skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
M2M Open Data Hackathon June 7-9, Santa Clara
Friday June 7 is the kickoff to the M2M App Challenge when representatives from the US Dept. of Energy will be on hand to present open data sets and how to use them.

Timing for the event is perfect since President Barack Obama just took a monumental step in making data open, accessible, and machine readable by default. Open data sets are being made available that touch many areas. Here are a few examples of what is currently on the table:

Healthcare: Health and Human Services just recently released new data on hospital fees, a major step in creating greater price transparency. In other cases, the open data sets can be used for developing new healthcare-related products and services.

Weather: Data related to weather can help feed newscasts, identify weather patterns to help avert danger, or create better information for insurance purposes.

Consumers: Private companies are using open data to fight credit card fraud; open data helps consumers reduce energy bills; families may leverage open data to compare healthcare options.

Public Safety: New apps and tools may access data related to public safety for emergency response and planning. Platforms will be available at the M2M App Challenge, such as Esri, www.esri.com, to incorporate geospatial data into emergency response efforts.

Automotive: Data from the Research Data Exchange provides a variety of data-related services for multi-modal transportation mobility applications with the USDOT ITS Dynamic Mobility Applications (DMA) Program and other connected vehicle research activities.

In all, the president’s executive order is intended to help fuel new start-ups and entrepreneurs and to stimulate job growth in the United States.

Check out this brief video for more details: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=n603rEnEGXA

More info and how to register can be found: http://connectedworldmag.com/conference/index.php?q=app_challenge
Problems with using “IQ” in… anything
Isn't that a side effect?
> assuming all other variables stay constant.

This is where you fail.

Let's suppose that monitoring all monetary transactions actually does reduce crime.

But the apparatus for doing so legitimizes similar actions by oppressive governments, which use it to suppress democracy activists rather than terrorists, and in so doing use the tools we built which they would not have had the funds or local knowledge to build themselves. And if you don't care about those people, imagine what happens if our own government should ever turn malicious, or fall under foreign control, and have this ability to prevent our citizens from funding a resistance.

Then there is the danger of all this data falling into the wrong hands. Requiring it to be collected creates a secret which in the aggregate amounts to a national security threat. If you know who is paying whom for what and in what amount, you can commit industrial espionage on a massive scale. You know where strategic weaknesses are because you know which company doesn't purchase reinforcing materials for its products, you know how much capital an important defense contractor has in reserve before it goes into financial straits that impair its ability to operate effectively, you know who isn't insured against specific risks and could be bankrupted if they were contrived to occur, etc.

This is effectively the same trouble as mandating lawful intercept backdoors. The damage you cause by creating immensely powerful surveillance tools that inevitably fall into the wrong hands by far outweighs the cost of requiring law enforcement to use the more traditional methods of catching criminals.
Any chance you could explain this? I don't see how Coldfusion is a secret weapon, but I'm probably missing the point here.
I don't disagree with the article, but I had 2 thoughts form in my mind while reading it:

1) I don't think entrepreneurs (and tech ones at that) have solved any problems, even for the upper classes they cater to. Instead, they have become popular and profitable the old-fashioned way, by creating and filling a need. Even a solution as fundamental as search on the internet is not really helping me lead a better life--though it does make possible the vast stores of knowledge and likely the entire tech sector (including my livelihood).

2) Given 1) above, the entire article essentially seems to encourage people to exploit the under-exploited markets of the unexotic by creating needs there and fulfilling them. I don't really see how entrepreneurs can, for example, fix the bureaucracy of Veteran's Affairs, even if they had a turnkey case-handling solution to sell to them.

Finally, the author of the article had a pedigree as long as my sleeve, but I didn't see any work in the unexotic fields.

Somewhat related thought: where are the non-tech entrepreneurs? Are there solutions that don't require computers anymore? Are there ways to get funding for such a solution?
This is a very interesting approach to solving an old age problem: how do you match the right people to the right employers?

The solution for most people used to be stacking credential and hoping the competition wouldn't have the same level of credentials as you.

What type of jobs are available on HireArt? How do you decide on what metrics and skills are useful for that particular post? How many test have you devised?
Why do you say Python is applicable to so much more than Ruby? I don't see how this can possibly be true since they are both powerful scripting languages.
Hey, Elli from HireArt here.

We work only with non-technical jobs like marketing, biz dev, sales, etc (we think technical jobs are quite different). And then we have two different types of challenges:
1) Challenges that individual employers create
2) General industry challenges that candidates can use to apply to lots of jobs.

In terms of how we come up with the questions, we mostly just ask employers: "What does this employee do at work" and then we ask candidates to do similar tasks.
OCLint, a static code analysis tool for C, C++ and Objective-C, based on Clang
Tim Cook Claims Apple makes secret Acquisitions, how is this possible?
As a large commercial user of MongoDB (almost 300 instances of it running in production), I've seen some big shifts in 10gen's focus lately. They've really ramped up the customer service, and they are making more regular releases that seem like improvements.

