skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to upvote this even more. The deliberate blurring of the distinction between privilege and advantage reduces our ability as a society to improve things for both the abused and the disadvantaged.

Privilege is latin for private law. It's a special set of rules that can only be offered to a minority like guaranteeing admission spots to top universities to legacies.

Privilege does not describe things that could be offered to everyone but are not out of sheer nastiness. If the state U prohibits blue eyed people from enrolling, that isn't a privilege for everyone else. It's just nasty prejudice against blue-eyes. Nobody is getting special private-law treatment; a minority is just getting shafted.

Advantage could be any number of things, including privilege, but could just be parents that care more about you. Everyone could have that; nobody threatened your parents to make them less caring. Not everybody does have it, though, so it's an advantage.
Sorry, that's what I meant. It was supposed to be a funny Star Wars reference :p
> For all practical purposes the 512f has proven to be a pretty pointless tool for holding large corporation accountable.

That's because it's very difficult to prove that they did it knowingly, especially in an age of automated DMCA takedowns. It has nothing to do with the pain of a suit or any of that, but that you're likely to lose.
As is its Chrome port, NaClBox:

http://www.naclbox.com/
Learning to build web apps
How easy is it to file a DMCA takedown notice? I would think there's some due diligence on the part of DMCA to verify the claim first. At least, I hope so.
If you can do this and keep the beans segregated, this is far and away the best solution.

Even just gluing a coffee bean or two to the outside might work.
I stumbled upon this accidentally, and was riveted. Nice to see Andy Grove and Gordon Moore talking about the old days, pre-Intel. Highly recommended.
I, too, owe my technological career to my father's father, who was an engineer. He died recently and I wrote about it here:

https://plus.google.com/106356964679457436995/posts/dcPPziC1...
This may sound dumb, but maybe the easiest solution is to put a transparent fake water container that never drains. So anyone who is about to pour water would see that the machine already has water.

Since the machine in question is hooked up directly to the tap, one never needs to fill it with water.
This would be really cool if you could do something like contribute to AWS and make e-coins to then contribute to the marketplace. Obviously this is probably technically infeasible for most types of work that AWS does on a daily basis.
Same boat, Boricua in tech, same traits. Read the article the right way, and liked the anecdotes. Take care.
You only need to generate collisions for the keyspace used. Brute forcing 20-30 bit collisions in any hash function is trivial.
Mid market is where the best value is. Give someone with promise a shot and mentor them and you'll end up with a great employee. The guy that works at Facebook, used to work for google, went to Stanford--might they be more likely to jump ship as soon as there's a new game in town?

I guess it depends on what you're going for, but I don't think the "best and brightest" mantra is all its cracked up to be. People can become better and brighter with the right guidance--only hiring the best and brightest and considering it an all or nothing proposition is lazy.

Edit: to be fair, as has been pointed out, there are engineers that are literally 1000x more productive, and they don't cost 1000x as much. That rare bird truly is best and brightest and is worth every penny. Trouble is, it's really tough to tell, and I don't know that the traits to look for are necessarily correlated with credentials typically attributed to "best and brightest". That is, those people don't all work at Facebook et al
Surface Pro: Hefty Tablet Is a Laptop Lightweight
Anything of value, anyway.
That's a bad code problem, not a PHP problem. Why does this meme continue to exist?

This is a PHP bug: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/010511-php-floating-po...

Everything else? Bad code.
Copyright infringement is not stealing, it is copyright infringement.
> In my very humble experience, I can't answer this scientifically, but I have known engineers that can be 1000% more productive than others.

In my very humble experience, I have worked alongside several people like this. None of them went to aforementioned 'Top Tier' schools and none of them worked at Google etc. One had an Associates degree in Physics and the other was a college dropout. But could they kick butt and write complex software at the speed of ten men, hell yes.
History of bitcoin:

- slow start

- exponential rise

- exponential fall

- exponential rise

- ??
Things You Should Know About Ubuntu Phone
Google for an example of the DMCA form or boilerplate (the language is in the law). Find the registered agent address for a site. Send an email.

