skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's really impossible to tell without knowing more details, given how many times gov't clients change requirements it's easily possible that they were just wasting time.

Also speaking of lots of money for wordpress sites, what did AOL pay for Techcrunch?
Taxation is not theft. You're free to leave, but as long as you stay in our territory, you'll have to stick to our community rules, and that includes taxation.

There's a social contract which you implicitly sign. Take it or leave it, but stop trying to impose your ideals upon society.

It's funny how liberals can't stop ranting about impositions but fail to realize they're denying society the right to assemble as a state.
Show HN: RazorFlow: Build interactive, mobile-friendly dashboards with PHP
WSJ's New Series: Business of Apps
I find that self-checkouts are helpful for people who feel sheepish about buying certain products, or certain combinations of products. I bet there's a measurable uptick in sales of feminine hygiene products, condoms, constipation and diarrhea medicine, and other "embarrassing" products in stores that add self-checkouts.

I used to feel sheepish buying things for my girlfriend but I realized it's not bad for people to think you're a good partner. So instead of sullenly buying the hygiene products, I say go all out. Throw in some generic Midol and dark chocolate. No one will criticize you.
Thanks, I'll add that soon.
I'd be more worried about MOOCs as a teaching-led institution than a research-led institution.

"Learn from the best people in your field" is just as good a pitch with MOOCs as without. But it becomes much harder to see what justifies the fees at a mostly teaching (or mediocre research) university unless the quality of tuition is excellent.
Speaking of "stadium", that's another one of those Greek words where we go around repeating the Latinized version. It might be more properly "stadion".
As a filmmaker, I'm more impressed by the burning incense. I don't even make live-action video (I do animation), and I STILL desperately want a camera that can do that.

I suspect that the results of showing that video to a room full of filmmakers can be summed up in the phrase "Shut up and take my money."
I work for a city agency in the US. I saw and heard such stories of insane tax payers' money used for affordable technology like adding responsive design to a website (talking close to $1m).
Spoiler Prevention with CSS Filters
Ask HN: Finally, I visit San Francisco. HN, what must I do/see before I leave?
Hiya,

After many years of dreaming, I finally get to visit 'Silicon Valley'. I came in on Saturday evening. For first timers, your transportation system is the most confusing I have seen. Yup, it includes Lagos, Nigeria :P.

If this were to be my last trip here, what would you recommend I do? Where do you recommend I visit?

I would love to visit famous startup offices (Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox etc). Meeting PG would be an honour too. Do I just show up with a big smile and expect to be shown around? What would you advice?

I would also love to meet you HNers over beer or water. Sorry, I do not drink coffee.

Yesterday, I spent the whole day indoors and that is a bit embarrassing. It is already 8am so today is almost finishing. Asides a few booked hours here and there, my calendar is basically open.

I am staying on 3rd Street and would be around until the weekend.

PS: Are there any parties holding? I am great as gatecrashing uninvited.
ABSOLUTELY NOT!

I will be 38 next month. I completed my thesis for grad school in 2010 (35 y.o.). I started taking prerequisites for CS school back in 2000 (25 y.o.) because I had a Bachelors in something totally unrelated to CS. I liked programming when I did a bit in HS but never pursued it until I took a CS101 programming course using C++.

I'm nothing special but I am proud of what I can do. It is never too late, sure as hell not at 22 or 25 or even much later.

To be fair you probably won't grow up to be Linus Torvalds, Bjarne Stroustrup or James Gosling, but then again how many of us will be? I'm still gainfully employed, I'm doing ok, started learning Rails on my own 18 months ago, working on other web based mobile frameworks. It is never too late. And depending on how much time you spend on it maybe you could be another one of these guys, who the hell is anyone to say?

The one thing you have to be when learning anything with programming is you need to be persistent. I hit the wall more times than I can count. You need to reach out and ask for help without worrying about looking stupid. Some of the assholes will insult you or look down at you ("you couldn't figure it out yourself? loser...") but the hell with those people.