Unfortunately, the better customer service doesn't provide better answers or solutions to problems, and the improvements aren't targeting long standing, basic issues with the platform.

This feature announcement fits the pattern: an improvement, but not in a critical area like indexing, or document-level locking, sharding stability, etc. There are basic fundamentals that need addressing like overcoming the 20K maximum connections per server, or mongos CPU usage. These are the things I deal with in production and that are business critical, but those feature requests sit untouched in JIRA for months or years.

This feature seems interesting, but it solves a problem I don't have. I'd prefer them to solve real world problems.
+1for Sinatra!
Indirect Dependencies Are Killing Open Source Licenses
For #1 everything I've seen points to rails and Django having a nearly 1 to 1 correspondence. It's just preference for the most part.
I use OTR[1], works with irssi and pidgin (maybe all libpurple clients?). For voice I recently saw a reference to Jitsi[2] here on HN. So I have no experience with it.

[1] http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/

[2] https://jitsi.org/

Addendum:

I went to give jitsi a try and was suprised to see that there are no signatures for any of the downloads. It does not seem that binary signatures are that important to the jitsi team. I took a peak inside the debian package and discovered that the repository signing key has no signatures on it. There is also an open bug to have signatures for the windows binary but that is also an open issue.

If you get bored add a +1 to:

https://java.net/jira/browse/JITSI-1162

https://java.net/jira/browse/JITSI-1161

https://java.net/jira/browse/JITSI-1048
The $2,500 Veterinarian Bill – Dating a Team Member
P.S. I take issue with anyone who is 28 years old being considered a "veteran" at her job, let alone at McKinsey. Perhaps I think too old-school.

There are specific verticals, where one can very well be. For e.g. I know people who have been focussing on a vertical since they are 15 years old (e.g. web design, digital art). You can definitely master some verticals after 13-14 years.
| And since when is working around the
| law a crime?

Finding a loophole in the law, may make what you did technically legal, but it doesn't make it all of the sudden a 'good' thing. If I found a loophole in the laws that let me defraud you of all your money, while technically staying inside of the law, would I not still be a fraudster/conman, even if I didn't run afowl of any 'fraud' laws?
time to quit and do something real.
FWIW in my own app, on iPhone, Facebook connect with native dialog has a near-100% login rate. (The non-native dialog is much worse unfortunately.)

So, fuck the haters, Facebook connect is a very low-impact way to get users to sign up to your service, particularly if you assume in the long run that it will be deeply integrated with phones as it is on iOS. Yes, a few nerds will opt-out, but most of them will be pulled in eventually if your service turns out to be useful and trustworthy.
The legal system does not codify good taste, it codifies minimum standards. The Constitution even less so--it only interdicts those actions that are deemed to be outside the power of even the elected legislatures.

As for what one has to do to engage in a private discussion over the internet, any answer involves encryption. Otherwise the question is ridiculous on its face--how can you have a "private discussion" where dozens of intermediaries have access to the plain text of your communication?
The FSF also still requires fax or mail, as of when I did mine about 1.5 years (I think) ago.
Lots of people have been commenting about Tradehill doing all of the regulatory work needed to by completely in the clear, yet, a cursory search for a registered MSB[0] going by Tradehill, inc. or Tradehill didn't turn up any results.

Tradehill alludes to the fact that they are doing some simple "know our customer" type verifications, but that won't satisfy FinCEN when they come knocking.

[0]: http://www.fincen.gov/financial_institutions/msb/msbstatesel...
If people are actually listing classes in the stand-up, I agree that's a problem. For me the stand-up "did yesterday" content is more, "We worked on X and have it almost finished. In the course of that, we made a neat utility for X, and cleaned up some ugly code in Y. If anybody wants to talk about refactoring Y further, let's talk."
> small number of key products.

Are we thinking of the same Google? Google has gotten its hands on everything from niche programming languages to web browser to computer vision and neural networks. This, of course, in addition to its traditional strengths in search, distributed databases, and infrastructure.

Yes, they are still an engineering company. Watch the I/O keynote. They are deeply vested in various areas of computer science, machine learning, and distributed systems.
This thread is part of my re-calibration. There's always a trade-off between practicality and security, and I'm interested to see where it falls for everyone else.
"Understand the trade-offs being made and the factors that led to them."

As a user of Facebook, this quote explains a lot. I run a Facebook page with 90k+ likes, and have grown to expect it to simply not load completely without refreshing it multiple times. I've long suspected we were the victim of some type of 'trade-off.' It appears my suspicion were correct.

