skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While this is here and visible to the public, I would like to see if I can get someone connected to the EFF to tell John Perry Barlow that an old outsider hardcore Deadhead may have done something interesting in the world of computers. Also, I trolled IBM about a patent (see http://9fans.net/archive/2013/03/173) and there might be some matters of professional interest in terms of patent law. A very personal document that makes the connection between the psychedelic anarchism of the 60s and the software design of ANTS is found at http://9fans.net/archive/2013/03/206

Professional colleagues of the late University of Wisconsin Law Professor John Kidwell might also have a vague personal interest in knowing what his son has been up to in the world.

I don't like facebook or any of those things, so I'm not well "networked" in the world. Kind of isolated actually. Me and a basement of Plan 9 machines. Figured I should reach out a bit.
Agreed, and I'd add that the other biggest issue pushed Abe and Thaddeus McCotter was the issuance of Greenbacks (United States Notes). Today, this and similar reforms aren't a Red/Blue issues either, they're the establishment vs. the anti-establishment of both parties.
Show HN: The "Farewell, Google Reader" t-shirt
What's the incentive for free market solutions to the problem? The free market is motivated by profit. The gov is ostensibly motivated to serve its citizens. There's a better chance of the latter being effective, IMO.
GCC now uses C++ as its implementation language.

It looks like C++ is getting some traction. BIND has also made the switch to C++ (and Python).
Why unfair? I have a friend who is an extremely competent programmer (and a very prolific writer) and he sends me - of his own initiative - snippets of code written by his cow-orkers (or at least he did, until he switched jobs and went into a company with much more respectable peers, so there's no fun to be had in that). You wouldn't believe what some people are capable of attempting to write. (Except, of course, you would, if you visit thedailywtf.com with any frequency.) Let's just say that, for example, an awful lot of people believe these days that they are competent enough to rewrite date-handling libraries in the Java ecosystem. Of course, the correctness of the result fails horribly.
You make a good point, but football players also have the desperation maker of competition and winning. There are surely players that make it to the NFL and coast, but 1) they have competed to get to the NFL, 2) there are plenty of people willing to take their current jobs, and 3) a Super Bowl win is a big prize that they probably haven't gotten yet and requires some amount of "desperation" to achieve.
I challenge the idea that a startup is the best place for an aspiring new engineer to learn. If you don't have an adequate number of high caliber technical folks on your team it's simply impossible to effectively absorb and train new engineers.

Just because someone is smart and has raw talent does not mean they are wise. In order to build that technical wisdom you need to be a part of an engineering organization that has it already. Some startups do, but universally characterizing all startups as being the best learning environment is incomplete advice at best and dangerous, self-serving advice at worst.

When new grads approach me about wanting to do a startup I tell them to work at a Facebook or google for a year to learn the ropes, then make the jump.
This isn't something the free market can fix

He assumes that people care and are willing to change technology but can't for some reason. In my experience, people don't care.
That's a relative viewpoint, which still doesn't explain away the effect of money on the individual developers, who essentially no longer have to strive to create something of value in order to maintain their lifestyle. I think the article's right: that's a problem, and it's very difficult to pin down, much less solve.
Just for those who have the courage to act on them :)

Nevertheless, I'm sure you're only saying that because you believe you are unlikely to find yourself on the side of the exploited. I, myself, do not know what fate holds for me, and have seen too much to put all of my chips on red, so I'd rather promote a society that protects its members from both sorts of violence, physical and economic, or -- to make things more interesting yet still fair -- from neither.
So, nobody was using Google Reader anyway, declining numbers and so on, eh?
The moral pitfalls of the Lobster Claw Game
Obligatory onion, which gets more real and less funny as time goes by:

http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...

I don't believe it was a conspiracy from the start, but it was serendipitous for governments that the internet is so leaky security-wise. It would be wise to establish privacy boundaries that governments and companies cannot cross by international law, but it would be even wiser if our technology could become inherently secure.
I've tried both feedly and news blur at this point and don't see myself using either going forward. While both can count me as a user right now feedly doesn't provide a method to delete your profile without emailing them and I haven't bothered to see if newsblur does. I doubt their active user count will be nearly as large.
That's exactly where I got hung up as well. If there is a demand for anonymous access tech, I think that the free market will eventually fill that demand (barring interference from the state). I don't think it's wise to entrust the government with limiting its own powers in general. "Strong government will" rarely seems to mean "empowering people to be free and anonymous," at least in my experience.
Agreed, and more importantly, thank you for introducing me to the term "theory of mind." It seems a nice way to succinctly refer to the notion of understanding the perspective and level of familiarity of others.
It seems what happened today is:

The GCC 4.8 branch has been created and a first release candidate
is being prepared right now. The branch is closed for now.

