skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The story of "things used to be better" is one that apparently never gets old.

PS. Anyone who bemoans the lack of "ribald proletariat banter" without a trace of irony is putting themselves squarely in the sights of the same banter ("wanker"), IMO.
Even if my pay was doubled, I wouldn't be able to afford to live in or near London. However, I can afford a comfortable lifestyle in rural Yorkshire (house, car, holidays, internet access, good food, days out etc etc) on a modest pay packet. The rent for my 17th century cottage with garden in a Yorkshire village wouldn't get me a room in a shared house in an undesirable part of London.

I don't understand the pull of the capital. It's overcrowded, noisy and dirty, even in its 'desirable' areas. The oil sheikhs and Russian oligarchs can keep it. I'd much rather live up here even if I had enough money to live in London!
It seems like we need an independent project Loon but with servers attached to the balloons!
It's not actually that common, but there have been at least 3 people prosecuted:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-11479831

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/11/ripa_iii_figures/
because telling someone that something sucks is utterly useless. Try asking constructive questions that will either lead you to realize that it doesnt suck and that the 5 minutes of thought you put into it is orders of magnitude less than the time and effort she/he put into it. Or you will get them to stumble upon a perspective they haven´t yet considered and maybe find a solution to it - or if it truly does suck - realize the same and spend time figuring out what to do. Destructive criticism is utterly pointless in the startup world - or anywhere for that matter.
Architecting Visa for Massive Scale and Continuous Innovation
This is harsh: I visited a company town once, and it struck me that Australia is like a giant company town. Our wealth comes from mining and farming, and the owners share enough to keep things humming. Result: a good life, risk not needed, non-conformity not appreciated.

In comparison, US is more entrepreneurial and SV more so - but to be fair, it's more entrepreneurial than anywhere, and even it suffers from risk-aversion and echo-chamber conformity at times.

What do you think?

EDIT I don't think it's a question of tech or not (Australia is technically highly capable and advanced), but of entrepreneurial or not. Our idea of "entrepreneurial" is opening yet another mine, TV station or restaurant.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/14/ripa_self_incriminat...

A couple of people have been convicted of refusing to hand over their encryption key.

It's worth noting that this is a separate offence, so there's a determinate prison sentence. You can't be held in contempt of court for refusing to hand it over.
I would say there is no exact "right time" to quit and become a freelancer. While going off on your own can be highly rewarding, it is not without stress and requires high degrees of focus and hard work.

With that said, if you are single I would have at minimum 3 months of living expenses saved up before I even thought of quitting my full-time, secure paycheck job. Preferably you would have 6 months to a year worth of savings just in case. If you are married and have a family, I would at least say 1 year worth of savings before I quit.

Prior to quitting though, I would get my feet wet by finding small jobs on the side and slowly building up clients. This is good not only from the experience prospective, but provides you with contacts and portfolio material.

Managing your time can be tricky and everyone has their own methods for doing it. Personally, I use several lists to keep track of on-going tasks and use software like Basecamp to manage projects. My lists that I keep are for daily, weekly, and overall project tasks. Each day I try to complete at least the daily list and build the next days list from the weekly and project lists.

Working for yourself it is inevitable that there will be slow months or months where you do not get any new clients. This can be depressing and add stress. The key here is to not let it get you down, know that everyone experiences bad months and just keep moving forward with current projects. For slower months I always reach out to past clients to touch base, feel them out for additional work, and depending on the relationship I have built with them, see if they know anyone looking for my services. Referrals are your best friend.

I am not going to try and make it sound glamorous, freelancing is not, but on the flip side it can be very rewarding and provide you with excellent learning opportunities and growth. Just understand that there are a lot of things that going on long with it. You are now responsible for all your own taxes, insurance, and the "business" side of the house.

Based on your job title, it sounds like you are young and just getting started. I don't know your experience level or education, but I would say solely based on your title, to continue working for a few more years at least. If freelancing is something that interests you, start small and part time finding and taking on small jobs here and there if you can. This will give you experience managing your time, working on projects independently, and a little extra income, all while you still collect a steady (and guaranteed hopefully) paycheck from your employer.