We also spend five to seven thousand dollars a month on advertising. I wonder how much more effective our campaigns would be if our page loaded 100% every time.
Sure, but plagiarism is more than just trying to publish an old idea. One paper was of something novel, but in their background section, they just copied a paragraph or two from an older article. That's the no-no.
Hey, guess what, you actually can control what permissions you ask for. And Facebook tells you what permissions the developer asks for. And this app does not ask for anything other than your public profile, friends list, email address, interests, and likes. In other words, exactly what it needs to accomplish its goal, and the same data you would need to manually fill in if it didn't use Facebook connect.

Complaining about "Facebook connect" doesn't make any sense. What makes sense is complaining when app developers ask for permission to access data they don't need, or they ask for access and abuse it in ways they didn't disclose to the user.
Man kept in cage for 11 years in C. China
You throw around this "that doesn't make it right" thing. I'm curious what you think is "right", in general, and from where the concept of "right" comes from.

In particular, if I make up my own mind to consider another in a position of power, why is that "not right"?
There is too much options [0] and it's more flexible than it should be. I know , it sounds weird but with bootstrap all you have is 12 columns and when you have less options it's easy to plan.

Maybe the other problem is : Units are not in multiplies of 5 and that forces you unnecessarily to think. If it would be in fixed units like bootstrap or in multiplies of 5 ( pure-u-3-25 etc.) i would be less thinking while deciding the length of some div.

[0] : http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/cssgrids/#unit-sizes
> Even a solution as fundamental as search on the internet is not really helping me lead a better life--though it does make possible the vast stores of knowledge and likely the entire tech sector (including my livelihood).

I disagree. You can spin this many ways. I look at "search" as solving the problem of "easy access to information" - however one must understand that it is not an unsolved/solved problem (varying degrees of "solved" apply here).

Being able to learn new things, research something I'm working on beyond my direct network of friends/colleagues, and engage with others solves a lot of problems for me. All this information also makes it much easier to re-skill or add new skills to my repertoire.
Exactly. Good two-factor authentication is not hard. World of Warcraft, for example, has had an excellent real-world implementation for years now. It's actually sufficiently not hard that I'm not sure there's really room for much innovation in that space (unless you count banks actually using it to be innovation).

What I'm saying is we need a better solution for Facebook and HN. There's some large subset of sites for which users will not tolerate a physical artifact or convoluted multi-step process. Within those constraints, and with the understanding that we'll never be able to do as well as 256-bit private keys or two-factor, I'm wondering if we can't still do significantly better than alphanumeric passwords.
There's a number of interests outside that potentially usurp efficacy of crime reduction. The cost of 100% monitoring, or moral/ethical interests (I deserve some degree of privacy)
Harvard: The Class of 2013 Senior Survey
Yeah, I could imagine contexts where not much is going on, or where the work is pretty routine, or where collaboration is low. In which case, no need to talk frequently.

I usually work in exploratory, high-volatility contexts, where there's plenty to talk about. I also favor continuous deployment; I think the last shop averaged about a release per engineer per day.

Given that very exploratory context, I also really like people generally being present. If that's the default, you can iterate much more quickly.
Leaving aside the question of whether evading a law through a technicality is alright (and surely the court will decide whether they were successful at that or not), but the indictment indicates they misled financial regulators, submitted a fraudulent verification system to regulators that falsified data, and indicated they sold the company to a foreign entity then continued to operate it surreptitiously through shell companies. This doesn't sound like squeaking by on a technicality.

I really don't see why everyone is assuming these guys are in the right. I don't see much to support that claim.
This app literally cannot spam your friends or write all over your fb page, because this app does not ask for that permission. You are living in 2008 or something, whenever it was that Facebook didn't have fine-grained permissions.
In computer vision conferences, reviewing is almost always double-blind.

In computer vision journals, reviewing is only half-duplex blind -- the reviewers can see who you are, but not vice versa.
Dylan Ratigan left his cable news show to hire veterans to create hydroponic farms in California.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/dylan-ratigan-farm-...
I wonder if this will end up like the other cities that sprung up in china that have yet to have any inhabitants…

Well, congrats to whoever gets awarded with the contracts…
Kenya hit by national blackout after power grid failure
If 30 years ago it had been known that the Internet could be used for child pornography or communicating about blowing up important buildings, I wonder what today's world would be like if today's mindset had been prevailing then.
Ask HN: Are my options worthless now?
I'm an early employee at a startup. From the go, our money has come from our founders, and from a single external investor.

A year into working there, now with ~15 employees, we (most of us) were issued stock options. At this point, we were still in 'stealth mode', with no additional investment than the start.

There was a valuation (as I understand it, a number picked from a mix of equations, and pulling things out of the air) of $30MM, at an exercise price of $4.00, for 37,500 shares; for a total of $150,000's-worth, 0.5%

Another year later, we're not turning a profit but we've had a few more investors come in over the past 6 months, no new hires.