Mobile dev is probably not 5 years (feel free to correct me) meaning if you know nothing right now the experts really don't know that much more than you do now. I've heard of 40+ year olds going back to school to be a doctor. Being a doctor takes an awful lot more time than being a good coder, and it wasn't too late for them and it sure as hell aint too late for you. If you are persistent, curious and some level of intelligence is enough to do well.

One thing though - as far as the age thing, some code shops might stay away from the older folks because they want cheap talent with no life or responsibilities. Those opportunities may not work out for you but you don't want them.

Who ever told gave you the impression that youth is so important to be a good coder does not know what they are taking about. Carpe Diem my friend!
This is similar to the story a few days ago about West Virginia spending $5 million on Cisco routers it did not need. In general government tend to be overcharged. This is not unique to Africa.

Also some of the cost is justified. Getting government contracts requires paperwork and meeting conditions that add to the cost of the contract. Also government payment cycles are different. So the contractor has to build in some margin for delayed payments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5283160
I expect the top tier schools will see their positions strengthened while everyone else sees the bottom fall out from underneath them. There are private schools that, rather than having a big endowment, have large amounts of debt which require revenue growth to service.
That's a great question, possibly the defining question, and I think the answer is a resounding "No". Humans seem to rarely buck the system, so it's much easier to deal with the occasional seed individual before the problem becomes systemic. And "deal" doesn't mean remove, as it's pretty easy to destabilize revolt when you have the right information. And boy do we have access to lots of information.

Plus, how would a revolution change anything? The newly powerful would behave the same way the old guard did.
Yep, I've been meaning to get one of these. I really dislike being unable to enforce a password on your private keys.

I've also been using Duo Security as my new 2FA solution and I like it a lot (it also has support for using Yubikeys to provide your OTP.)
Kinda concerned about the usage of ufw with fail2ban without the mention that you have to do a little more work for fail2ban to actually work with ufw (otherwise fail2ban causes interesting issues/clobbers ufw's rules)
True, but it's also a matter of habit. At some point, I knew my wife's preferred tampon "configuration" better than she did.

(Then we moved to a different country, everything changed, and now I have no idea)
Many women have regular cycles but not every woman does. For those women, it can be a surprise as to when and how long they are going to get their period.

That said, this service wouldn't be for those who are surprised by their period, on the contrary, it is for women who know when, how long and how "bad" (for lack of a better word) their period is and it is regular. At first I was skeptical but I could definitely see a market for this. It is easy and cheaper to buy tampons at the store but it trades time for a little extra expense. If I was a woman I would probably do this as I value my time more than a few extra dollars a month and it is a set it once and forget it.

On a random side note, this is one service that would be quite awkward to get if you lived in an apartment and then forgot to update your mailing address.
15 Questions w/ Ydraw's Jace Vernon
Rather than the cause being something other than corruption, I think this is in addition to corruption.
Without corruption all the way to the very core of the government (as it is in SA), we wouldn't have situations such as this. The lowest, cost effective tender would have been chosen after following proper due diligence.
In this case the due diligence would mean asking experts (of which there are many in SA) which, combined with the cost of the project, would still have cost a fraction of the R140m.
"If you want a top-tier university go and buy one"

You mean like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_University_of_Sci...

$10 billion endowment: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1204482....
Depends on what you're looking at. Look at the credits for modern films. These days they use more people, not fewer.

Or look at food. We've already figured out what a future of minimum-cost food looks like. There's a lot of growth in more human-intensive agriculture, production, and cooking. The best restaurants aren't the ones with the most automation.

Sure, if Strong AI Jesus ever descends from the clouds or comes up from the labs, some things may change. But maybe not. Humans are evolved to deal with other humans. They like doing it.
That's the point: the pressure was only effective because they were put forth by minority governments. Majority governments have a much freer hand.
I'd imagine it's why some guys get embarrassed buying condoms, the "oh no! Everyone now knows I have bodily functions!".
It is at layer 3. IPv6 is layer 3.
I ordered the top end 13" MBA on Friday with 2-3 day shipping (an extra $13). It shipped last night with a scheduled delivery of this Wednesdaym two days away.

