skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Don't look to government bureaucrats for revolutionary vision"

Which bureaucrats should we look to? ;)

You seem rather negative towards bureaucrats.

Some bureaucratic positions are influential. Some people have visions which they can't do on their own or in a company. Some people figure out that the best way to achieve those visions is to become an influential bureaucrat. Vannevar Bush is one of those. He had a vision of how he wanted the US to fund science research. That vision became the NSF. His bureaucratic work started much earlier. For example, he was a key figure in organizing the Manhattan project.

Other bureaucrats with vision include: Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover (Hoover Dam, and more importantly the interstate compact which lead to it), the Health and Environmental Research Advisory Committee of the DOE (to start the Human Genome Project), J. C. R. Licklider (his DARPA memo on the "Intergalactic Computer Network" lead to ARPANet lead to the Internet), and Viktor Zhdanov, Deputy Minister of Health for the USSR (call for the WHO to undertake a global initiative to eradicate smallpox; the previous smallpox vaccination programs were also government driven).
> In a world where 90% of communications is non-verbal imagine what is lost on conference calls.

On the flipside, a significant percentage of people who work in the tech sector seem to be introverted, or sometimes even autistic (although it is hard to draw a clear distinction between the two). Many of them don't really "get" non-verbal communication anyway, even in a face-to-face setting. Even if they do, non-verbal communication tends to be much less efficient for these people. As a result, I doubt that relying exclusively on verbal communication results in such a large loss as the author describes.

> The culture is forged through office parties, poker, paintball or film nights. And slowly, over the years, those crazy stories about Danny passed out in the company bathroom after the Summer party get replaced by weddings, births and family picnics. We become more than dispassionate colleagues – we’ve been in the trenches together and survived.

And this is exactly the kind of office culture that introverted and/or autistic techies tend to hate, or even positively despise. Office parties? Boring. Danny's bathroom episode? Idle chitchat. Paintball? No, I'd rather go home early and play my favorite FPS game. And I thought I'd be able to avoid those stupid corporate events if I worked for a lean startup! No thanks.

In short, I think that the author is approaching the topic of distributed teams from a rather biased point of view, namely, the viewpoint of a corporate executive who is proud of his "social skillz" and expects everyone else to enjoy the pointless parties he throws.
Huh? Where do you get this from?

> 1. Fifteen different prices depending on what alleged type of device you're using, and gasp whether you have more than one.

The device type is a good indicator of bandwidth usage. It's sensible to bill using this model for now. They could use metered bandwith, but something tells me you'd complain about that too.

> 2. Internet access is only required for most tasks due to people's laziness of using webapps.

What does this have to do with anything? People use the internet for all sorts of stupid stuff. I happen to use it mainly for vpn and ssh, but why does it matter?

> 3. Alternatively, "yay, I can refresh reddit on a plane"

So? Again, who cares?

> 4. Partial Internet access given before payment, to make it as disruption-free as possible, even though it will necessarily end up admitting things like the original article.

Partial access is given due to exclusivity deals and that sort of thing. Would you prefer the alternative of just not giving you anything? Who the hell complains about free? Seriously.

> 5. These whole "enter your credit card" wifi networks in general. Network access is infrastructure. Yeah, it takes a bit of work to backhaul a plane. But it also took quite a bit of work to build the plane. Just make the infrastructure universal so we can rely on it instead of clouding the thing with massive transaction overhead.

You do realize that Boeing, Detla, and GoGo are different companies right? Also, it takes a lot more than a "little bit of work to backaul." It took GoGo many many years working with the FAA, ISPs, and others to only just recently get this setup and approved. Look at what's happening with the dreamliner if you want an example of what can go wrong if you do this incorrectly. Finally, most of the planes in a typical airline's fleet are decades old. You can't just bake this cost into the price of the plane (as if that makes sense anyways. not all 747s are passenger planes). With your proposal, we'd maybe get wifi in 2030 (assuming this proposal would be possible at all, which I doubt it would).