We just got word that those who didn't get granted options last year, were granted them this year (the reason they weren't given them the first time round with everyone else? Personal differences with the CEO).

They were issued at an exercise price of $1.00, for 9,000 shares; for a total of $36,000's-worth.

This is where my math gets off. I'm assuming the share price has gone down, because of the investment we've had. But, should it really be that much? If today's price is $1 per share, does that mean that (assuming worst-case, the self-valuation hasn't changed) there are now 4x as many shares in total? And hence, my options worth (0.5% / 4)?
My apologies for changing the subject, but do you have any evidence at all that Google has ever "voluntarily hand[ed] over [anyone's] e-mails", or was that just a random slur?

Google's stated policy is to fight government requisition of data, but ultimately to comply with the law. That is to say, Google claims to be as anti-government-surveillance as it is possible for a corporation to be. I am aware of no evidence whatsoever that this claim is false. Admittedly, I also have no strong evidence that it's true[0].

Note that I'm not quibbling with the literal truth of your statement, since your statement deals only in hypotheticals. But it'd be pretty crass of me to say something like "I've never seen <insert name here> rape a child without offering the kid some heroin to ease the pain", even though it's technically true for every name including yours.

Also note that I'm not entirely sunshine-and-roses positive about Google's record on privacy. I think it's not as bad as the fear-mongers state, but not without any concerns whatsoever. Google management, it seems to me, pretends to believe that when users say "we want privacy" they always-and-only mean "we want privacy from the government and criminals". Which is... disingenuous. But I think that Google appears to be a relatively pro-privacy [1] organization, especially with regard to the particular slur you raised, and I've never seen a credible argument that this appearance is false.

[0] I do see some evidence that Google is truly anti-surveillance. However, all the evidence I have is also consistent with the theory that Google is willing to spend a lot of money to convince its employees that it's anti-surveillance... if Google were an NSA shell corp, maybe this is how it would behave.

[1] By "relatively pro-privacy", I mean I have to think pretty hard to think of organizations MORE pro-privacy, although eventually I remembered that mozilla exists.
Fix the problems of how US government IT contracts are awarded? There's a startup for that. http://www.dobt.co/

> During the pilot period, RFP-EZ attracted more than 270 businesses that until now had never approached the world of Federal contracting.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/05/15/rfp-ez-delivers-sa...
having been on both sides of the hiring equation, my sense is that the current system is broken by design.

For myself, I've read positions at a company that are a perfect fit, only to see things like (paraphrasing) "5-10 years of prior experience at a digital media company required". To get that, there are a small handful of companies one could have ever worked for. why wouldn't the hiring manager just call the 5 people you know who are a fit? right - because HR says we have to post the job.

From the hiring side - it is important to understanding managerial objectives in hiring, which frequently diverge from company interests beyond a certain size and maturity. Job security and minimizing headaches come to the forefront. The most understandable is training - even a smart pup needs time to learn. the remaining motives are questionable, and hard to surface.

No doubt there's room for a company like HireArt, but when i read the description of what the company expects to solve, my first thought is that rather than fix a broken-by-design hiring market, it will mostly relieve the guilt of HR employees who know hiring is intentionally broken.
Do yourself a favor and ignore the comments here screaming for alternative login options. Look at the data and see what the conversion rate is for people, and only change it if the conversion rate is below what you consider acceptable. (Filtering out "Referer: news.ycombinator.org" of course.)

Most people here complaining about Facebook Connect are basically ignorant as to what it actually allows you to do, and are also in the minority of people who have not populated their Facebook profile with interests.
> This is like saying Henry Ford designed the modern automobile to be used in bank robberies, drunk driving murders, hit-and-run maimings, and kidnapping.

That analogy might be valid if 50-90% of Model-Ts were used for bank robberies, and all those other things, and exclusively.

At some point it crosses the lines of being a legitimate business and becomes a caterer for criminal enterprises.

Having 1 legitimate customer does not excuse you from willingly servicing the needs of 9 criminals.

LR went out of their way to hide the tracks of money transactions.
I don't really have a pattern that I follow when I launch the terminal, but I'd say the first command that I run is either git status or git pull --rebase since I'm usually working in a git repository. It helps to have a custom "environment" configured just how you like it. I keep my dotfiles (configurations) hosted on GitHub (http://github.com/hodgesmr/dotfiles) so that I can easily load them up on any machine I'm working on and others can use the if they like.

Zach Holman did a good post about dotfiles: http://zachholman.com/2010/08/dotfiles-are-meant-to-be-forke...
It's essentially a mindset where the developers are also the operations staff and the operations staff are also the developers. This avoids the classical "throw it over the wall" mentality by making the developers live with the pain of their system (if you write shit, you get paged, etc.).

I'd check the wikipedia for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps