skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There will always be someone else at work who will be willing to do the things you are unwilling to do.

That sounds more like getting to the top of your office or company, rather than the top of your field. I was thinking about the people that invent and create liberally, outside the constraints of product deadlines and work hierarchies. Fantasy indeed :-)
Well, you might want to do that if you were building a colinux-style paravirtualized system on top of the Windows kernel.
And you thought emacs vs vi was bad...
It’s 2013 and My [Note|Net|Ultra]book is Still Too Big
Zeo (sleep tracking device) website no longer accessible
Hulu has billion dollar bidders
>That's not the case with the microtransaction free-to-play model -- they need you to play the game, to feel a need to play the game.

Zynga focuses on mechanics that promote habits, but to say that's the only approach incentivized by F2P is a pretty myopic view of the market.

The F2P model incentivizes addictive gameplay more than other genres, but it's not like building an addicted game was a bad thing pre-F2P. Valve's DOTA 2, for instance, has largely identical gameplay to its 100% free Warcraft 3-based ancestor (tangentially, Team Fortress 2 isn't much of a skinner box either).
there should be a requirement to destroy the DNA if no conviction is attained. the fact that the gov't can store your fingerprints forever simply because someone accused you of something is insane to begin with. using this as further justification for DNA storage is misguided.

your DNA is more private than your medical records, because much of the latter and a whole lot more can be decoded from your DNA, maybe not now, but it will most certainly be done in the future.

"just give us the keys to your house, we'll only use them when we (or our associates) deem necessary"
The interesting thing is this national DNA database would be freely and easily accessed by corporate entities, assuming CISPA (or CISPA-like) acts pass.
I switched to feedly. I'm not thrilled (it seems to really stress my machine out) but it's not terrible. I remain curious how it well it will work after Google shuts Reader down.

I may go the self-hosting route too. I wrote a script to pull down all of the entries of every feed I'm subscribed to in Reader - the OPML of subscriptions is helpful, but for blogs that are offline I want to have a copy of the feed from Google's cache.

I'm not doing anything with the data right now, but I figure I've got it if I want to do something with it later.

https://github.com/epaulson/stash-greader-posts
Show HN: custom Github-like contrib graph on a tshirt (a week-end project)
Governments continue to intentionally kill civilians all over the world, including the US government. Drone strikes are one example.
It was acquired by Green Dot last year.
Get ready for .Google and .apple
There's no good way to say it, but there are bad ways and this one is more bad than good.

Including "But I think we all know this is necessary to move forward." is certainly a shitty thing to say in a letter like this, EVEN IF IT IS TRUE.
Thankfully I don't do anything on the web that relies on advertising for revenue.

Here's a website you can surf: mcmaster.com

Have fun.
If you have time for a girlfriend, you're doing it wrong. Shut up and code. And somebody get me the cap table spreadsheet. Quick, somebody put out the fire in the rubbish bin. What time are the VCs coming over again? What, there are customers waiting in the conference room?!?? Who the hell scheduled that meeting? Why is the build failing again!!!??? Where is Bob, Bob is the only one who knows how to configure the firewall! NO, don't let the VCs leave, stall, damnit, stall... Why can't I get logged into the CRM system? Is the LDAP server down again?!? Who are these people in the conference room, customers or the VCs? Salespeople? Who the f%!# let salespeople in? We can't buy anything, we don't have any money! Where did you put the VCs? No, I don't have cash to tip the pizza delivery guy. Why isn't that fire out yet? Damnit, somebody hand me a fire extinguisher. Answer that freaking phone! No, tell the Fire Department we don't need them. The SEC?!? What the f%!# do they want??? Are the VCs still in the lounge?!? No, we don't need Ghostbusters, send them away. And somebody get that goddamned goat out of here right now!
Google spends far more on lobbying that it cares to admit
the worst jobs are taken when you're desperate

If I could suggest one thing for a young programmer to tattoo onto their inner arm, it would be that sentence right there.
10 Lessons from a year of development in Ruby on Rails
The fact that they take fingerprints and put them in a national database, without even a conviction (you can be arrested for anything, and never convicted), should worry some folks, but I suppose we gave that battle up long ago.
I find the article rather convincing: I want to play a related alterna-history game that takes the article as a given.