Done.
19.9% of the population is mentally ill? Wow.
Scientists 3-D Print With Human Embryonic Stem Cells
Tons of effort has gone into PV cells for decades (they were being manufactured in quantity in the 70s). They are our dearest hope for renewable energy at scale. And they are still more expensive than any other source of electricity we actually use by such an embarrassing margin that even really impressive cost improvements will still leave them pretty much non-competitive (making steam is a little better). Recent price drops due to subsidies are not going to be sustainable unless the industry is weaned off the subsidies.

Most of the reduction in that Economist graph is after Obama takes office, before that the changes are not all that dramatic to really support a comparison to Moore's law (which has itself shown pretty flawed as a way of predicting the computing future).

So I just don't see any substantive, fundamental reason (i.e.: clear prospect) to suppose that solar generation will get so much cheaper that it will reach striking distance of natural gas, of which we have quite a supply. But I'm not saying it's impossible to have another opinion.
Of a typical Yale student I assume be meant. And I don't see how you can fault the author for that.
How long until Amazon does Prime Instant Apps, where you pay one flat fee and get unlimited access to all of the apps in their (limited) catalog?
I'm not sure if there is a difference between currency and money, but there is a difference between fiat and non-fiat currencies. Cigarettes are not a fiat currency; they have inherent demand because they can be smoked.
Looks great overall, we just recently discussed how bad are open source forum options and said how nice it would be if SE would open source / sell the stackoverflow Q&A format for companies for internal forum-like discussions. So I find this to be great, much better than the alternatives,

Here are a few confusing things in terms of UX though:

the "New" button, expected: create a new topic, instead, took me to "You have no new topics to read." page e.g. it seems the "read new stuff" is merged with "create new stuff" (the "create new topic on the right")

the "item has x replies" thingy, I understand you want to have replies in context, but this duplication confused me, e..g I wasn't sure if it's a new "type" of reply. how to solve it? well I would do one of the following: either just link (via scolling to the right location via an anchor / scroll aniumation) or keep what you have right now but also have the link so pepole can see the original comment as well

So far so good, thanks for sharing this, I'm happy twice, both needed a Q&A forum at work, and also wanted to learn Ember.js (version 1)
Can't be harder to look up than "Go".
That sounds like madness.. The doors that way!
I made the HN submission; and you know what? I agree with you. On a second thought I would have rather not posted it. I much prefer a slow and steady increase of value, instead of another Bitcoin valuation bubble made even more rapid by publicizing it all the time.
If we have to keep this thing, I dearly wish the party filing the request would have to show some proof or at least be in the US. this guilty before innocent crap is a pain.

On a sadder note, looks like the alumni association is going to receive a letter from me.
This does not appear to be an official Google site or suggestion. Personally, I'd use them for my cat's blog and that's about it. Google could pull the plug on this at anytime
Which company would ever stop this from happening? More breakages = more money.
Littlewood was a talented mathematician; pg is an employer of computer programmers. Unless you are doing original research, which, AFAIK, most YC companies aren't, I see no reason why you should limit yourself to 4 hours a day. (Apart from having a life, but that's a separate debate.)
Tips for the Aspiring Minimalist
Previous discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5134618
> Where are the best engineers coming from and where are they working?

This seems like a pedigree pony show.

The best engineers in my experience:

1. Are highly productive in writing good quality code/systems etc

2. Know when to take responsibility and lead a feature/project etc

3. Know how to mentor well.

4. Know how to quickly slice a complex problem into digestable/achievable chunks.

5. Know how to deliver software on time and on budget.

6. May or may not have a CS degree.

7. May or may not have attended some high pedigree school.

8. May or may not have worked at some high pedigree corporation.
In my opinion, this is a pretty toxic way of evaluating yourself. Its like saying "you can't be a top engineer if you don't graduate from the right school" which is complete bullshit. And yet young people hear that and believe it and waste a lot of time in the distraction of fixing their 'relative' position. Please don't do this.