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2013-03/msg00124.html
Scheier is right that information will be collected, and that the government will have access to it. That genie is out of the bottle. But there is still hope for reasonable and even strong controls on the USES of information. This is exactly the distinction I've been drawing for years, e.g. in http://www.dbms2.com/2012/03/01/where-the-privacy-discussion...
Like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5362235 :)

Posting at the right time is not a guarantee you'll be seen, and you're post doesn't stay on the new page very long during peek times.

Don't worry though. I'll be back next week sometime between 9-10am Eastern with a new blog post.
Ah, okay. Clicking on the tutorial link and then clicking on the "Overview" link on the site for the tutorial yielded "Creates a new service namespace beneath normal userspace for administration" and "Move between namespaces on demand with rerootwin and other scripts", both of which seem pretty useful. You might want to make a semi-prominent link to the overview.
Eventually there will be some good and accessible options that will enable you to truly opt-out of the internet surveillance state.

Other than the occasional embarrassing thing (like googling a dance song) I really can't think of anything I have to hide.

Even so, I would pay a subscription fee to keep all of my internet communications completely private. I don't like being profiled, and it feels like an infringement on my freedom. I would even pay enough of a fee that the company I pay it too could in turn pay lobbyists to help protect their interests or headquarter in another country etc.

And the worse it gets, the more I'm willing to pay.

I'm sure I'm a minority right now, but I think our numbers are growing.
No doubt about it.

Another guy puts it in a more precise manner: "Chuck Norris of start-ups"
Kufikia - earn up to $1000 to learn a new technology/framework
What exactly is the process like?
I thought they were all linked to lcars.
why do you say that, because it isn't a press release or some startup garbage? It's old news, but still news
> The question is, when you say "it's time", how do you make it happen

I'd say a good starting point would be something akin to the GNU project for protocols and services. Stallman's work made alignment with a particular set of principles the overriding goal of software development, and as much as this is often regarded as an extreme position for prioritizing ideals over the practical value of the software, it's hard to deny that it certainly shifted the 'center' of discourse to a point that gave enough weight to user freedom to enable a thriving ecosystem of open-source software that satisfies both practical use cases and the ideals of software freedom well enough.

We've seen a lot of one-off projects that have attempted to create distributed, user-centric services and protocols - OpenID, Diaspora, etc. - but these haven't aligned into an overarching "open internet movement" where projects build upon each other's work, or endeavored to promote a unified vision of the open internet.

Basically, the principles of an open internet ought to be articulated in a coherent statement of purpose - something akin to the FSF's "four freedoms" - and attached to some effective branding. The ideal needs to become a meme.

Marketing the idea of the open internet shouldn't be too hard: there are already plenty of examples of people's lives and workflows being severely disrupted by service shutdowns, business-model restructuring, security breaches, and so on, to which outsourced non-commodity software-as-a-service offerings are uniquely susceptible.

When we look at the kinds of practical concerns that have lead to this structural milieu - i.e. the situation in which service vendors are actually able to shoehorn their users into walled gardens - the single factor that pops out is the fact that the service vendor itself is in control of the platform on which the server operates, and can therefore modify the structure of the application or protocol without restraint.

The first order of business for a practical solution, and the first kind of product that ought to be developed, is something that breaks that combination, and gives users a level of control over the web applications they use that's akin to what they expect for desktop apps.

What if everyone had their own VPS, with a user-friendly UI to install and configure server-side applications, that give them the ubiquitous access and ease-of-use they're currently getting from webapps while still leaving them in control of their own user experience, and allowed them to choose what products to install, what versions of those products to use, and what features to enable?

A VPS-as-end-user-platform model would break the current platform/service combination that lends itself to walled gardens, and allow the VPS providers to compete on price and quality of their commodity service, while application developers would compete to encourage users to install commercial or free web-based RSS readers, OpenID implementations, social-networking nodes, email clients, etc. onto their own VPS instances.
Ask HN: I've been offered a job that is different than one I interviewed for. 
I work at a really sought after big security company. But being a big company I am stuck with all the corporate policies that prevents people from easily moving internally into good positions.

I interviewed for a senior level job at an upcoming startup in the valley. I don't have the experience required for said job. So my hiring manager offered me another job that is tangentially related to the job I love. And if I perform well on that semi related job for six months I could be considered for senior level position that I would love to do.

It will be a good salary bump, but I will be leaving a great company (although stagnant job), move to completely different coast and hope that he keeps his word after six months.

Is it worth taking the risk? Or should I keep searching for a junior level job and stay put till I find one?

