skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Chen Guangcheng is one of the purest souls on earth, like Mandela.

Many people I know in China are close friends with him.

The CCP govt in China has put pressure on NYU, to cancel the visas of professors at NYU Shanghai. (Many US universities are expanding into China with mainland campuses currently).

Guangcheng is simply telling the world about the dirty tactics China deploys relentlessly. It's not selfish on his part - he doesn't have a selfish bone in his body. Indeed, he risks even more of his family getting jailed/hurt in China by revealing this news.
That's a point I've made as well:

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/RJpNqz1y...

[Long bit about supposing I'm OK with Obama spying on all and sundry]

Now take that argument and flip it: I'm a raving reactionary right-wing flag-waving, Bush-loving, Grover Norquist worshiping, NASCAR fanning, Fox-watching, elephant-tattoo-on-my-ass Republican. Guess what: I have exactly the same rapid paranoid concern about Obama's or any Democratic administration's use of FISA surveillance.

The so-called PATRIOT Act is a significant part of what's tearing the US apart. It fosters distrust on both sides of a vast and growing political divide. It is more power to the government with less oversight than anyone can trust. "That is not what democracy is about. That is not what freedom is about," to quote Senator Sanders.

The so-called PATRIOT Act always was and will be a full admission and capitulation to the fact that we've abandoned our cherished freedoms and the terrorists have won.
Honestly, the weather here is great. I don't mind it at all. Your mileage may vary of course, but I find most people here do not find the weather to be a problem.

> remember that ratios aren't really important when it comes to saving, only net

Agreed, but the ratios have a big impact on what the net is. Right now, I wouldn't really be any better off going to SF in terms of saving potential. From talking with friends, the pay raise I'd get wouldn't be enough to justify it, from a purely financial viewpoint. If I stayed there for long enough, though, my salary would probably rise enough to put things in favor of SF in the end.

But that's assuming I rent my whole life. At some point I'd like to buy a house. Now things are in favor of Houston--hugely so. The average home price in SF has went above $1M recently, but in Houston it's in the 100s.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/29/san-francisco-media...

http://blog.chron.com/primeproperty/2013/05/median-home-pric...

In Houston, a $1M house gets you one of two things, depending on where you buy: (1) if you buy in a suburb, you'll get a mansion; (2) if you buy in the city ("in the loop"), you'll get a very nice house in probably a place like River Oaks (unambiguously the best neighborhood of Houston and possibly Texas).

IMHO, you need an income of well over $300k to afford a $1M house. How many developers in SF make that kind of money? Even in the HN demographic, it's got to be a very, very small number. Yet I could easily afford a median-priced Houston home on my starting salary out of college. I choose to rent just because I enjoy walking to work.

Anyway, strictly speaking the best strategy might be to go to SF for some of your twenties, live a crappy life but save like crazy, and then come somewhere more cost effective and buy a house, maybe also using your higher SF income to negotiate a higher wage here as well.
It's 55kb gzipped. Angular is 30kb. Does that 25kb make all the difference?
Maybe so far as Snowden is concerned, but the comment I was replying to was talking in more general terms (i.e. Chinese citizens using HK to flee from China).
Kinda scary, considering this is the developers website (hosted on the same server as zamfoo.com) right now: http://meccahost.net
The phrasing "without legal authorization" is the superhighway-sized qualifier which lets anything through, here. Of course they consider everything they do to be 'legally authorized', under their own strained interpretations that are hidden from others' review and challenge, and which include things like provisional authorizations that don't require a warrant.

We know they consider any calls known to be 'foreign' already legally authorized. No warrant needed, little reporting, little oversight.

Then, anything else that they guess with 51% confidence is foreign, until they discover otherwise, is also authorized: they can start listening, before they have a warrant, and perhaps never needing one. Operating in secrecy, there are a number of ways they could have their fingers on the 51% scales, here: nudging a few extra algorithmic signals into the analysis until they hit the 51% threshold, or pretending not to hear any other indicators of domesticness. (A US citizen might want to answer all calls not with "hello" but instead "I am a US person", if you want them to stop listening... though from the myriad of reports, it's not certain that the enforcement is much stronger than an analyst-self-reported "honor system" and "oops, I'll try not to do that again".)

But then also, multiple reports seem to indicate they can start listening to previously-recorded believed US person calls with merely the intent to pursue a FISA warrant within the next 7 days. What if they start that and get more evidence to push the foreignness-confidence over 51%? Perhaps no warrant application is then necessary. What if they use their 6 days and 23 hours of listening and then decide, false lead? Does this "free look at anyone for any reason" have any cost for the analyst? (Was it this sort of temporary-unilateral-overreach that let an analyst access stored intercepts of former President Bill Clinton's email in 2009? [1])

If the internal controls are as good as they claim, they ought to be able to report exactly how many domestic calls/emails were heard/viewed, in the sort of 'inadvertent' and quickly-self-corrected errors many officials have already have described on-the-record.