How to figure out if you are a "Top" engineer:

1) Do you enjoy the challenges you get at work?

2) Do you enjoy the folks you are working with?

3) Do you earn enough to meet your needs and still save for retirement?

4) Are you learning every day?

Congratulations, you are a "Top Engineer."
I still feel the majority of the money that is being put into bitcoin is speculative(as opposed to having hard data). I think if you buy bitcoins now you lose money at the end of the bull's run. That could easily change if Amazon or Steam start accepting them and the money from actual uses drowns out the speculators (and therefore any growth in the value of the coin has real use backing instead of easily spooked speculators).
because opera is a good browser. especially on mobile. I expect a service to degrade well even if the platform doesn't fully support all features.
I'm kicking myself right about now, I played around with slide timing for the best part of 10 minutes to find an ideal pause, in the end I increased it by a third to make sure the slightly-heavier-than-they-should-be images had chance to load before the slide advanced.

I was planning on spending another couple of days optimizing the home page and completing work the rest of the application UI, which was almost complete, but EXEC released their official redesign earlier today so I had to rush it out. Guess that's just the way it goes sometimes
That's a nice story of how a consultant have ruined the engineer's day.
Calling All Hackers: Google Wants You To Break Chrome OS At Pwnium 3
You know what I always find so hilarious. How people always seem to qualify luck - even when they show us how lucky they have actually been.

I continuously hear statements like "it's partly luck", or "luck is obviously a component of it", or "luck is clearly a factor", or "luck plays a role" [1] - all attempting to downplay the enormous magnitude random chance has on our daily lives. Hell, they might even put numbers on it like "it's probably 50% luck", or "90% luck". Nobody seems willing to go all they way to and just come out and say "Yeah - I got really lucky and that's about all there is to the story".

The just world fallacy is a very, very strong illusion.

Life's a crapshoot. It's all luck.

[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5174488
Have you considered allowing campaign creators the ability to easily embed their T-shirt sales directly on their blogs, similarly to how shoplocket does it with purchases?
Check out GitHub Pages for hosting static content for free. I use it for all my statically-generated sites now, and it's been great other than the couple times GitHub went down.
a coffee machine like this is guaranteed to make terrible coffee. the solution is to have better equipment.

if you see a coffee machine that has bean storage, it's almost guaranteed to suck.
I found that having problem statements does energize hackers. As a participant, I've seen a lot of people not having "cool" ideas to work on and instead ending up smashing together a bunch of API's or building another social share app.

To relate to your point of organizing purpose-based hackathons, I've helped organize a hackathon last year, in which we brought in NGO's and had them issue problem statements about specific problems in the third world. Then hackers were encouraged to try to solve these problems using tech. I was amazed at the results -- people had actually built something useful to the world outside the narrow 48-hour time window! And in the end, the programmers seemed happy that they were solving a real problem, of course doing it in their own "cool" way.
Good advice, since they already did pull the plug for a similar publication method in Google Docs
Word, the complaining about things is endless.

Google is no charity, sure. But they make it easy for people to develop web apps, prototype and monkey with web content, they allow people to share their work with a simple click, but GOD the URLs are not good enough for some random dude on the Internets, we'd better throw our arms in the air and get all snarky about it.

With this trend of negativity I guess we've found the cure for mortality. It gets REALLY old but somehow never dies.
It isn't DOS, DOS was an operating system. You're probably thinking of the Windows Command prompt, with a shell that is a descendant of command.com.

To your question, it is just as easy to write console Python tools in Windows as it is under Unix. I've written quite a few work on both.

