skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Code refactoring
Its too easy to develop over the top of bad quality code. Refactor it. You know you want to.
OK enough is enough! In the light of this bill, post-thanksgiving time I will spend on cleaning up all my email boxes and would like your suggestions for a new email account that fulfills the following requirements:

- is located off shore, preferably some small country with less draconian laws that exists now and could be implemented in near future (15 years?), BUT stable enough so that my service can be reliable,

- content of my emails is automatically encrypted,

- and at this point, I am fine with paying for my email. The amount of work it lets me do, I am fine with paying up to $49/month, I think.

Thanks!
How US hacks into Sarkozy team computers (French)
> I'd even go as far as to say that the concept of lobbying is a fascist idea

The people living in democracies without lobbying wholeheartedly agree. We genuinely can't believe you let it happen.
Well, it's a joke in the sense that I did it for fun and not because I think people will actually start using it. :)

You're right about the sunrise, though. To solve this, I say that, by convention, 6AM is sunrise no matter your location. The idea is that the day should start a little before people wake up, rather than at midnight. I think this lines up more with people's intuitive understanding of "a day."
IMO, saying "I do not communicate that way, sorry" on an initial contact request is a little douchebaggy (key sentence is "on an initial contact").

I much rather prefer: "I'll make time for a quick phone call, but I only have X minutes for it." (5 minutes? Does not have to be a long time). Stick with the time limit.

The first thing to say in the phone call is "This may be the last phone call we have because [...]". That's better than coming off as some eccentric whose most memorable quality is that he does not do phone calls. As opposed to whatever you want the most-remembered thing about you is.

Just an opinion.
Interesting discussion in that site's comments over whether or not the author's use of The Oatmeal's comic images are fair use or not.
SELinux does not aim to protect or harden the kernel. SELinux aims to enforce a more complicated(maybe expressive), MAC policy on the filesystem and a few related objects. The SELinux threat model is helpless against a kernel vulnerability because it does not address application security.
A little confused as to your question. Not making a distinction between "Enterprise" and an "app." These suggestions most certainly apply to Enterprise products and generally these are practices for all web and mobile products.
Congresswoman Crowdsourcing Domain-Seizure Bill on Reddit
I don't know why techies aren't more accepting of paying more for bandwidth or paying in smaller slices rather than having most people pay for far more than the use. I mean, I guess I do know why techies are against that sort of thing, because they're more likely to be heavy users, and the current situation subsidizes heavy users to a pretty substantial degree. But still, basic fairness would seem to dictate that this stuff ought to be a little more sane.

Nobody seems to mind paying for precisely metered electricity, gas, or water. But the moment you want to meter internet usage, it seems like people swarm out of the woodwork to shoot it down, even though it seems that the current "unlimited" model is responsible for a lot of our current problems.
I see. Thanks for your responses.

What happens when you encounter phrases with multiple intents? Is it something you can detect but is difficult to deal with, or is it a best-guess kind of thing where you attempt to obey the "first intent"? Or something else?
I often wonder why more small companies don't locate in smaller "lifestyle" cities to facilitate recruiting. I suppose that places like Seattle, Boulder and Salt Lake fall into this category but as someone who just moved from Seattle to rural Montana near Missoula I am constantly surprised at the number of really talented individuals willing to take paycuts to live and work near the mountains.
For filing a bug do check against the nightlies, in case it was fixed in them but didn't make it to 18.
No, I don't think I'll give it a rest. The patent system drives a business model where companies can produce no products, but instead buy patents and sue people. That's a grievance that people should petition redress of. Sorry, Kappos, until that business model isn't profitable, I'm going to keep bitching, in line with my first amendment rights.
APIs that ignore the realities of distributed computing and that each have different special-snowflake wire formats requiring tedious documentation: the worst of both worlds.
am I the only one wondering why you need MMS so bad?
Just because something is GET doesn't mean it can be cached. It's not consistent, and every API call needs to be evaluated individually. The thing with REST is that it treats all functions as a variant of a CRUD operation, while functions may do more than just CRUD or a combination of CRUD operations in a single API call. Imagine if all your javascript functions had to be prefixed with GET/UPDATE/DELETE/etc.. you would feel constricted, and for what reason? Imagine if your function names had data in the call path MyCourse.32423.Delete(); that doesn't look very good does it? 32423 would look alot better inside Delete().
The mobile gold rush is over
The Man Who Revs Facebook's Money Engine
This is a problem with the blanket term "Intellectual Property". Intellectual property consists of many things, e.g. copyrights, patents, and trademarks.

You can be in favor of some without being in favor of all.
61% of Online Shoppers Would Trade Privacy for Personalization
Sure. I'll start with this: as far as client libraries go, Braintree is doing it right. Because it's the only thing they support, they are incentivized to make sure it is feature complete and bug free.