Good luck!
Unfortunately, the desire to keep historical buildings conflict with the need to add density. Clearly, people should make some tradeoff, but it should not be "never demolish any old buildings".
i dont really see how you can recreate waze or tumblr in a weekend - especially in their current shape. I guess being less arrogant will allow you to be a better judge of startups ;)
I think much more than automated cars, what will help is the Internet and new technologies making it ever easier to work from home, instead of having to "go to your job" in the city.
2 more weeks to go
Could you extrapolate this statement (Google and Wall Street) to giant companies with an online HR application process? Cover letters make sense when you're sending it to a person, or at least an email address.

What happens when you put your resume into Taleo or one of those other online application systems? You could be applying to several positions with the same cover letter and resume in that case. I wonder how many people actually read them.
So what's the point in doing this, when employers can just google my name and make direct contact?
Implementing worker threads in Rails
Six Strikes “Copyright Alert” Warns Subscribers For Dangerous P2P Software
Is your Web API susceptible to a CSRF exploit?
One group did (based on my feedback), yeah. I used to be a salesperson, so maybe that counts for something?
Stuxnet/Flame were things put out into the 'wild'. The recent stories are of large-scale dragnets sucking information in. Why should security professionals (outside the entity itself), ever know of it?
Others have said, but I'll add: this is accurate for London. Greater London is a large area, the actual inner city is totally unaffordable by anyone's definition.

Even GL is largely unaffordable. House prices defy gravity, and rents are going up, at a time when Govt. is cutting housing benefit severely (which should result in net lower demand) - most London boroughs have a large outflow of socially housed tenants of various forms.

The average London property price is $785k (USD). There are a number of boroughs in London where the average is double that. And, due to the way the Govt. is blowing up the mortgage market, owning is actually cheaper than renting (so long as you have the deposit... for now; next year, Govt. will give you that as well).

13% of the population may be in Greater London. Large numbers of them are moving out; current affordability is incredibly bad.
Did you fundamentally misinterpret my sentence? The password is not retained by Apple, the private key is retained, in encrypted form.
Berlin Profits from US Spying Program and Is Planning Its Own
That it's not surprising doesn't mean it's not a problem. And while those classes may derive the most value from being in the city center, it doesn't necessarily mean that society as whole does. Or even those individuals themselves, in the longer term.
Since multiple PR depts are saying largely the same thing, I'm inclined to believe this is what they've been informed they can release.
Source: Instagram Will Get Video On June 20
You can't directly compare this with Stuxnet. Security people (or rather, security people who analyse viruses and worms) discovered stuxnet because it was in the wild. Security companies run honeypot machines set up to capture viruses so they can analyse them. Stuxnet was identified because they weren't discriminate enough with their targeting.

It was only after stuxnet spread itself onto the wider internet that security researchers picked up on it and then thought "this is weird" when they looked at its behaviour.

How do you suggest a third party security researcher could learn about data transfer between Apple's servers and the NSA's servers? Short of hacking into the system or an Apple/NSA employee whistleblowing, there's no way they could.
I agree entirely.

And it pisses me off. I live in Brisbane, and I love the people and the city, but I will eat my hat (and film it for YouTube) if the Council/State Gov will ever pump money into building up a proper tech sector here.

Melbourne is a little better, with their "hipster"-styled outlook; I guess that's why it has a bit of hype in the start-up scene here in Aus (they have anti-conformism, to a mild extent).

Sydney, well, there is innovation coming out of there. A number of startups, and they do quite well, but it's a 5:1 ratio of B2B vs B2C startups, so you don't get to _see_ the work being done, unless you are in a vertical they target.

Maybe one day Australia will take tech seriously... until then, I'm biding my time and saving up my personal runway to chase dreams elsewhere in the world, like a lot of people my age.
What about Prague ? Tech scene has evolved rapidly in past few years. (Skype, AVG, Avast, Red Hat, Geewa, Socialbakers, Good Data, Zoom International and many others...) + Startupyards,Node5 incubator + The Hub.

Check this article : http://www.janrezab.com/prague-beats-berlin-with-its-tech-sc...
This is transparently false - the median household income in Manhattan is somewhere around 65k. This is high, but it is not remotely the reality presented.

If people are being "priced out", it's by other peoples' willingness to pay more for rent. The masochism of people moving to New York City these days astounds me - they're willing to live in some really terrible conditions to live in New York. Similarly, when I lived in Paris I lived in a ludicrously small apartment with a bathroom in the public hallway. My willingness to pay even a small amount for even that crappy setup "priced out" the potential of combining the space with another apartment or something. What an asshole I am!
You are right. But the problem that institutions face is that as the sums of money gets smaller, the relative cost of doing due diligence on the idea/team gets significantly larger.
Good graffiti style rhetoric but no argument or pertinent observation.
Unfortunately, the extension only gives context to one of the three figures mentioned at the beginning of the post..
An interesting phenomenon in Paris is the fact that there are still many housing projects inside Paris proper. Which means that effectively only the middle class is getting priced out. Only the really rich or really poor get to stay.