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/pinwale/
Meh.

Buy three ebooks from different accounts, render them to pain text, diff them and take out the differences.

Why three? The assumption is 2 books would have the correct value and 1 book would have the copyrighted value.

Though I don't see this as DRM. I've done this before on a much smaller scale to track things as they enter the wild. It's just security through obscurity, the digital equivalent of a tracking collar without any of the benefits, like guaranteed uniqueness.

It's also crazy overkill. Here's a much simpler way to do it: At the end of every period randomly decide to add an extra space. Hardly noticeable. Spread (again random) between 1024 and 2048 of these over the entire document. Count them up... now you have a pretty decent identifier without having to do any sort of special logic to the words themselves. To the average person it's not noticeable, it doesn't require messing with the original document, and it can be made unique enough to be a digital fingerprint. Of course this house of cards falls apart when you know the secret.
If what I'm reading is true, I am absolutely disgusted and appalled.

This article reinforces the fact that post secondary academic institutions are 100% business oriented and makes me glad that they didn't get more than a year's worth of tuition money out of me.
I remember seeing a startup doing something similar to catch employes leaking internal docs. Can't find it now, though.
> Mark Twain's keen observation

If you're talking about "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.", Twain never actually said it: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/twain.asp
Similarly, there's the alleged ECHELON cooperation with unencumbered ally intel services: "Uh-oh, this call recording has a 0% foreign content, so we're not allowed to listen. Can someone ask a Canadian or Australian to do it for us?"
Especially as you can share with self-defined groups in FB.
I'm really glad that this is happening, because I think the character of "tech" has gone to shit in the past few years as assholes who care only about their gaudy, disgusting parties-- but don't actually love technology or want to improve the world for real-- have come into the game.

This elite isn't ready to rule. They won't even run companies that are decent to the people who build and maintain them. It's easy to take the Silicon Valley perspective and say that the old legacy elites are full of idiots (and that's true) but "our" "elite" is just as full of useless, garbage humanity that should not be trusted to manage a bag of rock salt. Let's start with the brogrammers, douchey VCs exactly like the caricature in that Tesla video, hipster turds who become managerial favorites because their mancrushing did-their-20s-wrong bosses live vicariously through them, sloppy coders who think they're "rockstars", horrible management at all levels and in most firms, and companies using "fast failure" as an excuse to unapologetically do the wrong thing, because it's somehow OK if you're the Next Steve Jobs.

I am really glad that VC-istan has, over the past year, developed a tropical wave of a morale problem that threatens to become a Category 5 showstopper, and I'm really proud of the part that I played in that. There are a lot of brilliant, innovative people out there in this country and I can't wait to see what they come up with once they start falling for cheap lies.

Nerds are such horrible judges of character that we tend to throw obscene amounts of effort when some smooth-talking ex-IBDer (fired because he was too unethical even to sell subprime) gives us the time of day and manages to convince us (by pure assertion) that his half-baked idea will "change the world". But I'm starting to work on that problem by exposing painful truths, and maybe we can change it in some timeframe like two-thirds of a generation.
The willingness of content creators to deliberately distribute an inferior product just to catch pirates never ceases to amaze me.
Ask HN: Market for SAS/R developers?
So I was informed by my current employer that one of the things on their todo list is to have me do SAS and/or R programming along with the PHP/Java that I'm doing now. While it's great to have more languages on the ole resume, I'm wondering what the market for these languages are like? Is there crazy demand for them out there, or is it as useful as saying your'e a HTML programmer?
As he mentioned, at least one school calls it computer science 101. It's not a replacement for an entire computer engineering degree.

I also studied computer engineering (and computer science), so I got all of this information over the course of 4 years, but I think it would have been valuable to take this course up front in order to immediately understand how all the pieces fit together.

It would also be valuable for computer science students who don't get most of the computer engineering material.
Yeah, I stopped reading the MSM in 2003 when Juan Cole was blogging about stuff which didn't appear in mainstream sources until months later.
Applying for the job is the first step to getting a "PhD required" job without a PhD. Then it's up to you to prove not having a PhD doesn't impede your skills in any way.
You know, for all the arguments about why to use OSX over Linux I'd never think that hardware support would be one of them, considering OSX is designed to run on Macs with a pretty limited scope of hardware.
Show HN: I made my Raspberry Pi a secret phone homing server
Just out of curiosity... I assume the waiters, waitresses, receptionists, taxi drivers etc. of San Francisco are not all on $70K+ salaries? And if the answer to that is yes, how do they manage to make it work? Either there's a lot of #firstworlproblem esque moaning going on in this thread or taxi drivers in SanFran are the best paid cabbies in the world.
There really aren't. I live in one of the few "family" neighborhoods in this city and there are maybe 2-3 families with kids within blocks of here. Plenty of non-white people around here too. If you go out to the "burbs", everyone has kids...
Being a retiree of the trading industry myself (was last involved in HFT in 2007, last at all in 2008) - I believe that's naive.