> 6. Why give the spineless airlines any more money than you have to? This attitude is subject to change when they start sticking up for their customers by giving the TSA the boot.

OK, seriously, W.T.F. are you talking about? The TSA is employed by the airport, not the airline.
Yes, I was mostly just pointing out that the "Ooh! 16 million years! Scary!" attitude is bothersome, but you're right that I'm over-simplifying. My recollection was that the thorium cycle produces a mix of very-short-lived, deadly, gamma-emitting isotopes (U-232, I think? and possibly others) and very-long-lived, low-risk stuff, with less intermediate-half-life transuranic material left over, which made it rather preferable to the uranium fuel cycle as far as waste disposal was concerned, but I may be misremembering. Either way, the Guardian article doesn't deal with the issue in much depth or in a way that makes it sound like they know what they're talking about, so I don't trust their assessment of the relative merits of LFTRs vs. conventional uranium LWRs.
What's the fuss with multiple cursor? Emacs has these too (of course) but seriously WTF!?

Who programs in languages so mediocre that there are repetition everywhere and that working is so repetitive that having multiple cursors actually helps?

Do you really have to enter the same thing so often that having "multiple cursors" makes you more productive and is considered a "killer feature"!?

All I see is that if you need that you have way too much repetition in your "code".

I don't like repetitive stuff. That's what computers are good for. That's what I do as a programmer: I carefully craft my tools so that all the stupid repetitive tasks are done by my programs (or by my programmable text editor).
I would be unwilling to rely on one that hadn't been machined, assuming it would jam or so. I don't think the idea of a ban is so much about making them impossible to get as making them hard to get casually. As far as I can see the big prize for the administration would be closing the gun show loophole and dealing with the straw purchaser problem (both of which seem like reasonable things to me).
I bet it's some viral marketing thing. Assange is about to learn about the crisp, refreshing taste of Bud Light.
German Federal Police Plans To Use Gamma FinFisher Spyware
At what point is competition more productive than teamwork?
I have been out doing interviews I had one go something like this:

INTERVIEWER: I see you have been a carpenter for 15 years. Can you tell me how a hammer works?

CARPENTER: Well, you swing the hammer at a nail and the nail goes into the wood.

INTERVIEWER: Actually, when you strike the nail, an equal and opposite force is imparted on the hammer. I'm going to have to mark you down as not actually knowing how to use a hammer.

CARPENTER: I have built hundreds of beautiful houses that still stand today using hammers. Some would say I am artful with a hammer.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah... Well, we're really looking for someone who knows arcane details about hammers that don't really relate to how you use them day to day.
There was a TEDx talk I saw a while back by two MIT graduates working on a "Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=AAFWeIp8JT0

It looks promising and they have formed a start-up,
http://transatomicpower.com

http://www.forbes.com/sites/pikeresearch/2012/09/27/a-pair-o...
The only times I have been asked language specific questions are when I was selling myself as a language expert to fix some particular problem in some particular language.

I will however say that 90% of the interview questions I have been asked are heavily biased towards C type answers, although I did manage to use Scheme once!

Sure a linked list problems don't technically have to be written with pointers, but we all know what the interviewer is asking for.

Actually that brings up a good idea, I am going to come up with a bunch of contrived answers to the "find a loop in a linked list" problem, memorize them all, and next time someone asks me that question I'm going to give 5 weird answers in the course of 30 minutes.
You wouldn't do the following?

:% s/_/_Class_/

Explained: On each line replace the first '_' with '_Class_'
excuse my ignorance, but how is Amazon a method of payment?
Interesting experiment. Some of the Twitter posts say where the parcel is, but there is no EXIF data on the images posted. I would guess that either the images were geotagged but are processed to remove it, or the author separately uploads GPS data along with images.