Did the Soviet Union make a serious strategic error in declaring war against Japan when it did?

Remember, we're taking it as a given that Japan surrendered to the Allies because of the Soviet Union. Moreover, it surrendered to the USA because it for very good reason preferred USA reconstruction to USSR reconstruction, in a way that mirrors whom German troops very strongly preferred to surrender to.

What if, instead, the USSR had simply decided to bide its time?

Some results:

1) Two rivals would continue to claw at each other for months, draining massive amounts of blood and treasure.

2) In the meantime, the Allies would be forced to have at least some number of fewer troops in Europe than they did in actuality. I don't find it plausible that the Soviet Union would see it in their interests to, say, invade France and Italy. But it would give the Soviet Union a much stronger negotiating position, and a United States devoting its resources to crushing Japan would be a United States not focused on rebuilding Europe. And a vacuum of power in the more developed parts of Europe would have been very tasty for Stalin.

3) On the con side, the USA would likely end up in a more powerful position in East Asia, if it won, decreasing Communist influence from China to Indonesia and Vietnam to India.

3.5) If the USA lost (let's define that as the cessation of hostilities while Japan managed to hold on to many of it's earlier imperial acquisitions), the USSR would have an embittered, genocidal, and highly authoritarian state with the capacity for total war on its border.

4) Also on the con side, Soviet influence would have been quite limited in Manchuria and northern Korea. The main base of operations for Mao in the Chinese Civil War would have been limited.

5) The USSR wouldn't have regained some positions in the Far East that it imagined were legitimately Russian. It also wouldn't have been able to uproot the large amount of industry that the Japanese had invested in Manchukuo.

6) Violating the Potsdam agreement that required the USSR to invade by August 9 would have decreased trust in the Soviet Union on the American side.

7) All those cons acknowledged, all of them except 6) could have been mitigated by the Soviet Union dragging its feet for six months or even a year more, drawing out and sabotaging back channel negotiations with Japan as much as possible, and then invading at the very end.

7.5) If it waited longer, Japan's willingness to surrender might have evaporated, leaving more time to get a full scale invasion of the whole of Korea, northern Japan, and a wider area of China going. That's on top of allowing for more preparation time, which may or may not have been useful.

Thoughts, HN? If anything, I think this indicates that the Soviet entering when it did wasn't the main factor that ended the war, because from the Soviet strategic perspective dragging the war out as much as possible seems very preferable to what ended up happening.
If management can use the rumor mill to convince people to leave for new jobs before a layoff, then the company doesn't need to pay as much severance.
> In reality, Google tried to sell itself to Yahoo for $1M in 1999 (and Yahoo said no). Those of us who were around at the time remember this.

Wow I never knew this. Care to expand further?
While I feel bad for the employees, some investors should have known better. It was over priced at $12.
Thus far most of the windows 8 hardware either sucks, or it costs too much. I really wanted a windows tablet until Samsung's ativ turned out to be defective,windows rt turned out to be useless, and the surface was released with a keyboard that requires a table to use.
This has been standard practise in the UK for many years now. Still controversial with an ongoing debate, but your point about relations is pertinent - a good number of convictions have been arrived at due to others' DNA samples.
The Best Choice Problem
Invest in Yourself at the Low End and the High End
Longer desc: generate a Github-like contribution timelime and (save it as a PNG or) export it on a tshirt.