Every HFT outfit has someone on the lookout for these kind of ideas. When this system is found, every idea in a commit in an obscure branch is going to be quickly reviewed, tested inside that outfit's backtest system (which likely has years of microsecond stamped tick data to test on, and a 1000-core strong compute cluster to do that quickly), and if it has merit -- applied before you have a chance to test it in trading yourself.

Your own success in trading this system is not required (and in fact, unlikely, even if you implement things that would work if done in a non-public way).

I'm not trying to get you not to do it - on the contrary, I love to follow interesting ideas in the field even though I'm not in it anymore. I'm just trying to give my sober, experienced, point of view - if you want it to succeed, this particular thing has to be closed source - you should only commit to public git after your edge has waned....
If I'm not mistaken, the keyboard should raise high an interrupt pin on the CPU, which should cause an interrupt service routine to be called.

That routine should then mask lower-priority interrupts, poll the appropriate region of memory (assuming memory-mapped IO) for the byte or bytes held down, push those onto the buffer for key inputs or into the STDIN equivalent, unmask lower-priorty interrupts, and return.

It is then up to the user program to read in from the buffer and do the needful.
It is certainly not the case that you need $300k a year to afford a $1M house. $800k for a thirty year term on 3.5% gives you around $3k/mo payments. That could be reasonably carried by someone making $120k after taxes (1/3rd net income rule).

That said, for a lifetime home in this market you might need a little more than $1M, depending on what you're looking for and where you'd want to live.

I don't think we actually disagree about anything. Except the weather (^_^ I couldn't bear it). Houston vs. SF is a tradeoff. We'd need more data to know exactly where it crosses over for each person.
I can't leave any comments on the actual blog so I'll just leave it here:

This is some bullshit written by a very entitled young man that is apparently aimed at very entitled young people. To wit:

"You didn’t even need to be a finance major to get aggressively courted by the bulge bracket firms. Goldman Sachs, in particular, seemed to have an obsession with taking the most liberal-arty kid"

Maybe if you are one of those kids that went to an Ivy, but this is so not true for the vast majority of college graduates in the US as to make the rest of this post really ridiculously meaningless.

It's not a backlash against "startups," it's a backlash against the same sort of douchebags that brought us CDOs now flocking to the tech industry cause it's a "hot scene."

I know I'll get voted down for this but everything about this guy and what he's writing about is exactly what's wrong with this country.
I second this recommendation. Code is a really great tour through the creation of a digital computer, and helps build a fertile ground for later questioning and research into the field.
Quickutil Beta: A New Utility Platform for Common Lisp
Agreed. More noted that for general reference. Or if he aspires to be an astrobiologist ;)
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Tell the TSA to End Nude Body Scanners: Day of Action, Monday, June 17
Apparently he's around 39 years old, as he was born in 1974 http://www.techcofounder.com/ads/view_ad.php?id=769
"What Snowden did is, arguably, treason."

Not by anyone who understands the legal definition of treason. Among other things, treason presupposes formally declared hostilities. Even Cold War turncoats convicted of espionage for aiding the Soviet Union couldn't be charged with treason, since technically, we were never at war with the USSR.
This is like complaining learning algebra doesn't equip you to be a mathematician. That's not the purpose.

I studied computer engineering and computer science, and I haven't used Karnaugh maps or VHDL since college because I write software now. I'm still glad I studied computer engineering though, because it gave me a deep understanding of how computers work.
'Inferior' up until now didn't describe the content, but the rest of the experience. This would change the content itself, which I would expect most authors to be very protective of.
"Fascinates" is a terrific start, but it is not enough. What have you built or accomplished in the relevant area?

You seem to be focusing on academic credentials. (I realize that's what the job posting asks.) But at the end of the day, credentials are only proxies for ability to do the job. And the best way to prove ability is to demonstrate past success in similar or related projects.

Industry, even an industry apparently dominated by PhDs, is not academia.
Ask HN: Which companies are working with/on the coolest technology?
Also any thoughts on how I could capture this in a website?
Why on earth do the organizations that 'fight' piracy keep suffering from the delusion that it's just random everyday people who share a copy with a friend that are the source of pirated material on the internet?
FYI, Einstein was not a bad student. (http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/12/albert-einst...). It's just a myth.