Any chance of providing a time series of the parcel's location?
pricing too high. max pricing should be about 15.00 a month but just have a limit of storage and force people to dump old stuff.
Also, hbi, the first bytecode interpreter for full Haskell, is 23 years old now...

There's no excuse anymore to be ignorant of "modern" static typing - a quarter of a century is long enough.
Who's paying them?
The arguments I've heard may be difficult to pull off, but they do make sense. One cited a lot of deep in the money call options expire soon, and the folks that wrote those options have a lot to lose if the stock is high when they expire in a few days. With today's sloppy reporting and Apple being an especially juicy target for rumor-mongering, trying to deflate AAPL in the time just before the payout both makes sense and is probably easier than you imagine.

You say that people aren't looking at the market rationally, but look at the volatility in AAPL just this week. It's decidedly not normal for a stock with a price that high to see 4% fluctuations day-to-day unless there's real news. Everything out there has been asinine rumors.

As for having their lunch eaten by those looking for value... I bought call options yesterday on the wacky price dip; they were up over 200% today. Granted I only bought one option on the bet that a lot of this activity has been based on attempts to drive down the stock price on rumor alone so it's not like I made a whole lot (about $180 in profit), but people with much more money to throw around than myself taking a similar bet made stupid amounts of money in the last 36 hours or so.

I'll also point out here is that Apple has all of the profits in the industry, even if it doesn't have the marketshare. It's been true of the Mac for years, and is increasingly true of the cell phone market as Samsung eats into marketshare. Guess what? I care about profit, not marketshare, which is why I'm long AAPL.
We run www.slidedb.com which is a developer driven website for mobile games. Whilst our site is only new so the installs we drive will be small, it is one more outlet for you to promote your game (add it here www.slidedb.com/games/add). And because all content shown (including the homepage) is posted by the community / developers - you are not hoping an editor decides to cover your game, any coverage you get is entirely dictated by the effort you put in and what you post.

We have been running simarly themed sites ModDB and IndieDB for years now reaching over 200k+ visitors daily. We hope to bring the same independent developer driven coverage to the mobile space in time.
>> Validating your idea.

That is a strong point. What's interesting in your article is that one was "yet another social platform" and another is a marketing-style product targeted towards artists. While artists sort of care about marketing, they really are too busy for that.

I went through the validation stage and the feedback was not only honest but highly discouraging to say the least. It's disheartening to think that I put in so much time and thought into creating a prototype that got such a cold reception. Here I thought I was solving a problem and it turned out that no one thought the idea was any good. This is where loss-aversion can quickly take over and you just keep on looking for one or two yeses to get some courage.

Then again, after dropping the idea, I can't fight the suspicion that I am a spineless quitter.
I wouldn't say that. It's not all over the news, and most people don't know about it.
They don't have to weight everything equally, but as I previously stated, politicians that actually want to do good and not just get re-elected (I hear some exist) might actually care about their precedent-setting decision and how it will impact non-residents.
>Any chance of providing a time series of the parcel's location?

Let's do that /after/ it arrives.
Is this for backdating options?
SpaceX also had the advantage of a very wealthy founder willing to pour lots of his own money into the project. This certainly wasn't enough to finance the entire development up until the first ISS flight, but it did allow him to hire a bunch of hotshot engineers right from the get-go, and probably establish a degree of legitimacy that made attracting more funds, government contracts, etc., somewhat easier. I'd wager that if Elon Musk had decided to fund LFTRs instead of rockets, we'd already have a prototype.
Yes and it was a direct response to the NRA. He intends to use this as a means to deflate their arguments on the whole gun control debate. My guess is that the study will come back saying games aren't the cause of violence. The public will breath a sign of relief and then he'll continue with the proposal. The NRA's argument will be invalidated and he'll use their words against them to win the debate. Man, I don't agree with most of his policies, but Obama is one smart cookie.