Just a fun week-end project.
I think the confusion is the difference between a box and a container: I grok that I would use a dockerfile to configure a container, and I would use chef/puppet to configure a box. But, _why_ can't I use chef/puppet to configure a container? Why is a dockerfile (in concept or syntax) _better_ than chef/puppet?
I hope they at least use better point and shoot cameras or smartphones with better cameras like the Nokia 808.
There have been a bunch of proposals for telescope satellite arrays and there are a few in progress like ARReST at Caltech & Surrey (which uses cube sats)
I'm wondering now that the creativity to come up with those things might actually be beneficial to coding.
Google hired recently Ray Kurzweil as director of engineering. Ray's recent book - "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed" - is influenced heavily by the ideas from the first generation of Numenta's technology (via Dileep George). So, you could say that Google is following Numenta to some degree. Jeff Hawkins is always careful about setting expecetations and tries avoid as much hype as possible. The progress was indeed slower than what some people imagined it to be, but it is a very hard problem . Now, Numenta has Grok and its technology will be tested in the field. It also released NuPIC as open source, which will let anyone interested to dive in, run benchmarks, etc.
Not broken.

Don't submit "X is down" to hacker news.

Two reasons. First, if we need the service X, we already know. Second, you will likely be wrong in just a few minutes, as is true in this case.

If you want to know if some web service is down, ask http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/, not HN.
The issue with that is that no hospital is willing to be the first.

Hospital: We're going to lower costs by not letting doctors choose their equipment.

Talented surgeons: Welp, don't want to work there.

Patients: Why would I go to the hospital that doesn't have any of the good surgeons?
The hospital would have worked out a better deal with you if you asked. However, if you don't ask, and just put yourself horribly into hock to pay them, they'll take the money. Likewise, if you refuse to pay, and they have to go to collections or the like, they'll apply the full, inflated amount.
> you can be arrested for anything

My favorite is being arrested for resisting arrest...for that arrest.
One thing is not want people wondering around, looking for a quick random answer, as this site is pretty much about community.

Other is make it difficult to access by a random, specific criteria, such as technical hability. Yes, I am no tech hacker, never used Tor, but I try to be part of this community as valuable member. I think community is about aligning interests, not an exclusivist club.
Cool! I've not heard of Polymaps before, and will look into it. For the time being, I am using Google Maps.

Do you have any recommendations on how to create the tiles?

The most important thing, is that when a user clicks the markers in my map(whether or not they are real vector markers or rasters passing themselves off as markers), the marker's associated attribute values need to be available to be fed into a popup.
Source of paraphrasing: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2013/06/get-your-mob...
I'm running tinydns so it's definitely not DNSSEC or open resolving. The queries are for my domains, so it's not that they're questionable. The problem is that there are millions of them all from the same IP. So, it could be that it's some kind of attack, but I really don't know.

I'm planning on moving hosting over to Route53 at some point in the next few days, because the fact that I can't figure this out other than "turn off logging" tells me I probably shouldn't be running DNS servers.
So, have a deal that says "Hey, if you want to be able to receive Medicare/Medicaid payments, you have to standardize tools."

All the hospitals will say "Wow, holy shit, alright", and the surgeons will have to play ball--because a surgeon without a proper OR is basically just a butcher or barber.

EDIT: Please explain why this is a bad idea instead of just downvoting.
Ad-blocking on the internet is kind of like recycling. Sure, it doesn't matter if you do it, but if everyone did it we'd all be fucked.
You don't have to love his politics to admit that Scalia's reasoning is, usually,[1] a beacon of clarity: "I cannot imagine what principle could possibly justify this limitation, and the Court does not attempt to suggest any. If one believes that DNA will 'identify' someone arrested for assault, he must believe that it will 'identify' someone arrested for a traffic offense. This Court does not base its judgments on senseless distinctions. At the end of the day, logic will [win] out. When there comes before us the taking of DNA from an arrestee for a traffic violation, the Court will predictably (and quite rightly) say, 'We can find no significant difference between this case and King.' Make no mistake about it: As an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason."

Even in Lawrence v. Texas, when he was wrong (in the macro sense), he was right in pointing out that, despite the Court's maneuvering, its opinion left no room in the future to find gay marriage bans anything other than unconstitutional.