SSL: It is not the onus of the vendor to ensure people are properly securing requests. I have seen horrendous things done in the name of "security" but it only adds headaches. Fix this at the client level. SSL everywhere is sufficient. By extension, vendors often introduce mechanics because they want to make the world better: http://xkcd.com/927/

Platform Support: I think the counter-argument is community client libraries, which the OP is correct: they are worse. The stability + scaling + support issues mentioned by OP can usually be solved by better API design and better architecture behind the scene.

Backwards Compatibility: OP claims you never have to update your code if you use their client library. This is likely true. Good API design would dictate not breaking exposed endpoints unless there is new functionality to be had. In this case, to take advantage of any new API features, you'd still have to update your code. No cost savings are had either way.
I'm very skeptical of the #2 ranking Seattle gets for talent. I lived and worked there from 1994 to 2011.
Improve your health by sitting less - a low-cost solution
> There are no small players in this space.

There's a horde of small players in the space. They've been dropping like flies, but there's a steady stream of new entrants both on the handset and software sides. Most of these new companies will fail as well. But it's not because of patents, it's because there are big economies of scale and the network effects are even bigger.
I agree about the limits, but the problem is not urbanistic, in fact afaik the French tried to make a techhub in the nineties by offering great offices for cheap and it didn't work.

What limits other hubs are taxes and legislation: a guy I know in Brasil had tons of stories about taxation over there, and it wasn't pretty. Another guy in Europe said in some countries its nearly impossible to fire an employee.

Then there's funding: in some places there really isn't any, and what little there is comes with a price, like 60% of your startup up front for $20K or less.

Those are the things that really add up, Silicon Valley is not just SF, there are places nearby which are much cheaper. On the other hand you can't escape taxation (unless you like being in jail) or labor laws. And if there are no investors you are screwed too, unless you have rich parents.
> This is like saying it wouldn't be so bad to be blind because blind people are able to live fulfilling and experience-rich lives.

not to distract from the threads theme of misinterpretation, but no, not quite. it's more like saying "being blind doesn't completely ruin your life".
"The attention paid to terrorism in the U.S. is considerably out of proportion to the relative threat it presents."

I agree 100%! The formation of this organization was reactionary policy making at its worst. The TSA is nothing more then a works program for people who are barely qualified to do anything.
Yeah, I truly don't understand at all why my 4S refuses to access data unless I put in the proxy. StraightTalk says I don't need to, other people on the Internet say I don't need to, but my own experience shows me it simply doesn't work without it. I haven't got the slightest idea why.

I also can't for the life of me imagine why the iPhone config utility doesn't have fields for MMS. It seems like such a strange and pointless omission.
What is the answer though? Can you imagine a politician running under a "massively downsize the TSA" banner? Would any existing Washington elected official take up the cause?

They can't even repeal the comically silly shoe removal procedure (unless you're under 12 or over 75, because no terr'ist would ever foot kerplode those demographic stereotypes).
BLASPHEMY: Gandalf Exploited to Shill For Microsoft Phones | Betabeat
Microsoft Uncovers Special Bond Between Computers and Toilets
I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that GPG encryption for email (and other data) is freely available. It would be considerably more generally usable if someone with design skills contributed to the projects. The Mac GPG integration is nice, but in my explorations outside of that, it's been... difficult to use. Particularly galling is the key distribution problem. :-)
This might be a good time to reflect on the flawed ides that simply because a prior company failed with a similar idea or product, that you too are destined to fail.
Conflict may be unavoidable, but that doesn't mean it requires public resources to resolve, nor that it needs resolution at all. Even without patent disputes, there would be a "conflict" between android and iOS -- that doesn't mean we would need the courts to step in and figure out which os is better -- the conflict is kind of the point.

We could clearly today have either more or less protections: you can pretty easily imagine a system with less patents or one with more and stricter forms of legal protection. A system with more forms of protection would probably see more legal battles. A system with less protection would see more market battles with focus on winning over consumers vs juries. The system we have today isn't some divinely revealed sweet spot, so the attitude that "conflicts are inevitable and this is how we solve them, thus there's nothing we can do about it" is disingenuous.
The Science of Instagram: How to Get More Followers and Likes
The same board that fired Hurd? The HP board needs to go away. They've been fucking things up for years. It's one of those situations where, after 3 CEO's, the first of which was kicking ass, maybe it's time to consider that the board is the problem, not the CEO.
I'm the author of the article. I prefer the term "schmucky" (instead of "douchebaggy").

In theory, I think you're right. In practice, just the thought of trying to do what you are suggesting sounds awfully unpleasant -- even more unpleasant than actually taking the call.
Because he is clearly a troll?