Glue scripts (Batch files) are just fine too, as long as you don't try to do too much with them. When something gets too complex, move that part to Python, or really any language you like. To be honest I like that, I'd prefer people not write complex things in shell scripts that could be done more elegantly in a programming language.
Google partnership will see thousands of UK children get Raspberry Pis
I live in the same town you were born. Conditions are still hard. Unemployment is through the roof. The few programming jobs available pay around $10/hr. And they are mostly doing maintenance on old C#/Visual Basic systems.But that's better than what most of the population gets. Minimum wage is the norm. People make around 12K per year, and have to deal with very high costs of living. Plus the shitty infrastructure.

I had it rough, too. Grew up in a barrio. Where most of my childhood friends are either dead, in jail, or crackheads. Few ever managed to make it into college (I did not). I'm the only one who has actually made something out of himself. But not without a lot of hardships. Not long ago (less than 5 years ago) I was completely broke, no transportation, no job, nothing. But somehow I kept moving forward. Throwing punches whenever I could. Like you, I was lucky. My parents got me a computer ( a C64) early on. No one else in a radius of 5 sq. miles had a computer. It was the best thing to ever happen to me. It gave something for me to hold on to when all my friends were busy learning how to sell drugs. It kept me safe at home when drive-by-shootings started to happen. It also helped me not get a young lady pregnant (which was the norm).

Nowdays, I am an accomplished engineer, marketing consultant, and entrepreneur. I work remotely, with a great team, building a very tough system (that has me writing code like crazy in different languages). Also help great people build their businesses into powerhouses. Best of all, I get to build my own businesses, which I find extremely fun (to the point of even doing some as a hobby). Who knows what would have happened to me had I not discovered my love for code? I know that I would not be able to say how proud I am of reading about a fellow puertorican who has made it. Good luck, and let me know if you ever visit. I know a place who makes great frituras.
Facebook breaks logins
I wouldn't expect it to. I don't see how anyone can expect it to compete with the major consoles. It won't (not to say it can't, just that it simply won't) run any huge AAA game titles, so it's completely irrelevant on that level.

I think it sits in its own niche. Budget gaming. A competitor for Nintendo's offering, perhaps. But certainly not a competitor for either Microsoft's or Sony's offering.

I think you're more likely to own an Ouya or both it and a "major" console. It would not replace them.
Oh man, this tugs on all sorts of sentimental DOS strings. Especially that first phrase about people under 30 not knowing what DOS is.

When was the last time you have used the B: drive?

Anyway, an interesting thing is that growing up in Russia, using DOS, we were all gung-ho about using Norton Commander and its clones, such as DOS Navigator, to supplement the vanilla command-line DOS experience.

And I'm telling you, it was oh such a great experience, that to this day, I still wonder how I manage to get by in my vanilla command line bash shell. Sure, all the auto-complete tricks are insanely useful (and maybe that's all we really needed?), but I recall the whole two-directory layout was super useful in being able to move files around and do quick edits and what not. Midnight Commander just doesn't do it for me. I tried FAR Manager on Windows, and also no dice. They all feel heavy and not as natural.

To put it into perspective, anyone who's really really into VIM, think about how you love how fast you can be with VIM, despite the obscure key combinations and the modal overhead (haha, bias showing?). Anyway, think about how once you get used to all that power, you wonder how you can survive without it anywhere else. That's what using Norton Commander /DOS Navigator was like in MS-DOS. Using a Solaris/HP-UX command line circa 1998 felt like going back to stone age.
I wasn't saying that no lists of wanted persons was publicly available... just that no complete list of people a drone would kill on sight was available. Are you saying the people on this list would be killed on sight? (if so, thanks for the link) Or are you just saying that they are wanted?

As for the laws of war, I think they were created for situations where the opponents could be easily identified. (Opponents wearing a uniform for example).

