skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As at

http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/Eternal_vigil...

attributed to Jefferson is

"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."

So, US citizens need to resist the excesses of big
gumment and, moreover, as good news, can do so with
a simple letter to their Congressman and Senators,
if enough citizens do that.

E.g., it was good to see SOPA/PIPA go down for the
count after one punch from a flurry of publicity and
letters to Congress. I wrote all three of my guys
here in NY.

One way to get more such needed letters is more
information on the Internet as here on HN. While
the EFF seems to do a lot of really good work, the
legal system is slow while a few 18 wheel trucks of
letters to Congress can get action as quickly as
Congress can act which means in less than 24 hours.
Two-thirds of the House; two-thirds of the Senate;
do not pass the White House, do not collect the
president's signature; done. We actually do live in
a quite responsive democracy; when enough citizens
shout "frog" Congress jumps; and Congress has the
lion's share of the power.

For the power of more information, as at

http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2003/1203/nv/nv2.htm

"'Sunlight is the best disinfectant,'” a well-known
quote from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis
Brandeis".

The NSL situation was so obviously unconstitutional
that I have to believe that the W efforts to push
through that and similar stuff after 9/11 were
understood at the time to be unconstitutional but to
give a window, until cases were brought and the
courts acted, to permit defending against anymore
9/11s.

Hopefully the FBI and the DoJ didn't do too much
damage to honest US citizens and did round up lots
of wacko Jihaders dreaming of a harem of 72 virgins
or whatever.
Google reader is a pretty important tool for competitive intel. The only really tuneable alternatives are expensive services that don't do the job half as well.
"discontinuing a product"

I guess you need to unpack what that product was. It was loss-leading free product that killed the ecosystem that proceeded it. That whole 'embrace, extend, extinguish' thing is what many people are decrying as a tad 'evil'.
A 2% chance of recovery is better than a 0.01% chance of recovery anyway.
If the cardiac arrest is the result of something else, does defibrillation hurt anything? Or does it have no effect either way?
yeah we should have a config method.
He's at least 10 years late on multicast networks. Here's the 1985 RFC that's considerably more detailed than his from 1996:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc966
Still, the whole thing smacks of Jobs-era Apple-like overabundant zeal.

It's a mailbox that attaches mail organization to gestures rather than buttons. Big whoop.
I lived in France, and I have relatives, including my sister, who lives in France now (and is a recipient of the French medical establishment's services). I worked for a US HMO for 5 years. I also worked for a US medical malpractice insurance company for 1 year. The points you make are valid, and I agree the system is messed up. Alas, I recognize that all massive systems are messed up and cost a lot more than they should, because large systems introduce inefficiencies. It is possible that the US system is less cost-effective than systems in Europe because of the size of the US population versus that of other European countries. Japan seems to be a hybrid system, and has a population of 125 million or so, but I don't know much about it despite the fact that my wife is Japanese.

In the other large-population countries such as China, India, Indonesia, I don't know that things are any better.

(As an aside, I don't think sarcasm is ever "called-for".)
Formspring shutting down on March 31st
At least Microsoft folks do not pretend they are not evil , Google is even more devilish when they claim they are not evil ... Well they are at least as bad in PR as Adobe , that's a relief.
The Samsung Galaxy S4 Is Completely Amazing and Utterly Boring
This ban is stayed so the 9th Circuit of Appeals can consider it.
The GM Corvette and the Apple Mac Pro Have Much in Common
congrats for providing a textbook example of a non constructive answer
A data-driven guide to creating successful Reddit posts
It is a good one to start with, but I wish there were more details as to how she felt Codecademy helped her get the new position. Because her new position is Sharepoint work that she apparently already had experience in. Looking at the tracks she's completed she definitely has an interest in development, so I'm wondering what tracks helped her obtain the position and how did she explain the apparent knowledge with no practical experience.
Maybe you don't have the default font we're using? Are you on Windows?
If this is correct then perhaps I should have waited 13 hours before posting this.
@patrickk I've been looking for a basics post about SEo without tech speak for ahem years. That doc is brilliant. Thank you! I might be able to start implementing now instead of having SEO on my to-do list yet again.
> There's legitimate substance here, but occasionally, the system actually works exactly the way it's supposed to -- the judicial branch both asserting its independence from the executive and striking down an overreaching action by the latter.

Note that this isn't over yet. The judge put a stay on the ruling to allow the government to appeal. Note that national security letters have been around since 1978; and have been greatly expanded in scope in 2001. So depending on how you count, that's 12 years or 35 years of lost liberty. I'm not sure I would count that as a system working the way it's supposed to. How many years of living under gag orders do we consider acceptable?
> The problem with having no skills or track record is that it's not worth paying you

Required experience for paid work is a fact of life. If you don't have the skills to work for pay in a certain area you work for free. You can do that by putting in the time on your own side projects or you can accomplish it some other way. Like doing free work in exchange for experience.
> Groups isn't even on the extended products list in the Gmail header bar, though Reader is! You have to click "Even more" to get to Groups.