In the meantime democratic representation is failing: Paris is a metropolis of 12 million inhabitants and only about 2.2 millions vote for the mayor. The government needs to expand the municipality like it did in 1795 and in 1860.
What is the best country that you know of to store data safely in?
Ask HN: Favorite mailing lists, IRC channels
I've recently come to appreciate true veterans of technology hang around mailing lists and IRC channels.

What are some of your favorite programming/security/sysadmin mailing lists and IRC chaneels?
If you want to go into more statistical type of roles in the future (data science, analytical marketing, etc.) than they're very useful.

Outside of that they're of less use.
Ask HN: Would you pay for Linux?
I've been tossing up the idea of a modern, developer-friendly distro with a nice UI, simple file hierarchy and good package management. Linux is built around being open, and almost all distro's are free (as in beer), so this might be an unusual thing to ask, but..

Would you pay for a Linux distro?

If so, what would you want to see in that distro? If not, why not?
> Golang will not let you compile if there’s an import or declared variable that’s unused. OK, I understand that Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness, but this is seriously slowing me down; probably a third of my attempts to run my damn program fail because I’ve forgotten to remove debugging apparatus, or I’ve sketched in a variable but not used it yet. How about a compiler switch or something?

Agreed, this is really annoying and makes it very hard to prototype things.
If you searched for "AOL" and "Steve Case" - they are on to you!
Let's hope that the modern day Harrison isn't forced to personally petition HM The Queen to force Parliament to actually pay out who then has to personally threaten to appear in parliament only to have Harrison die three years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison#Harrison.27s_Fir...
My reading of that is that you aren't allowed to redistribute any modifications or use it for anything other than accessing the tarsnap service.

So not really open source software in any sense that I understand.

[NB My comments is not intended as a criticism of tarsnap or Colin's licensing policy - he wrote it so, in my book, he can license it any way he wants.]
Its relative. Paris would be even denser given the extreme demand in the city, and with modern technology could be say the 10th densest city and still very livable.
The CSM is actually a very highly respected news source. It regularly wins Pulitzer prizes. See this encyclopedia britannica entry: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/115192/The-Christi...
How GCHQ stepped up spying on South African foreign ministry
People aren't ready to hear what they aren't ready to hear.

And if they are, they probably know it already.
If you are in EU, Norway is pretty much transparent from a legislative pov. For example: http://www.autistici.org/ai/crackdown-2010/
Language and Community
> I wouldn't say that the US is substantially more free today than it was then.

It's not something that needs a lot of thought if you consider that the current president allegedly personally authorises deadly drone strikes even on american citizens (on "Terror Tuesdays"), while Nixon had to resign over Watergate.
A 2009 report said that 40% of London's families are on housing support. So these people live there because someone else pays.
That's an interesting cultural observation because in the .us we have about the same attitude toward nudity, but not toward actually doing it. For example there was a huge outcry about a half time entertainment show during a major sporting event featuring a topless woman (although she wasn't having sex or anything like that, just singing and dancing). But we have plenty of TV drama shows and all that which seem to revolve primarily about having sex, and they show almost everything except the fun parts (as mentioned above) in action and that's considered great family viewing.

So in summary maybe the cultural difference is in the .us we don't ban the action but try to ban the object, but in the .uk its the opposite and they try to ban the action. That probably has some implications WRT dealing with internet censorship by avoiding the whole topic, or maybe why it seems to be hard to avoid offending someone somehow on one side of the pond or the other.
? no it isn't, and even if it was that would still be sexist
Thanks. That's the most relevant (geo-oriented) answer to me. I guess I have to reduce the CV size.
Not very likely. CA Certificate generation is about as secure as the papal election (read one of the most secure proceedings in existence).