Applying them to a situation where 'enemy' has a stochastic definition is a dubious thing. Of course it creates benefits, but it also creates a lot of problems. Killing people without due process, in the long run, creates an incredible amount of ill will. I think this, beyond rhetoric about justice, is the reason we have due process for criminal procedures -- the people who knew the innocent person you just killed get angry with you. Even if it was an accident. Note that this definition doesn't really effect two uniformed opponents on a battle field -- at least not in the same sense as "John was killed by a drone while driving to Texas for his vacation".

The other good argument for providing due process is that without due process you give a huge weapon to your enemy... as it becomes easier to frame someone, and as that framing becomes more deadly, it becomes easier to convert people to your cause through blackmail.

In summary: laws of war weren't handed down on a stone tablet, they codify a way of being that reduces the long term negative outcomes of war. When a new form of war is crated, you probably new new laws. The old ways of minimizing negative outcomes are probably obsolete.
I wonder what the Debian/Ubuntu policy is on package name reuse? When Ruby is sent out to pasture, do we never get to use 'god' again?
Home security services are, generally speaking, a racket.

A monitored alarm service (where, if an alarm goes off, the service notifies the police) will knock a percentage off your homeowner's insurance policy, but that's almost all it's good for.

This is because something like 97-99% of alarm service calls are errant, so when they happen, they're the lowest priority thing to do.

In addition, once the alarms go off, the burglar is already gone. The most prevalent crimes are crimes of opportunity: no-one is home, it's midday, they roll up your driveway in a truck, knock, go around back, break in, grab your iPad and PS3 and laptop, take it out the front door, and go.

When they break in, they've got 30-90 seconds before the alarm goes off, 30-90 seconds after that before the service calls, and then 5-20 minutes or more before the cops show up. They're long gone. You don't think someone who's done it before can get into your house, grab a pillowcase off your bed and fill it with anything valuable and portable inside of three minutes? (They totally can.)

If you're worried about someone breaking in while you're home, I can't recommend much, but those are also statistically unlikely. No-one's targeting you, staking out your house, stalking your movements, etc. (Probably.)

If you're worried about someone breaking in while you're gone, you want solid doors, strong door frames, visible security cameras and security lighting outside, and hidden eye-level still image motion-triggered cameras inside, and you want regular inventories of all of your valuables, including proofs of purchase. You want to focus on warding off crimes of convenience, identifying the perpetrators, and restoring what was damaged or lost as quickly and as efficiently as possible so you can get on with your life.
That was a really good show! I took a microelectronic fabrication course in school, and the Deal-Grove model [1] was one of the things we studied. Cool to see the people who discovered the reasons for the weird things that happen in microelectronics.

It's amazing how interesting of a story can be told with mainly pictures and old video. No special effects, just the raw meat of the story of the people who made our data world happen.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deal%E2%80%93Grove_model
Then you will love Nuuton. One of the features it has is the ability to search whithin itself and rank the results.
I would say this is not all that accurate of a list - it seems more a list of what some of the biggest tech companies pay their interns.
Man, you're bringing me down, man! Don't you know it's the age of the nerds! Silicon Valley has never been hotter! 6 figure salaries, billion dollar valuations!

Everyone's the best, only the best comes here. STEM! MIT! CAL! STANFORD! We're changing the world, doing stuff that matters!
I worked at a place where someone (who we never caught) put some chocolate coffee-bean-look-alike candy from Trader Joes in the grinder. All the new peeps (myself included) got 'blamed' for being ignorant, and lots of signs went up. I hate signs because the can never anticipate all scenarios.

My next work place had someone try to cook bacon in the toaster oven. As it turns out, this is not a viable way of frying bacon and it caught the toaster and part of a cabinet on fire. Later that month the building management started doing regular fire drills. We'd take the opportunity to tell the story about Mike and his bacon as we stood on the street.

I'd say people were idiots, but that's a negative view practiced ineffectively by the first place. I'd rather see it more like people incorrectly assume what they are doing is right, and never question if its not. Silly humans.
New phishing tool mimics logged in dashboards