They have been really destroying Groups for a while now. The new ui is terrible, the new url format is also bad. They got rid of instructions for emailing for subscriptions, and someone reported to me earlier today that emailing list+subscribe@googlegroups.com doesn't even work anymore.... are they just going to dump their usenet archives?
I agree with that statement in a way.

Linus Torvalds wrote a kernel because he bought a PC: hardware which allowed him to do anything he wanted.

Today, smartphones and mobile devices are much more popular among the youth. Could you imagine if Torvalds had been born in 1993? By this point, I'm sure he would have made something much less spectacular than Linux. Maybe he would make some pretty cool Facebook or smartphone games, and maybe a few cool web apps, but the freedom to tinker with hardware directly had been slowly slipping away over the past ~10 years. Since that avenue was becoming less available, there's a chance it wouldn't have grabbed his attention in the first place.

We still have laptops/desktops which aren't locked down. Hopefully that's what the young/future version of Torvalds would have gotten interested in. But how long until you buy a laptop only to find out that it doesn't grant you root access?
I've always found reading Hamdi v. Rumsfeld to be soothing when I'm feeling cynical: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6173897153146757....

This is just a few years after 9/11, a year into the Iraq war, and Scalia, joined by Stevens, dissenting because the majority didn't go far enough in protecting an accused terrorist from the Bush administration:

"Having distorted the Suspension Clause, the plurality finishes up by transmogrifying the Great Writ—disposing of the present habeas petition by remanding for the District Court to "engag[e] in a factfinding process that is both prudent and incremental," ante, at 539. "In the absence of [the Executive's prior provision of procedures that satisfy due process], ... a court that receives a petition for a writ of habeas corpus from an alleged enemy combatant must itself ensure that the minimum requirements of due process are achieved." Ante, at 538. This judicial remediation of executive default is unheard of. The role of habeas corpus is to determine the legality of executive detention, not to supply the omitted process necessary to make it legal. See Preiser v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 475, 484 (1973) ("[T]he essence of habeas corpus is an attack by a person in custody upon the legality of that custody, and ... the traditional function of the writ is to secure release from illegal custody"); 1 Blackstone 132-133. It is not the habeas court's function to make illegal detention legal by supplying a process that the Government could have provided, but chose not to. If Hamdi is being imprisoned in violation of the Constitution (because without due process of law), then his habeas petition should be granted; the Executive may then hand him over to the criminal authorities, whose detention for the purpose of prosecution will be lawful, or else must release him."

His whole dissent, starting at 554, is worth a read.
EFF just earned themselves a big bonus from me this year.

This is exactly what the nation needs. We should be pushing back against government overreach where fundamental freedoms are concerned.
It's a question that's plagued the greatest philosophers of mankind for centuries (but you'll no doubt hear many matter-of-fact replies on here).
Amazing work, mate! I will definitely use it really soon on Javascript 2d Games to show how to play the games. If you are looking at monetizing it, you could sell it as a plugin for Crafty.js for instance
This will open up our Monday morning schedule nicely if we no longer have to maintain:

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

It would be our great pleasure :)
If anyone from Codeacademy is listening, please make more project-tutorials that I can show off on a portfolio! Thanks :)
Yes they are.

I had a couple friends who wanted to learn JavaScript and went to CodeAcademy's course[1] only to find it was more like Programming 101. Not a single mention of what is a closure, how you can modularize your code, how prototypes actually work, etc.

[1] http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/javascript
You can use # or & but not ? because that denotes the start of the query string.
If you're not planning to have monetary return from a project, it's almost always better to work on a personal side project than for someone else.

Your enjoyment of the project will be higher, you have more control over scope and tech stack and you can choose to solve an interesting problem within your ability.

In short, think it as marketing material development for yourself, which will be way more effective at getting future work than some free work you can get.
The Copyright Rule We Need to Repeal to Preserve Our Cultural Heritage
I'd love to see more meditations and brain wave sensors dded to devices like basis.. I have been using the heartmath device and it works very well.....just need it integrated into my other data....
That's not a narrow technical ground. Requiring involvement of the judiciary versus not requiring it is a huge distinction.
Welcome to 2013. To be successful you need to address an immensely huge audience. It is just not physically possible to provide everyone with the kind of customer support you got back when you bought meat from the person who had killed the pig.
Look, the TFA is full of crap. Here is the reality: today I would have a hard time coming up with a better alternative for a free productivity suite and search engine for most individuals and small to medium enterprises. When I am talking to someone looking to run things under their own domain, they might ask "do you think Google is going to discontinue support for Apps/GMail/Docs/Drive/etc?" To which I would have to reply "very unlikely". I think the OP overestimates the influence of the people that used GR. Sure, some had pull but the pragmatic ones can see the difference between Google's flagship products and GR.