But it sounds like you want to look at the X1 Carbon as I don't see the need or benefit of you converting to Mac at this point, given your information.

Lenovo is always a slow ordering shipping process. It's never quick. Whenever I buy a Lenovo, I buy it off of eBay after carefully examining a seller's feedback and reputation.
also http://www.ipaidabribe.com/
Best Real Estate Apps You Can Use For Your Property Search
In the season of Ticketfly, is it Ticketmaster's time to die?
The real figure is R40m.
"at the end of the day they aren't better than normal lectures and are actually a bit worse"

True, however I see the value in replacing horrible lectures. I haven't seen a MOOC with truly awful video lectures, yet.

However I personally attended classes where both the prof and the TA for all practical purposes didn't speak English. Given a well written syllabus and a non-MOOC lecture series like the MIT OCW calculus where you can search and skip around and pick the lecture to match your syllabus, you don't really need an English speaking prof or TA...

"if they plan to replace colleges" higher ed was originally an aspirational good where the smart and non-rich aspired to hang out with the rich. I don't think allowing any idiot to watch videos for free is quite the same business model.

Also I think it weird that most of the people discussing MOOC credentialing have clearly never heard of technical certificates. You can always identify the "insider techies" vs the "outsiders" by how people who don't know what the acronym CCNA stand for are mystified by how credentialing could happen, in contrast to the guys who got their CCNA in the 90s consider it merely business as usual and roll their eyes... another "future is already here, just not evenly distributed". Its hard to believe around a decade ago I was doing CCNA and CCNP tests online at prometric or whatever it was called. I see no particular reason prometric or whoever cannot offer a 32 test package where you get a BSCS equiv if you pass them all. If you eliminate the education and stick to training, thus eliminating the liberal arts classes, and skip the "see spot run" intro classes, a BSCS training equivalent is probably more like 10 to 15 tests not 32.

One big problem is Cisco tests used to be something like $250 and that kind of credentialing cost is rapidly approaching old fashioned school tuition.
99th percentile minority is still something like 2.5 million working adults. Some of them are engineers.
This is an HN account which should probably be deleted (see its history).
Sequestration to Highlight Security Cracks
Evernote Breach Promoting Salted MD5 Over SCrypt/BCrypt
"Is alcohol a dangerous toxin foreign to our bodies?

Quite to the contrary. Every living human body continuously produces ethanol (beverage alcohol) 24/7. It's called endogenous ethanol production. Human life does not exist without the presence of alcohol.

Microorganisms in our digestive system constantly convert sugar into carbon dioxide gas and ethanol. The quantity of alcohol produced depends on our diet, but can reach about an ounce of "pure" alcohol per day. That's equivalent to almost two alcoholic drinks: two beers, two glasses of wine, or two shots of whiskey.

Our belief that alcohol is a poison and foreign to our bodies is based in our temperance past. The United States imposed National Prohibition for almost 14 years (1920-1933) and we are currently experiencing significant neo-prohibition sentiment.

Temperance activists disregarded scientific knowledge and, instead, made many clearly absurd assertions...

...

Instead of stigmatizing alcohol and trying to scare people into abstaining, we need to recognize that it is not alcohol itself but rather the misuse of alcohol that is the problem."

From http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/Controversies/Alcohol-A-Dan...
Any stats on the limitations ?

I'm wondering how efficient this would be given that indexing a lot of data via javascript might really not be a good idea..
Since most of us check HN multiple times throughout the day I don't think it matters that much, especially since the rate of project submission will be relatively (to HN) low.
WSJ explains its new 'Business of Apps' series
Is Chomsky still very highly regarded as a linguist or is he just very well known for his political activism?
Because aside from practicality issues, rainbow tables.
This is an opinion:
Go get http://eloquentjavascript.net and build something useful in plain Javascript/HTML5 (no jQuery yet, it might harm your successful picking up of the language!).