That being said, I'll go ahead and be a little contrarian. Kennedy isn't really wrong: if you accept that routine fingerprinting is okay, there is precious little you can invoke to say that routine DNA swabbing is not okay, other than the fact that DNA swabbing is far more effective.

The precision and effectiveness of DNA makes it scary to people, but look at the flip side. We might actually want a world where DNA is the go-to tool for convictions, because everything else is so much worse: http://lst.law.asu.edu/FS09/pdfs/Koehler4_3.pdf. If routine DNA swabs lead to the use of DNA evidence being routine, then juries might come to demand DNA evidence to deliver guilty verdicts, which would marginalize the other, highly unreliable, forensics techniques.

There is also an important fairness aspect: unlike eyewitnesses, DNA evidence is not subject to cross-race identification bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-race_identification_bias....

[1] As long as the topic isn't drugs or homosexuals.
Your Lowest Common Denominator
New York, NY. Sharewave, full time.

We're looking for an engineer to be an integral part of an early-stage startup, working directly with our CTO (Robert "r0ml" Lefkowitz) and small engineering team as we build our product beta.

Ideally you have:

* Hands-on front-end and/or back-end web development
* Working knowledge of two of the following: Java, JavaScript, Postgresql, Python, Git
* Proficiency with web and mobile technologies
* A relevant degree (alternatively a good working brain)

About us: Sharewave is for entrepreneurs and private companies who care deeply about their investors. It’s a beautifully simple way to organize, visualize and share information with your investors. So you can spend more time leading your business and less time on it’s administration, no matter if you have one investor or one thousand.

We’re a team of 6 people with a range of financial, technology and startup experience (you can read specifics about each team member here). We've also attracted a very experienced board consisting of C-level executives from market-leading companies within the finance and marketing industries.

Our office is in the city’s newest co-working space in midtown Manhattan, which hosts a number of startups and small businesses, along with unlimited coffee, tea and beer. The compensation package includes salary, equity and health benefits.

We're just interested in your resume and any relevant links that showcase your work (GitHub profile, projects, etc). This position is based in Manhattan, and we aren't able to help in relocation. You must also be authorized to work in the US.

Send your application to: jobs@sharewave.com
Thanks To Nathan Fillion, You Can Get Serenity On Your GPS
I'm a grudging holder of a view I deem the "rag doll" theory of identity & evidence gathering: if they can get it from your limp body without coercion or harm (needles & "intimate" contact included), they can have it. Facial photos, fingerprints, DNA ... things which can on the whole be obtained by just following you around (touched surfaces, fallen detritus), and which circumstances may dictate a more manipulated form of acquisition (hold face up for frontal photo, manipulate fingers for prints, mouth swab for DNA). Anything involving jabbing, yanking, or threats - no. This view does presume the existence of enough evidence for warrantable arrest in the first place, which should entail a high legal barrier: a judicially signed warrant should be required prior to arrest if possible, and acquired promptly thereafter if impractical; failure to obtain one (before or after, independent of information acquired during holding) should require immediate disposal of anything gathered including arrest record.
Ask HN: How to build a github portfolio?
I see a lot of people suggesting that one should build a github/bitbucket portfolio. What would be appropriate projects/code to put on there, considering the fact that I doubt my skills are enough to make any non-trivial contributions to the major open-source projects?
When I read these revisionist pieces, I often see the same phrase you quoted: "ready to surrender." If someone is "ready to surrender," what does that mean? Well I'll tell you what it certainly doesn't mean: It doesn't mean that they've _actually_ surrendered.

What a lot of revisionist writings gloss over is that yes, certain parts of the Japanese leadership were "ready to surrender." But it is well documented that some were only ready to surrender if conditions X and Y were met. Others were only ready to surrender with conditions Z and A. And of course others weren't ready to surrender at all.

Yet until a credible leadership figure actually _offered_ unconditional surrender, it was going to be war as usual.