There are plenty of reasons to not buy into the Google Ecosystem, but this is not one of them. Then again, all we need to do is wait a few months and see if the earnings report supports the OP's claim or Google's strategy. My money is ong Google.
That's not for free. Doing work for free means "I will do this for you and get nothing in return." All I'm saying is don't run around willy-nilly doing work for free, thinking that will somehow magically lead to success; be cognizant of what you will actually get in return. And I'm not saying that money is the only type of payment, not at all.
By itself it does not. If you have a bunch of machines, you also have a config system (right?) and they (puppet, chef and so on) have the means to manage cron tasks as a class.

You still get cron, and the means to manage them across one's servers.
heartmath device is cool too..would love to see meditative and drain wave measurements added to the basis device
Hey, thanks! Sure, I'll make that buttons better for next version.
I was clearly expecting a nice and shiny presentation of Linux kernel API (or at least system calls) when clicking on the penguin.
yes I'm on Windows and I get to see the Nimbus Sans font. But looking as to how my comment has a rating of -2 I suppose people disagree. Honestly I didn't mean to be a dick, just hoped to provide a little constructive criticism.

Here is how it looks with Win 7 Chrome:
http://imgur.com/EAZ7DBk
What that means is that if VF doesn't correct itself, and is left alone, it will eventually degenerate into asystole - which is the whole point of CPR and defibs, to do something before it does that.

People have arrhythmias all the time and they autocorrect, but if a VF doesn't autocorrect in relatively short order, it will usually, eventually, end in death (or asystole). It's not about one rhythm versus another, it's about one rhythm leading to another, with no set timeline.
Not only that, but what if the more elite players felt more relaxed because they grasped new concepts more quickly because they simply had a greater base level of talent (genetics, brain make-up, et. al.)?

Let me find a study, breathtakingly misinterpret the results and write an article that has an overly applicative bait-y title and start ringing in the views. It's apparently that fucking easy.
Work in progress: open source Google Reader API clone
Google Takeout allows you to get all your data from various Google services https://www.google.com/takeout/

What surprises me most is that Microsoft, which has a severe case of Google envy hasn't created a web based RSS service of it's own. They should make an offer to buy Reader and Feedburner too, since Google seems to have little interest in supporting these products.
There is one thing that could happen. Google could simply turn gmail into a messaging system for G+. Forcing gmail users to use G+ in order to use their email address. Sort of like the inverse of what Facebook is doing.

This would tie down all G+ messaging and your emails into one convenient interface for Google to fuck you over with.

ETA: 2014. But don't take my word for it.
What can I say... grass is always greener eh?

It sucks that you were injured, but maybe -- and hopefully -- it's added to your life experience in a positive way. For better or for worse, you are who you are because of your experiences. Good and bad.
They're a kick off point I've found, they teach a man how fishing could work, and point off from there. They're great for picking some nice basics and then the expectation is you'll head off and learn from there. It's not a great end to end solution though. I'd say the Rails tutorial by Hartl is the best for the end to end coverage, but often they never seem to go that far.
So... what do I do if an IP block gets on Spamhaus? How about two factor authentication? (DnaBolt's Legitimi is minimum 1000 users)

That's not to mention that I'm seeing 1GB RAM minimum to run the thing. That's a lot of wasted resources for one person.

I can run my own email server. I just have better things to do with my time.
Good news! Let me know when you use it.
That would make it. The problem is just that: designers doesn't want anything default. They like to customize to the extreme, take, put, etc.

Keep going nice work!
How I read HN:
1) Subscribe to HN feed in Google Reader
2) Install Reeder app everywhere (phone, iPad, laptop)
3) Link Reeder to Google Reader
4) Read happy... all items synced across all platforms, read, unread, starred.
5) Any time I have a free moment I pop open Reeder on my phone and read HN.

I don't give a %$@*%& about "social"...

Mission #1 is now to find another service that will reliably feed RSS feeds into Reeder.
I think his story got mangled in a game of telephone. Microsoft loves their word count. Competitors got bit by it, though:

This story is as old as the PC. Most of the time, what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the "word count" feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it's not there, because it's in the "80% that nobody uses," and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can't use this damn thing 'cause it won't count my words. If I had a dollar for every time this has happened I would be very happy.

From former Microsoft employee Joel: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html He has links to reviews in the original

There are stories, though, of Microsoft shipping out beta copies of Microsoft Word with debugging all turned on, which made it slow, and despite saying so very carefully to all reviewers who got a copy, they still got torn apart for it being slow. I think the story is in "Coding The Microsoft Way" which I haven't seen in over a decade.
Any chance you could open source L33tStart. Also what type of ponies were you using for your startups? Black or white ponies?
Ding!