The fun part is that you can get started immediately:
http://jsfiddle.net

For HTML/Javascript references you can always prefix your google searches with "mdn" to access Mozilla's excellent documentation on all things web e.g. "mdn html5 canvas"

If you feel like you really need some server backend logic look no further and also stick to Javascript and checkout node.js (with express.js).

There will always be some new things on the horizon but don't get distracted by the newest go, erlang, ruby, etc. based web framework and no not even Meteor nor Derby even though they are Javascript based.

Plain Javascript (and node.js) are very much here to stay (and also fun!).

I guess my answer to your question is to really focus on a certain set of technologies in order to acquire some deeper knowledge by constantly applying it to something which actually gets used regularly.

In the end it's about helping/entertaining other people by shipping stuff.
Cloudflare's Blog is down
I doubt it. Most people go to a university to get a piece of piece of paper that says they made it through. For most people, unis are just modern-day trade schools. Unless MOOCs can offer something that people will take seriously (i.e., a degree), little will change.
I'm pretty sure the correct way to write any of these grammatical puzzler sentences removes the grammatical puzzle, because grammatical puzzles are difficult and impede understanding, which is presumably the entire purpose of language to begin with.
Seni Seviyorum
Show HN: Sponsorshive - A marketplace for event sponsorship
Ask HN: What to know before traveling around the world?
Hey, I'm an 18 year old european programmer that wants to travel round the world for a year as soon as I get out of high school (1.5 yrs).

Currently I'm saving up my money, but still I think I will couchsurf all the way.

What should I get ready for? Are there any materials (books/videos/articles) that I could read that could benefit me? What should I be doing now to be ready for the trip? Is there anything I could learn that could benefit me a lot?

Sorry for my English, I'm not a native speaker. Thanks for the tips!
I prefer the "adduser" way (easier to remember):

$ sudo adduser username sudo
Go see the sea lions: http://www.pier39.com/SeaLion/sea_lion_webcam.htm
I kept a list of the best things I read in 2012. This github commit was near the top of it...everything about it, from its technical insight to how spectacularly (in an attention-grabbig sense) it was executed, to how it spoke about the constant conflict between "read the documentation" and "save the developers from themselves"...fantastic.

I loved the commit from the future :)
https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/5239
If you do drop out, make your plan B now.

Priority one should be to be self-sufficient. It might be hard to get sufficient wages at that wage, and as a dropout, but this needs to happen.

If you end up in an unstructured environment, chances are you'll lose track of what you wanted to do. So - even if it's totally unrelated to what you want to do for the future - work like your life depends on it. It will give you a feeling of worth, and give you habits that will eventually make you the right man for the job that you want.
The $6 million for a logo was probably many months of work by a well-respected agency for a complete branding package. Not to say that’s not expensive, but when you look at it as a value proposition it could change your perception.

$15 million for a WordPress theme and server is bad value by anyone’s standards.
I thought of doing something similar in the UK. I was also looking at the use of Jersey as they let you send (or used to) packages under £15 vat free.

I think the only way you could make money would be to create your own brand, but I'm guessing (as a man) that this would be an area susceptible to brand loyalty, or at least to not using unknown brands.
SimpleWebRTC.js
Great article. Given the rapidness of releases and product development, how does marketing / sales get foresight for their customers? How do you plan campaigns in advance?
But knowing color theory doesn't make you a bad programmer. Why in hell would knowing basic programming inhibit your emotions?
Correct. It's hosted on Posterous and Posterous is down.

Unfunnily, Posterous claims on their Twitter fields to be up.
The bottom line ...