Having a degree does not magically make you more qualified, it's the work you put it over the years to get your degree. The paper is useless, but the experience learned remains in your head.
Dan,

Email me. I know some people in SF. . . .

Email address is in my profile.

Phil.
Exactly this.

Just because a copy of an ebook I purchased is now floating around the internet, does not, a pirate, make me.
"With enemies really, who cares about the morality?"

Yeah, fuck 'em, burn the village to the ground.
Obama says the congresspeople are all briefed up. They say they aren't. So they brief them up. Then they're confused.

The NSA would have been better off not trying to keep the whole program secret, since no one in Washington seems to be able to figure out what's going on even when they're told.

The whole thing has gone from shocking to sad to just plain pathetic.
I think you're missing something - you don't need to be connected to the internet constantly in order for the internet to be very valuable to you. If you have access once a week for 30 minutes, that's a lot more than never. That's enough to send emails and keep in touch with the outside world in new ways.
The reality is that if every major country is spying on other major countries (and they are), there is no trust to violate because there is no trust to begin with.

One would imagine that every country attending a G20 summit would expect to be spied on like this, because they would be doing the same to others.
Like movies, do you?
Yes, but lots of people speak Mandarin now, either for doing business with the PRC or because they are PRC immigrants.
Pricing anything is always a challenge. I suppose you have two audiences, people seriously considering setting up a funded startup in one of those countries, and general knowledge seekers (just about all hackers and HN regulars).

Another idea for this, since it sounds like this series might get yearly updates, is high-priced lifetime subscription 1-time fee, and a low-priced non-subscription cost for just this year's version.

Edit: On second thought, maybe not. Someone buying one of these to set up a startup probably won't have a multiyear need for them.
Is this not exactly what Facebook, Google, and Twitter do with their tracking cookies? They figure out what you are interested in based on analytics regarding the sites you visit (obtained through multiple different methods), then sell that data to advertisers.
Don't politicians use this common excuse to take away people's privacy rights on the net? Julian Assange calls it one of the “Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse” (terrorism, drugs and money laundering are the other three).
My personal experience is the opposite.

I tried Ember first. Got excited replicating the sample blog app, but got stuck trying a simple task: show the most recent post by default (see this bug: https://github.com/emberjs/ember.js/issues/1642). Later I started to trip into namespace clashes - you have to jump a few hoops if your model has a field named "content", "is_new" or "is_deleted" (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16515900/reserved-atribut...). My general impression is: there is nice ideas here but Ember is too opinionated and has to many magic going on (hard to debug).

In contrast, Angular shows better design everywhere. No name clashes, framework methods and attributes use special prefix $ (like python uses double underscores). Everything I got stuck with ember, I was able to achieve elegantly with Angular.

I love the eviltrout but this post is lacking a bit of diligence. Angular learning curve is a little steeper but IMHO it is way more finished and well designed than Ember (Ember data has good ideas, they have a cute mascot, and it ends here).
A/B testing content-gating? Well, Medium has to make money somehow...
Fair enough. Apologies for jumping to conclusions :)
Sorry, I got emotional and attacked him instead of his comment. For that I apologize. But he essentially implied that a black guy fighting segregation during the height of communist paranoia and racial tension in the 1960's could count on a fairer shake from the justice system than a wealthy white kid in 2013 with the support of a rich and influential segment of society. That's the kind of statement that tends to engender emotional, rather than cool and collected responses.
Open Source Medical Records: E-signing and form locking
composer support is nearly a requirement these days for php projects. No composer support is an automatic no sale for me (if not for many others)
Fair enough, I'll concede the point.

But of course, they would just as well argue we're in the War on Terror. It would be an obvious flimsy justification but, there you are.
As long as you don't care about the whole democracy thing.
I'm willing to pay the premium and always do (willingly), every time I make that upgrade decision.
Prior to the Osama bin Laden strike, claiming that such a thing could happen (the US sending a strike team into Pakistan without any approval/warning) would be in conspiracy theory territory.

No it would not, because Presidential candidate Obama made it clear he would do this in a debate in October 2008:

And if we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then I think that we have to act, and we will take them out.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/may/01/...
a special administrative region of the people's republic of china is actually more free than the USA.

Define 'free' in this context.
The damage caused by economic engineering leaves no good alternatives.
"Atrocious ranking", according to whom?
How Big is Tokyo? See it from the sky.
James Earl Ray initially entered a guilty plea but later recanted. There are a lot of sources out there but never has anything been proven.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Earl_Ray

Head down to the "denial of confession" section. Whether or not there was a conspiracy, I just wanted to bring up that it was still questionable about who actually shot Dr. King.
How living in 'Maintenance Mode' can help you improve every aspect of your life