What should I demand that will make him more obligated to keep his end of the bargain?

Is there a way that I could figure out whether the hiring manager is being genuine and not a used car salesman?
One thing you could explain for the benefit of this thread is what "clustering" software is and what it's used for. Is it the same thing as a "distributed system"?
Isn't it just the subset compatible with C for now?
"There will always be developers who will be willing to do this either because it's challenging or because they need to put food on the table."

But those people don't have to be us. Each of us has a choice to make: to cooperate with the construction and maintenance of the surveillance state or not.

Perhaps I am too much of an optimist, but I'd like to think that many of the most talented and capable of us want to make positive, constructive changes in the world. We don't want to be a part of making the world worse. Many of us are lucky enough to be in an industry where we actually have a choice in this respect.

If the most talented and capable of us deny the surveillance state our talent and capability, they'll have to make do with whatever ethically challenged people they can scrounge up. I'd like to think that they'll be the worse off for it, and the resulting surveillance state will not be nearly as powerful and effective as it would be were everyone to unhesitatingly and willingly participate in it or sell themselves to the highest bidder without thought of the consequences.
Why less memory than segmented stacks?

Lthread is a cool experiment but coroutines in C is a dubious ideal. If you're writing a program in C/C++, presumably you want ultimate control and the fastest possible execution. You wouldn't introduce extra runtime complexity and a speed hit for easier to use APIs (blocking I/O functions). You'd just use epoll and non-blocking sockets (or libuv). That's not to say that coroutines/green threads/goroutines in high-level languages where you've already decided to take a speed hit for easier use isn't useful. Said another way: if your concern is about easy to read code, C is not the right choice; if your concern is speed: copying a stack on every i/o function is not the right choice.
On free time, it may be that the body assimilates what was learned during practicing. One accomplished musician believes:

"Relaxation is necessary tension.
Tension is unnecessary tension."

http://www.dgmlive.com/aphorisms.html
You mean it is impossible for them to work a regular job after retiring from the NFL? Keep in mind that NFL recruits from College, and (if you ignore the cases of cheating the system) most colleges have academic eligibility requirements. Therefore pretty much all pro football players also have a college degree (except the ones that get drafted before graduating -- I don't know what that statistic is).

Heck, if I could have gotten a couple million dollar head start in life by working on my hobby once a week, I'd take that even if I had to delay a regular career by a few years.
RSS has simply been reinvented for non-techies in the forms of Facebook and Twitter.
>Yeah agreed but what's the most likely outcome. You rewriting your urls or you fixing your network / kicking the offending user ?

Who is "you"? The person who can fix the URLs is rarely the same person who can kick the offending user off the local network. If the latter person is not doing their job (or is about to but hasn't yet), you're still better off fixing your URLs.

>You're not only impacting browsing experience but also all the scripts that are trying to connect to the domain like your google drive sync agent.

You don't have to break the old stuff, just start using the final dot for new stuff.
This is awesome. Been procrastinating to add this functionality!
I have this in my /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.net
127.0.0.1 facebook.net
127.0.0.1 ads.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 ads.ak.facebook.com

Anyone know of any others?
The ethics and economics are frustrating to untangle. Without the Microsoft juggernaut, it's certainly true that we as users would have more choices. We could pay Apple $5000 for a Mac, Commodore $5000 for an Amiga, Sun $10000 for a Unix box, or pay steep prices to any number of other vendors selling incompatible boxes.

Point being, I'm not sure the economics of buying a Windows box and overwriting the hard drive are really that bad, compared to what might have happened in a world without Microsoft's standardization efforts.
Yes, I'd say privacy is actually much more of a problem for the elite. How many investigations dig up infidelity, etc, in the normal population and then carefully step around it instead of enlarging the investigation?

But I do think the power elite are driven by excessive compulsions, and I worry if we eliminate the ones with relatively normal/outside compulsions we will be left with the Machiavellian freaks running everything.
There are no guarantees. But you have to keep trying until you're on the top of the homepage. Don't get too complacent with your 9 users :-)
My wife's ARM-based Samsung Chromebook now streams Netflix via HTML5 streaming (as of March 11th). I think a much cleaner solution on Linux is imminent - simply spoof enough of the information about your machine to make Netflix think you're also on a Chromebook. Here's one of the announcements: http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/11/samsung-chromebook-netfli....
There's more than upkeep, there's also risk. Any product that collects people's data has privacy and regulatory consequences that exposes the company to risk. You can't just put a product that has those kinds of risks on "autopilot".

Technically, one or two engineers probably could keep something like Reader going, a drop in the bucket for Google, a rounding error. The true cost is not the upkeep, but the costs of the risks. If not investing any significant resources into upgrading and maintaining Reader means some snafu over personal data leakage, then you're looking at being hauled in front of Senate panels, and EU regulators, and civil suits.