EDIT: too much internet for the day, I've now started responding to myself.
However, it wouldn't be impossible. I am quite sure (although I don't have a proof) that the BPF bytecode can be made turing complete, so an arbitrary program (maybe a rootkit, much more likely patches to a few kernel structures) could be implemented in it. Examples of things that are very unintendedly turing complete include HTML5 without JS(the clicky rule 110), ELF relocations (you can write a program to be interpreted by the loader in a few symbols and relocations without changing code, see elf-bf-tools on GitHub) and the Intel interrupt handling mechanism(unreleased, see talk at 29c3).

Furthermore, you don't need dynamically loadable modules in the kernel for kernel code injection, see http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?id=7&issue=58
First, it is not easy (if not impossible), for most people to just move. Let's say some people did move to some other country (X). What is the guarantee that X will not through the same route? What do we do in that case?
User with non-English name and language settings as English-US is very common.
They created a system where a government lawyer makes a law that corporate lawyers can use to make a lot of money. In return, the corporate lawyer pay taxes to the government so that the government lawyer can have a fancy title in a fancy agency.

This is lawyers talking to (and for) lawyers. This doesn't concern engineers or consumers.
If you can avoid it* never travel through the united states.

*Edit
The success of Silicon Valley isn't limited to the tech workers though, the entire infrastructure of the area is designed for startup success. All the financiers, lawyers, professors, etc. are 'lazy' in the sense that they prefer their companies and investments to be close to where they live.

There is ample supply of tech workers / infrastructure in NYC, Boston, LA, but the list of cities is a short one. There will absolutely be more companies formed outside of the SV area, but there is still plenty of room for growth here as well. There are a half dozen cheap communities in the East Bay which still have low housing costs, plenty of commercial vacancy, access to public transit and are actually a closer commute compared to driving to San Francisco (with Palo Alto as a center-point).

I have personal experience with two similar companies, one in 'Silicon Valley' proper and one in the East Bay. The company in SV had more employees by a factor of 2x, but was paying 15x more in rent for their commercial space! Both were backed by Sand Hill VCs and had professors from Stanford / Berkeley involved in the efforts. This could just be another data point in the "SV is too expensive camp", but it also points to the affordability of nearby areas which haven't seen the same level of expansion yet. Look up commercial / industrial real estate in Newark / Fremont / Hayward / Milpitas, you'll be shocked at how affordable it still is.

You don't need to build cities from the ground-up to have a climate hospitable for investment and venture success, it's much easier to be proximal to where such a place already exists.
The big problem I see is that SSL requires an unbroken chain of trust all the way along. If I have client-side code connecting to my server, which is then connecting to a third party server, all of those links have to be secured. As someone else pointed out, it`s nice to make your payment processing secure, but at some point the developer also has to step up and ensure their half of the bargain is upheld. If I`m sending credit card details to my backend over HTTP for some reason, no API in the world will stop me.

Even looking at Stripe; they provide a JS library so you can do client-side encryption. However, if you include that JS library on an incorrectly SSLed page, a malicious party could replace it without you knowing. Even with extensive hand-holding, if a user is going to implement SSL badly, there will be security risks.

The only sure-fire solution is for the developers of SSL libraries to come together and implement sane default options, and clear documentation of how not to do things. Looking at the docs for OpenSSL, it`s impossible to easily discern what counts as a sane configuration. The same problem propagates itself into language-specific libraries, where the dev wasn`t quite sure what options to tick to begin with. And so it goes.
Pretty much. That kind of money is "fuck you" money. You can go somewhere away from the business, and pay people to pamper you for the rest of your life. Who would even be able to get close enough to you to tell you yer a shithead?

And, of course, there's the standard business mantra that business is war, and all's fair in love and war. These guys tell themselves that they're just crazy slick and smart, not criminals.
I'm a developer at Braintree. The challenge with maintaining backwards compatibility on the server side is handling the wide variety of possible inputs into the system. It's hard to write tests that account for all of them.

I've seen a couple of cases where backwards compatibility can be broken in unexpected ways. For one application that we built at Braintree, we had a client that was sending us an application/x-www-form-urlencoded POST body without the Content-Type request header. We upgraded the version of Rails that this app was using, and it broke that integration because Rails made a change where it wouldn't parse the POST body without the Content-Type header. Unfortunately, we didn't have any test cases in our test suite that made POSTs without a Content-Type. We were able to identify the issue and resolve it quickly, but it was a surprising bug. With client libraries, we can test every version against the upgraded app and know that all clients will continue to work.

Are there interesting request profiling techniques that can be executed on production traffic to analyze requests? I think the challenging part of backwards compatibility is making sure unintentional use cases, that were never intended to be supported, continue to work.
The Democrats do not have a majority in the House, the Republicans do. And the Democrats do not control enough of the Senate to be immune to the threat of filibuster.

