically /b/ but this is back in the day so it was much smaller, everyone knew everyone else. It was basically a little clique that would sit there making injokes.

I never really went in there, but the notable thing about it was that the mods would constantly abuse the css and js on the forum theme to the extent that it would often crash some browsers. It was pretty funny. Oh, and there was always one mod who was elected from the userbase every month, the "idiot king" who would rule with an iron fist. In short, like online gaming, it would be great in theory except for the fact that everyone else there is an antisocial teenage nerd.
They will also more likely have picked a password that's easy to brute force.
It's pretty refreshing to see cases where a government doesn't stay the course when the facts contradict it. I wonder if it is in less of a thrall of France's IP lobby?
One strategy most startups miss is the NAFTA TN-1 "visa" for Canadian and Mexican citizens (I use quotes because it's not really a visa apparently).

We hired a Canadian employee using this status and there really is very little paperwork. He needed a letter describing his work (which must put him in an acceptable bucket) which he presented at the US/Canada border and an hour or so later he was in. It has to be renewed every three years, but can be renewed indefinitely.

Waterloo puts out great engineers -- engineers with fewer options with the implosion of RIM. So, look north!
Wow! I didn't know that this was indeed the real situation. Sounds terrible. Is there a credible source that you can share? I'm wondering how someone can get away with fake documents all through.
...in your closet
Ask HN: How do I create a Terms of Service for my Application?
Hi,

I'm a high schooler who just learned PHP for the last year or so, and created a website for business owners and consumers to connect with each other. I'm now wondering how can I create a Terms of Service - I don't have any money for a lawyer, but I also don't want to go to get sued if something goes wrong because I don't have a Terms of Service? Is it possible to not get sued without one? Thanks for all help!
Make each of the line items clickable to reveal the detailed info. And perhaps move the current button to the top right of the block and rename it to something like "Expand All".
Yes. Which is a bit silly, I haven't really understood their justification for it. But if they want to clear that up, it would be a good idea.
Local governments could save most from cloud, but are least receptive to it
They must have some advanced crypto where the customer support person can only see the first 2 letters but the rest of password remains securely hashed...
"Feeling Good" by David D. Burns is a good resource. Lots of activities with writing things down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeling_Good:_The_New_Mood_Ther...
Android's Rise Helps Google Grow its Traffic Surveillance System
No argument there...but I'm just saying, remote wipe does what it does. Is there any consumer out there who enables it without realizing that it indeed allows the destruction of your device's data from "the cloud"? I assume that the average consumer is sufficiently paranoid about these kinds of technologies going awry...a database-server glitch is improbable, but don't you think the average consumer assumes otherwise?
When you run an iPhone app on the iPad, there are no such widgets.
Another problem that GNU/Linux faces is that people are incredibly biased when
comparing the two operating systems.

Whatever little fault GNU/Linux has is immediately regarded as an absolutely
crucial flaw that will forever prevent it from being usable by anyone but a
fat, smelly nerd living in his mother's basement.

This is completely ignoring that Windows is far from faultless, too. It's also
inconsistent as hell, it's buggy, and drivers also don't always "just work".

If anything, the current popular DEs on GNU/Linux are more consistent than
anything Microsoft has ever produced. They work better out of the box than any
crapware-laden computer you can buy at a store. If you're not using absolutely
obscure hardware, it should be usable. In fact, the Linux kernel probably
supports more hardware and does it better than Windows ever has.

My point stands: GNU/Linux is perfectly usable on the desktop and has been so
since years. One of the major things hampering its adoption are people like you
who spread FUD about it.
I understand that the project welcomes contributions, but who has the final say on the rating of a website? Are there any gate-keepers, and who are they?
>My weakness is thinking that when I first grasp an idea, I think I'm done.

I must admit that this is what I've been doing all in this time. Maybe because of the Hubris mentioned in the article and limited experience, I believe that it is still might be the better way. You are welcome to disagree. Here's an unorganized mess of what I think:

1) Making mistake is the whole point.
At the point where you make a mistake, is where you learn about it most effectively. Reading in depth doesn't give you that experience and its boring. :/
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/radical-teaching/200905/...

2) There's just so much to learn.
When the time calls for you to apply your knowledge, if you have the big idea (or vague if you want to call it) of many things, you can decide most effectively which branch to go deeper into at that particular field. Might also be interpreted as making more mistakes in that field. That's why, experience is weighed more than education.

After few of those encounters, I think you will tend to become an "expert". Probably is the reason why hobby projects are quite healthy to have such encounters.

“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.” – Niels Bohr

And in the end, I'll leave you with
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1RqTP5Unr4
500 Startups announces hostile takeover of Latam startup accelerator Mexican.VC
You presume there is an undercurrent of malevolence to this when there isn't.

If we decreased the supply of programmers to 1 said programmer would be making a shitload of money - but that is not good for the general population, nor the economy.

Similarly, the restriction of the oil supply will drive up cost, drive down usage, and force the economy to grind to an ugly halt.

Wage depression, especially in an environment where wages are already remarkably elevated, enables further economic activity (i.e., software businesses with cost structures that prevent paying $250K+ an engineer can now exist and create wealth).

And let's be honest, as a single programmer making 4.5x the median household American income, our wages are plenty elevated.
This argument is a tautology -- "make secure security less annoying by developing new less annoying but more secure approaches that will not be a barrier to user adoption and ignoring implementation complexity"... hmmmm.
Let's say you're a group of 3 ex-facebookers; don't you think you can easily find a ton of companies in the valley that'll pick up for talent? Is it going to be worth $3M is debatable but surely there's a good chance that it'll be a pretty sweet deal.
I wonder if you have ever tried to hire a decent programmer or tried to train one.

On seconds thoughts it is actually true for every profession. Ever saw a waiter smearing the shit on a table rather than actually wiping it clean? How much time you think one needs to learn how to clean a frigging table?

Hiring a good professional or training any XYZ to become a good professional, is really not something I will bet my business on.
Deleting your card details from amazon does nothing since they happily display the last 4 digits in your invoice history anyways.
FYI: They added these notifications recently.
Yes. https://github.com/flamsmark/privacy-policy-template & http://blog.docracy.com/post/27931026976/an-open-source-priv...
"Oh, shoot, I have so many credit cards... is it this one? This one? This one?"

Seeming clueless when doing malicious things is unquestionably a form of social engineering.
Are you sure about that? I'm a Canuck and have worked in the US under a TN-1 a few times, and I had to renew it every year, and initially my sponsoring company had to prove they had been looking to fill the position locally for a certain amount of time without any luck (fairly easy to do with a classified ad, etc.).

Also, only certain occupations qualify at any given time.