Ohh, and I hate politicians. Nothing about the above has anything to do with the good of the nation. Where's the study into the state of mental health care in the US? Sigh...
Try JavaScript macro expansion using Sweet.js in the browser
Since signing is now just an image, not sure how much value signing really should have.
Anybody can sign for you once they got one documented signed from you.
WikiCancel - A Subscription, Contract, and Account Cancellation Guide
In case of CSS, the important browser was IE.

This reminds me of DOCTYPE switching. From http://hsivonen.iki.fi/almost-precedent/:
"Back when the Quirks Mode and the Almost Standards Mode were introduced ... committees created specs and that were enshrined as W3C Recommendations before there was solid implementation experience. Then the Web Standards Project lobbied browser-makers to implement the W3C specs as they were. The mindset was that the specs given from above couldn’t and shouldn’t change. People thought that vigorous upgrade evangelism would work and make Web authors change their existing sites."

Note that the Web Standards Project was also the one petitioning Netscape to cancel Mariner, which ended up contributing to the problem. Why did non-IE browsers have to implement document.all?
the right product in this space is going to shake things up on price. everyone is trying to squeeze too much out of this concept. and that's why it hasn't gained near the traction with agencies as it could. its not cost effective.
It's all a huge distraction from solving our real problems. It's made to order for a politician. Something emotionally charged that can consume attention, so our real problems which would require real leadership can be kicked down the road or under the carpet for a while longer.
It appears the ec2 instance has died. They should put an ELB in front of it (I assume you can get static ips for elbs).
Eh, those historical claims about disarmament prior to massacre are very poorly founded in fact. Here is but one example debunking: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1791/did-hitler-ban...

Mass death in the 20th century is much more the outcome of the industrial revolution (in the west) and the catastrophic failure of collective agriculture (in Asia). There were no systematic campaigns of public disarmament. The comparisons to Nazi Germany are overblown, often reflect a complete misunderstanding of history (eg the belief that Hitler was left wing), and generally ignore context such as a long history of popular anti-semitism dating back centuries, if not millenia.
How Long Can a Desirable Goal Remain Cheap Without Being Aggressively Pursued?
It's just historical.

And Lisps being so powerful you can actually use the language itself to add type safety to it and there's no need for a lot of code (typed Clojure --although not perfect yet-- is quite small, for example).

The great thing is that you also don't need to do it yourself because there are people working on the issue.

With the Lisp "revival" and especially all the coders re-discovering Lisp nowadays I expect to see more and more research in that area and it's pretty exciting.

We'll soon get Emacs (or IDEs) warning us in realtime about type errors ; )
That would be a great step. It wouldn't have completely helped Aaron (who was also saddled with wire fraud and computer fraud charges), except that it may have reduced the "loss" calculation enough to not trigger the CFAA provisions.
Re: 6 - I should also say that to "give the TSA the boot", it is the US government who should stick up for its customers and end this security theater.
You say that people aren't looking at the market rationally, but look at the volatility in AAPL just this week. It's decidedly not normal for a stock with a price that high to see 4% fluctuations day-to-day unless there's real news

The market is adversarial, which is why it is seeing the fluctuations that it does (doubly so because it is an equity that most have been incredibly bullish about until quite recently, so it's at a potential transition point). The market is entirely rational, though the positions and perspectives that define each persons idea of rational vary.

I'll also point out here is that Apple has all of the profits in the industry, even if it doesn't have the marketshare.

This is an odd note to add on the end. Aside from Samsung making egregious profits as well (on a "commodity, race-to-the-bottom" platform), the fact that Apple makes so much profit in the consumer electronics market -- a market where profit margins average low single digits -- is exactly what makes so many nervous about Apple's long term outlook. The iPad Mini, for instance, is all about trying to save an iPad sale that they might have lost, at the cost of significant profit. For the first time ever I am seeing sales on Apple devices, including the latest and greatest. All is not at all what it was a year ago.
Of course no one knows what would happen, but personally, I'd LOVE to see how STUBBORN Tim Cook is.