"This situation must surely pose a bit of a problem to Microsoft, which desperately needs an operating system that will grab the company by the balls and successfully insert it into mobile market. Windows and Office are cash cows for now, but the desktop market has started to contract — slowly at first, but it will accelerate. With the mobile market exploding, Windows Phone failing to grab significant market share on the smartphone, and minuscule tablet market share for Windows 8, it doesn’t look good for Microsoft."
Awesome idea. Just added my side project :) https://breakpoint.io/41-furnace
I find it ironic that the avoidance scheme MS, GOOG, and APPL employ for European profits is called a double dutch irish sandwich.
Ping of death is a ping that claims to have a 65536 byte payload: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_of_death

Flashback quite a few years. I was working in IT and my coworker asked me if my WinXP (IIRC) machine was up to date. I said "yes". Next thing I know, it crashed hard. Oops, my buddy just hit me with a ping of death.
Maybe you can create index on the server and then just load it on a client?

edit: looking at the docs it's unclear if it's possible. I guess index should be a JS object, so it's pretty simple to save it to a disc and then fetch it from client.
And a cheap lens with low optical resolution makes a higher number of pixels effectively useless, so it's still a strange development.
Mango's 'slave fashion' faux pas
Schneier recommends use of a firewall: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/12/safe_personal_...

You are correct that a firewall will not magically solve all your problems, but it does help to protect against programs that open ports you didn't know about.

Recommending against them doesn't make sense, and implying that they are only useful to prevent TCP/IP zero day vulnerabilities is silly (especially since the firewall likely wouldn't protect against that anyway).
Show HN: Razen - a collaborative, scriptable schematic & PCB editor
I'm old enough to just barely remember frantic screaming about VHS video cassette lectures would destroy academia. 20 years later academia was still around so I could pay lots of money to attend, but a decade or to ago VHS cassette tapes mostly disappeared.

It is rather reminiscent of claims the VCR would destroy Hollywood back in the 70s/80s. Complete with the (hidden?) assumption that the existing business model is worth saving, that useless jobs must be saved at any cost, anti-technological progress rants...
I've found MOOC to be a real new hobby of mine. I believe they have more value for a lifelong learner or a professional than for a bored 20-something.

I hold especially dearly edx courses (though I'm doing something at udacity and Stanford), which are "semi-self-paced", i.e. there is freedom, when and where you want to listen to them, say a bathtube after a long day. But there is also a stick in the form of (rather hard) homework and exams with a long but hard deadline. Maybe I'm too little self-disciplined, but those deadlines do help me with following the course. BTW, I've totally failed CS50x where deadlines are voluntary.

With my professional work and family duties I would never be able to attend a normal course during the day (in addition to a transatlantic travel to Boston). In addition, I don't need to engage in 4/5 courses at a time like I would have to at the university. On the other hand, the cost is not that much of the problem for me and I would probably be able to pay for the course or at least the final exam, which is how I suppose they are willing to monetize in the future. Of course, provided it's nowhere near $27k tuition ;)

To sum it up, I think there are rather few people that choose an MOOC instead of going to the university providing the MOOC, where "choose" means a real choice of people that could afford it and would be admitted. However, for the rest of us it is of an immense value.
Best advert i've seen this year, literally laughed out loud
acm.org's signup process is the most absurd thing ever
Great program for startups!
I can think of at least 10 other companies with many external investors that better deserve the dubious title of "Pets.com of the second internet bubble"
> Move to Open Web Standards and you won't have to worry about platforms changing core libraries and breaking all your apps ever again.

Instead the user has to worry about whether or not the many libraries bundled by the webapp are all kept up to date by each and every app developer. Gone will be the days of shared libraries and centrally managed security updates for those. And don't suggest that webapps are secure because they run in a sandbox. Just wait, as more and more people move their work to webapps, more and more flexibility will be demanded. Soon you'll have to pierce sandboxes because AppA needs to throw data to AppB with a little Python script you wrote inbetween. Then the security issues will come, as will the library incompatibilities, and we'll be back where we are now, except the heterogeneous world of today will be replace by a JS monstrosity with browsers playing OSs.