And so if this phrase, "ready to surrender," is taken alone (notwithstanding its distinguished source), then it is facile in that it deliberately ignores both the wide diversity of opinion which existed within Japanese leadership, and the complex process which was necessary for the leadership to converge and make a firm, unified political decision.
FiftyThree, New York, Full time, H1B transfers okay, no remote.

Since we launched Paper for iOS in March 2012, it has been downloaded more than 8 million times and Apple named it the 2012 App of the Year on iPad. Paper is just the beginning, and we’re hard at work on what’s next.

We’re looking for app developers (but we’d also love to talk to web devs, backend devs and designers).

• Love creating beautiful user experiences? We’re a design-driven company, and you’ll have the opportunity to work closely with world-class designers. In the last year, Paper won numerous design awards including the Apple Design Award, IxDA, AIGA, and Crunchie.
• Enjoy a technical challenge? Interesting problems abound.
• We’re a startup but we’re on sound financial ground. We offer competitive salary, benefits, and equity.
• This role will be based in our NYC office. No remote, but we’ll help with relocation. If H1B, transfers only.

Apply at jobs@fiftythree.com

http://fiftythree.com

Have a look at what our users are up to:

http://madewithpaper.fiftythree.com/
No, I was more attempting to hint at a possible use for G+.
Insanity is very close indeed to genius. Also, why not?
The existence of Rust's current GC doesn't have anything to do with preventing dangling pointers. Off the top of my head, cyclical references are the only thing that you need GC for that you can't handle with unique pointers or borrowed pointers, but there may be others.

I would need to have read Andrei's original argument to be sure, but I'm guessing it was along the lines of "without a strong type system, garbage collection is necessary to prevent dangling pointers". And Rust's type system is strong enough to prevent dangling pointers; they cannot happen unless you are deliberately dropping into `unsafe` blocks. This is true regardless of if you have garbage collection built in. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the type system is powerful enough to encode all the patterns that GC allows.
FWIW I've found precisely the opposite. I ended up having to roll my own lxc wrapper. Maybe in a few months docker will be there, but not right now.
This is known as the survivorship bias. More about that here: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/survivorship-bias/
Indeed. One of the fascinating things if you read the dissent (which I highly recommend, it's very approachable) is that the national electronic fingerprint databases have not actually ever been constitutionally tested on 4th amendment grounds.

In my mind this falls into the same category as "searching" someone's smartphone if you arrest them. There's no analog for that. It's so fundamentally different, that you have to treat it differently than just looking through a backpack or something.
Why we switched _to_ App Engine, couldn't be happier
There's filament alright [1], but I don't think it is visible on this scale, so it is probably something else.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_filament
The DevOpsBlues (Written for Twelve-bar blues)
My phone starts to beep, it looks like something is broke.
My phone starts to beep, it looks like something is broke.
Slowly I stirred, sitting up as I awoke.

The web site is down. That's what the tweet said.
The web site is down. That's what the tweet said.
It's 1AM, and I'm getting up out of bed.

The monitoring says, the network is timing out.
The monitoring says, the network is timing out.
I'm starting to feel down and out.

The bloggers post that our web site is all messed up.
The bloggers post that our web site is all messed up.
The CTO Skypes, saying get that web site up.

I try to check the system, but the APIs don't respond.
I try to check the system, but the APIs don't respond.
It's getting so bad, I want to go jump in the pond.

The redditors vote our outage to the top.
The redditors vote our outage to the top.
The CEO calls and wants the outage to stop.

Our cloud provider posts that something may be wrong.
Our cloud provider posts that something may be wrong.
They say they're working real hard, and it won't be down for long.

Techcrunch says our users are really mad.
Techcrunch says our users are really mad.
We start a conference call, things are looking kinda bad.

The net is restored, the web site is back on line.
The net is restored, the web site is back on line.
The monitoring is green, everything is just fine.

The conference call ends, we all go back to bed.
The conference call ends, we all go back to bed.
I'll sleep just fine, as long as nothing is red.
Microsoft Ponders Major Restructuring, Amid Renewed Wall Street Focus on Stock