You are contradicting yourself, regardless. You are arguing that higher taxes will kill those seeking to bootstrap companies -- but if people are bootstrapping and have no income, they pay no taxes, and they most certainly aren't being hit by the only tax increases that are now being discussed: those on high earners making over $200k. It doesn't affect them.

Cost of living really doesn't matter that much to tech startups. If it did, everyone would be rushing to rural Nebraska to bootstrap their startup. In reality, you can find cheap rent anywhere, even SV, you just have to compromise on space and housing/location quality.
I agree, big news to most people from mars would be the discovery of non-microbial life or a big ass monolith with strange writing on it. Big news to a scientist is that some rock formation shows evidence that there probably was water on the planet in the distant past.
consciousness raising:

> When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise. If you're a database expert, don't build a chat app for teenagers (unless you're also a teenager). Maybe it's a good idea, but you can't trust your judgment about that, so ignore it. There have to be other ideas that involve databases, and whose quality you can judge. Do you find it hard to come up with good ideas involving databases? That's because your expertise raises your standards. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad [emphasis mine], but you're giving yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain.
Like any other programming language if you need to update multiple fields, you pass multiple parameters to the function. The URL should be equivalent to namespace/class/method while the parameters are just that - parameters you can pass in JSON format.
Google: 70% Indian tech shoppers know exactly what to buy
Correct, that's why in real world scenarios companies like Mechem will use a number of techniques. The link I posted earlier makes it clear that the UN considers a combination of techniques necessary to meet the required standard.
I don't want to argue for lobbying, which can get pretty sickening at times, but I suspect other major democracies just aren't as blatant. How does your democracy remove corporate bribes from the equation? How do people, in aggregate, push specific issues with their legislators?
In all honesty: such a place exists?
Google Promises To Bring December Back To Android 4.2 “Soon”
No work assigned from 4 months, Is leaving job a better option?
I'm not going to lie, the patent office was the last place I expected a "think of the children" argument. And, just like every other time I hear that argument, I immediately feel that I'm being lied to and manipulated for somebody else's gain.
Big data + machine learning + human artistry = even better underwriting
The world economy ( the west + china ) is collapsing. Investors are seeking yield frantically. It's not surprising that high-tech is flourishing in this climate. It's also not surprising that high-tech is now being applied to new industries ( bio-informatics ), and that those industries are based in different geographic areas. SV isn't going away, though. Their are socio-cultural issues at play that took generations to build in the Valley, and replication in other places is not happening overnight. There are a lot of places this article could have gone, but didn't and that was sort of disappointing.
Steven Cohen and SAC finally getting busted for insider trading
Enter Steve Sinofsky as CEO.
No doubt, I was thankfully using mostly FOSS components but I rolled my own SMTP solution a while back and it was hard to get right, especially dealing with how the format deals with multipart etc.
This is so NOT relevant at HackerNews. Why do you guys think other 'hackers' would be interested in such news? Can't they find newspapers on their own?
It was not cold-selling no. I had worked with them before in a different role so I was a known quantity. I also combined it with a meeting with another client I was cold-selling to - albeit through a recommendation from a friend and had already submitted a proposal.

In total it cost me about $2000 but am expecting work to come from it.
And one of the mistakes you should be looking for is the possibility that you are being lied to so thoroughly that it's hard to know what's real and what isn't. It's in situations like that, that forensic accountants earn their salt.
Lawsuits against bureaucratic offices is a good place to start. I wonder how much royalty-free software they use that has methods patented by someone else?
$6k is nothing unless you have a stable, steady stream of income.
I'm not arguing against implementing an RPC if that's what you need. My original post describes a super set of JSON-RPC.
A little tangential, but it's interesting the extent to which phone communication has dropped in my life. The phone on my office desk sits unused in the corner, covered with dust. For personal calls, I'm down to a perhaps 2-3 a week, total; for everything else, text/email/fb is more convenient. Now, I mostly view voice calls as an annoyance and I sympathize with the article.
What did Color do again?
give me your number so we can talk about it.
Why the US doesn't have a drinking problem like England does.
GET requests, by definition, should have no side-effects. Which makes them cacheable. Many browsers cache GET requests by default unless cache-control tells them not to.

You can most definitely write a GET request that contains side-effects, but that's because you're doing it wrong (tm).

Imagine if your function names had data in the call path MyCourse.32423.Delete(); that doesn't look very good does it? 32423 would look alot better inside Delete().

That's not data, that's an object. "MyCourse.32423" is the actual resource. It would actually look something more like:

MyCourse32423.Delete();

Which seems pretty reasonable to me if we're trying to map this into programming language semantics (which I'm not even sure we should be doing).