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9j-sfP9GUU
How come this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5880557

was ignored whereas the current one didn't? The same title, the same link...?!!
You just CAN'T go there. Once you suppress the natural social norms, the child will easily make the leap to other animals (or worse).
Note that the City of London is in some ways a tax haven and a neighborhood in London itself.
And the first sentence. The middle bit, useful.
Here's what worked for me:

1. I always prepared (exactly) 2 page CV.

2. One thing, that paid off (I think) I always prepared CV for specific Job offer. Takes time, but exposes the best of you in paper for the position you are applying for.

3. I have a belief that "If text looks good on paper - it will look good on screen", not necessarily otherwise. Thus I print my CV, read it loudly, mark and correct bits and pieces with pencil, edit the electronic form, rinse & repeat until I don't have anything to edit.

4. I wrote cover letter twice in my life - basically it was among the lines of: "I would love to work at your company, because you are cool at something I am interested in working on and I think I have the skills you need (references to CV, showing my experience in what they needed)."

So far so good, through the years I applied to companies in Lithuania, Denmark, Sweden and UK (London) - I got offers from all of them. I applied for Software Engineer position in PHP or Python companies.
He could be stuck in a filter bubble.
I think that a lot of the price pressure could be caused by the 0.1%.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/oct/16/empty-houses-l...
I think it'd be a hard sell. You'd need to find some real, concrete pain points that people suffer from, and then address them, and then market it towards people suffering from those issues.

I'm a desktop Linux user (Mint), and I find it to be quite developer-friendly, and it has a nice UI, and Debian has the best package management. So, personally, I'm not sold yet. :-)
> if the Council/State Gov will ever pump money into building up a proper tech sector here

Why is that the governments job?
The funny thing is, according to the ACS, 20% of Australia's workforce is in IT! Go figure!
Not all of London's population was originally British - it's quite popular with international multi-millionaires, who don't have to deal with the same restrictive immigration rules everyone else does. Also, a lot of people who're living in London can't really afford to do so; unfortunately it's where most of the jobs are and commuting into London by rail is just as horrendously expensive as living there.
Up until shortly, it was also the case that if you were on state benefits (specifically housing benefit) you could afford to live in a nice neighbourhood in London as the state paid your rent for you.

Fortunately this is being capped now so that non-working people will be subject to the same issues as working people.
Experts question strength of chemical weapons case against Syria
Couldn't agree more, I live in Newcastle (Upon Tyne) and wonder why all my friends headed down south after uni - for "the salary" was their reasoning but none of them have savings and their salary goes into rent, commuting and maintain an expensive social life. I'd much rather be here in Newcastle and be able to afford to live and save - just wish the weather were a little better
A robot is simulating. Animals are not.
Elegance in language is not about using the fewest words that still follow grammatical rules. It's using as few words as possible while following all grammatical rules, having good flow, a good sound and the right emotional meaning.

That's why good writing takes effort.
They sell access to those people. They don't provide specific identity information about those individuals. The Facebook example I posted shows how somebody was able to specify granular-enough parameters to focus on one individuals, but this type of targeting wouldn't work for everyone. I can imagine a day when this type of targeting is offered more-proactively.
Any recommendations and best practices to encrypt data ?
Ruby was about 10 years old before most people took notice. :) It often takes time for languages to get traction.
I have a couple of friends who do portfolio and risk management at two different pension funds, and both of those places use a lot of SAS.

That being said neither of my friends knew SAS when they where hired and I doubt there are many places that hire people because they know SAS. They hire people because they know statistics and risk analysis and then send them on a 4 day SAS course if necessary.
I hit "reply all" to 120 people.  Now my gmail is disabled for 24 hours
Because I did it from apple mail it looks like I exceeded the amount of mail I can send by 20. How is this possible? https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22839?hl=en&ctx=mail
In my opinion, the "biggest problem of our time" is oversized government and excessive lobbying of politicians to serve corporate interests rather than the needs of the people. Unfortunately the powers that be are not going to reward that which undermines their own reason for existing...
Ask HN: Good places for short coding term gigs?
There seem now to be a lot of decent places for full-time jobs and even bigger projects (SO, Hackerjobs etc) but I'm more looking for something shorter term to fill the gap between bigger projects. A fix here, some new feature there, a mockup etc. My skills range from PHP dev to mobile & design, so anything in those areas.

The likes of oDesk/Freelancer etc have proved fruitless given the workload to likely compensation ratio. Fiverr is also out, as I'd like a bit more than a fiver (greedy?!).

Is there anything out there? And not restricted to the US?

Flip, right now, I'd even take a chunk out for commission if someone can point me right way! :)