Complex, interdependent systems without slack. Now add production pressures. You have all the ingredients of a "Normal Accident"[1].

You should do the opposite of this.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents
Hhm, nice. It's the first version of IntroJs, I'll fix the bugs asap.
"a good reference (where the candidate doesn't work out) gets you sued by the company"

Really? Has this ever happened with the plaintiff ending up winning in court?
Can you name a technology that anyone can uniquely provide? Just because they aren't the only ones doing it doesn't mean they aren't innovating. They're the best at certain things for a reason(because they're innovating).

Apple can't switch in a heartbeat, or they would have already.
The 2012 Global Innovation 1000 Study [pdf]
Why the Samsung Galaxy S4 May Be Better for Business Than Apple's iPhone 5
Yeah, none of those are actually part of the spec. What you're describing isn't RSS: it's the ease-of-use automation that was layered on top of RSS that was made easy to do because RSS was a fairly strict format. (I remember many examples of my newsreader breaking because the spec wasn't followed correctly.)

What you're really describing isn't RSS. It's a web archiver.
AB Testing involves (1) changing or deploying a new feature, (2) many times measuring new properties linked with the feature, and then (3) analyzing the resulting user behavior. We help in the analysis process because most tools fall short here.

For example, supposed you add more weapons to promote more battles in an online game to keep players engaged. Say, in addition, you start collecting measurements about how long battles take. Suddenly, after introducing the feature, the opposite happens: players leave.

Most off-the-shelf AB tools will only tell you whether feature A or feature B worked (the "what"), but not the "why." It could be that battles are taking longer, so players lose interest without finishing. Or, more battles cause players to die/lose more, so they leave.

We let you ask questions in SQL that will resolve this and find out why. So, you can fix the problem, rather than be left in the dark. You might introduce a feature to shorten battles, or find a way so players don't die so often.

Sophisticated online gaming companies invest in complicated data infrastructure and experts to let you ask those questions (Hadoop, data warehouses, etc.). But, they end up spending days massaging the data --- e.g. to load the new property "time spent in battle" -- before you can ask deep questions. In this case, you may get your answer, but its too late -- you've already lost your players.

We give you direct access to all your event data (including new properties) immediately through SQL. You can ask the deep questions and resolve "why" right away. You're not guessing in the dark as to what to do next.

AB testing is about optimizing the user experience, and we help with the analysis to make better improvements.
Interesting. I don't see many MIPS-based handhelds coming out any more.
For the sake of 10 seconds, it is better to have a cool, collected paramedic arrive than a rushed and out of breath one. Keeping things calm and orderly rather than frantic is beneficial in an emergency situation.
This is a pretty good summary, except that there is quite a lot of doubt by anthropologists that the historical succession ever happened like this. Apparently, various forms of money came into being out of debt, without the detour via precious metals.

The reasoning is roughly this: When you trade, it is extremely rare for a "double coincidence of wants" to actually happen with real goods at a fixed point in space and time. So people extend credit and remember who owes what to whom. Money then grows out of the increasing formalization of this process. Coins are then created by a state that wants to make lots of uniform payments (i.e. payment to soldiers, hence the name soldi for certain Roman coins).
>> What are "influencers" going to do about it? Give Reader a bad review?

No, but you may start seeing instances of phrases like "I wonder how long it will be until FeatureX/ProductY gets the boot like Reader did" or "Perhaps this product will languish for years without innovation like Reader" or "Maybe Google will opt to ignore users of this product too" in the press related to Google products. Next time Google kills a product, the media will reflect about how it's "just as bad as what they did with Reader in 2013." Killing widely used products is now something Google does; it is a behavior they are now strongly associated with.

In terms of influencers, it's not about the individual product, it's about the behavior of the company that operated it. Don't piss off the people that give you free advertising by taking out features they like, even if they're the only ones who use them.

>> a product no one knew existed

While I find that a stretch, the point the article was making is that no one needs to know of the existence of Reader for this to have a negative impact on Google. Except for the influencers, who did.
Like self driving cars and Google Glass? Or the cheap/free fiber optic Internet access? Or free Wi-Fi in NYC? I do not think you know what evil means...
On the surface of it, a GCE n1-standard-1 and a EC2 m1.medium may look comparable. Each cost $0.12/hour, both have the same 3.75 GB of RAM etc. Sure, there's some differences; GCE may very well be faster, and the EC2 instance has local storage available, but basically they're comparable.

However, when you factor in EC2 Reserved Instances pricing, the EC2 price drops to $0.028/hour. For a small startup with a couple of instances to start with, you can run your entire EC2 setup for the price of one entry-level GCE instance.
That's incredibly alarming. This is Obama's justice department too, headed by people he personally appointed.
How will we tell whether or not it matters?