I wish he stubbornly sticks to his course - whatever that maybe - and get all of his sub-ordinates to stubbornly stick to their courses and despite all the noise external parties are making about whether they are doing well or not, come out with another kick-ass products.

It's always satisfying to silence your critics by being stubborn and and then proven right.
I'll defer the self-defense suggestions to you: I live in a "carry is strictly a political favour" county, so I haven't looked at cary molds of 1911s... I think you're probably far more familiar with this than I am.

I don't, however, think that a normal Stainless Kimber is better (tolerance-wise) than the Target model. The only distinction (afaik) are the adjustable sights (which are actually amazingly sturdy for adjustable sights, to my surprised). You clear know more self-defense than I do -- so I'll defer to you (especially re: shotguns, etc...)

Re: other suggestions--

I was not covering the "I have a determined nutcase after me" scenario, I was covering the "increase in violent crime" (armed robbery, home invasions, etc...) scenario. I've had these questions recently because (for many reasons) San Jose has had a drastic increase in crime: moving to Saratoga/Cupertino/good part of Sunnyvale or to Fremont seems like a good long term strategy anyway.

To clarify re: dog, I wasn't suggesting having the dog attack the assailant, but more in the sense of having a dog wake me (and the immediate neighbors) up if a stranger is around at night.

Of course this is not a very reliable strategy, being in a safe neighborhood (with trustworthy neighbors), and having a firearm are far more important. However, it's useful: an alarm system only works if it's tripped, but a dog can smell from a distance. So far, the only times my dog has waken me up at night, was literally when there was a stranger directly in front of the downstairs living room windows.

Not in any way perfect, but sufficient to alert the neighbors, scare away a robber that has purely financial motivation, let me call the police, etc... before they attempt to break in (best confrontation is one that never has to happen).

I agree that the trend of police shooting family dogs is absolutely disgusting, but so is the trend of paramilitary police raiding family homes on shoddy evidence.
Yes, of course death brings more attention and a wider audience. If it bleeds, it leads, on the net as well as TV.

But within the tech community that is already familiar with open access, copyright reform, and anti-SOPA efforts, a trial, ending in either acquittal or conviction, would have focused a lot of attention. The same defenses of Aaron's actions, and attacks on prosecutorial overreach, would have been aired. And any sentence beyond community service or perhaps a few weeks' jail time would have triggered enduring protests and similar petitions for pardon/redress.
When comparing two otherwise identical teams, the distributed one is probably the less effective. That's not the situation most companies are facing. A company looking to hire me that was competitive on most other fronts and stood out by letting me work remotely from Thailand would instantly jump to the top of my list. Many people for whom your company would not even be on the radar, let alone in the running, are suddenly realistic hires.
Must be someone anonymous :)
> We don't know what Apple has in store for us. Over the past 10 years, it reinvented the telephone, music players, the way we consume music, and mobile computing itself — actually, with the iPad, Apple invented mobile computing.

I'm sorry, but that is an absurd sentence. And that's where I stopped reading.
Tunisia has the lowest rate of gun ownership int he world, and they managed to have a revolution and get rid of an entrenched dictatorship just the same. What's missing from your historical examples is a strategic dimension; it's not as if all those people knew a dreadful fate awaited but had no weapons to resist with. Rather, they were taken by surprise and did not anticipate finding themselves the targets of mass repression. It's easy to say that you would have fought back with the benefit of hindsight. Everything looks simple in hindsight.
Most adults are, by law, part of the unorganized (inactive) militia.
Bruce Schneier would be proud.

It's good to see the world catching up and putting the emphasis on security.

[/sarcasm]
The diff tools can ignore the reality of the files, but it would be a foolish default.

It's right because the vast majority of newcomers believe that they are adopting UNIX and having a newline and the end of a file is an important tradition. There are some good places to upset the status quo but this is not one of them.
You're right on the rarely using them part, I don't think I used a single one. Thanks for the clarification!