Remember, Reader was written a long time ago by an understaffed and under resourced team.
Agreed. I'm a big Google Reader user, and will inevitably be trying out Feedly, but just haven't had the chance yet.

Judging by the amount of people I've spoken too over the last few days, there's a whole lot more than 500,000 of us. I'd love to see how many people Google considers not worth their time. I'd happily pay for Reader.
The s{} alternatve is based on the strange r'' or u'' syntax i've gotten used to.
Too bad Newsblur is pretty badly designed. I mean, there's a lot of bling, but it's completely confusing and sometimes ugly. Magic icons everywhere, wierd fonts -- two different dropdowns on each entry for god's sake. It looks like it was designed by someone who used their IDE as a template for the UI.

As an example of far too clever UI: Just try and change your password -- it's bizarre that it has no confirmation at all (I have no idea what my password is now). Not something I want to rely on, or deal with, or pay for.

Not that this isn't unexpected... web devs have always been very attached to their bling. That Feedly requires a plugin is... very odd. I don't expect it to last (either the plugin or feedly itself.. choose one), but maybe people are more credulous than I give them credit for.

Newsblur needs to simplify, simplify, simplify... but I suspect it's too late for that.

I'm switching to an rss to email digest script (modified rss2email). It's probably less bling than I want, but at least that minimizes the unnecessary crap, and works on mobile. It also has the benefit of limiting my tendency to refresh the feed lists every hour looking for procrastination sources. :-)
Skilled trades are doing pretty well these days even in the US. Much better than a lot of college graduates. The going rate for a decent plumber/electrician/welder isn't cheap.
There is some interesting historical context here following the history and lessons learnt link in the article.
http://www.9gridchan.org/9gridhistlatest.html

Found a little more background via Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

"Plan 9 is a grid computing platform. It is an effort to provide a computing environment for geographically distributed clusters running on heterogeneous hardware, engineered for modern distributed environments and designed from the start to be a networked operating system.[12] It can be installed as a self-contained system and used on a single computer, but also has the capability to separate its components between separate computers. In a typical Plan 9 installation, users work at terminals running rio, and they access CPU servers which handle computation-intensive processes. Permanent data storage is provided by additional network hosts acting as file servers and archival storage.[13] Currently available desktop computers can emulate this architecture internally using multiple virtual machines."

Anyone else care to explain the elements which make Plan 9 stuff awesome (in noob terms)?
"Just don't join //them// and (A) you will sleep better at night and (B) you will be helping the world. ... Just stick to what you believe is right and don't worry about the others."

There is another benefit to standing up for what's right (especially if you do so loudly and proudly), and that is providing an inspiration to others and leading by example.
Lua has a register-based VM. You're probably thinking of Lua's C API, which is stack-based.

EDIT: Also, I just remembered that Lua started as a stack-based VM, but moved to register-based at around version 5. So you could be thinking of the old Lua, too.
>What is baffling is that Google can't or won't monetize a product with that many users.

Or even just open source it and get some positive PR to offset the negative they've been getting.
From the article:

I hope most people know this already, but it needs to be said anyway. 4chan is a
popular website with millions of users. Negative stereotypes about people who
visit particular websites are just as silly as thinking that every person who
lives in Chicago is a gangster or any other unfair assumption.

P.S. install gentoo
Blogspam is a term used to indicate that the article in question is just a rehashing of the real article that adds no additional content or insight, the sole purpose of which is to increase pageviews of the blog.

He is not saying that the content is bad, he is saying that the provided link is bad. This appears to be the real article (i.e., not blogspam): http://www.iheartubuntu.com/2012/11/ppa-for-netflix-desktop-...
A startup story - the inevitable pivot and market orientation
>Do we really want a global ssl PKI where non-fqdn CNs are allowed?

It might not have been a bad idea to prohibit it twenty years ago, but at this point it seems unlikely because everybody expects the contrary.

> If not, why should anyone care about trailing dots for ssl cert validation purposes?

Because if the cert has the dot and the address the client is connecting to doesn't, you may not be connected to the right machine.

If I was writing a piece of client software, what I would do sooner than just allowing them to be considered identical is to do a name lookup for "example.com." if that's what's in the cert presented by "example.com" and make sure the IP address is identical to the one for the "example.com" I'm connected to, and then be OK if they are and fail validation if they aren't.
That's a great idea. I know part of the problem with Netflix and Linux is not only does Netflix not develop a solution, but they try to block Linux access, probably due to DRM. A good solution like you suggest might be the best bet.