skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For context, I'm 34, and like many around here a bright teenager. One thing that I really missed was story coherency, the careful assembly of motivations, events, themes, and characters into a cohesive whole. I don't even know how to describe my standards for a good story as a youth, but they're wildly different than they are now, and in particular many of the things I enjoyed then I now consider incoherent nonsensical trash. Things like Star Trek Voyager, which I always found weak, but now I can explain that weakness, or Final Fantasy X, which merely slightly bothered me at the time, which I now realize is because it was so bad it managed to penetrate the thick fog of blissful ignorance I was living in, but only a little. On the other hand, many of the original Star Trek episodes actually make a great deal more sense to me now than they used to. (It's fun to read the Blish novelizations of them; without the campy 60s videography and terrible effects, the true quality of the underlying stories comes out more clearly.)

I woke up to this around 25 or so. It was actually Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV series, of course, not the forgettable movie) that tripped this for me; I realized I cared far more about the characters than any campy horror show had any right to make me care, and I began to wonder why, and poke into the mechanics of how that was done. That turned out to be a longish and interesting journey.

(I know I've mentioned several media that aren't "reading" here, but it trivially applies there as well.)
You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

You think you're winning but you're treading water at best. On the MacLeod pyramid, you're hard-core Clueless. Put the Kool-Aid down!

I'm willing to posit that the relative high rent prices has give our industry to greatest boost of all in town.

What? That's money being wasted, not progress.

Silicon Valley was built when the land was cheap. It's now expensive and still somewhat strong, but that's an artifact of former greatness. Even if people move quickly, the patterns that attract and repel talent are slower to move (decades) and the chickens haven't come home to roost yet. Trust me: the land price problem is very bad for San Francisco's future.

This city is still the Gold Rush, always has been.

You don't have to have landlords making you poor to want to be rich.

This city is fueled by alcohol and general hedonism, which is fun!

Dude, San Francisco hedonism's got nothing on New York or L.A. or Miami, and none of those cities are regarded as tech hubs.

Just realize that we are the kings of this age of this city, and we are the last ones who would be at threat

You realize that 25-year-old VCs with no discernible merit (but the family connections that got them there) are making more than you will at age 50, and that those VP/NTWTFKs (Non-Technical Who The Fuck Knows) are getting 0.75% equity slices to your 0.03%, right?

You can't buy a house because of the real kings of that place and age: the VCs and those horrible executive implants that the VCs bring into your company (i.e. the VCs' underachieving friends who get positions in what you worked your ass off to build).
Saying that Snowden will receive a fair shake today is also pretty ridiculous.
Education of girls and urbanization are the most effective ways to slow the birth rate. Without doing that, environmental preservation is not going to be possible.
Yes, have heard good things about MBP trackpad.

My Dell Precision lives on laptop stand, use mechanical KB and trackball mouse -- detest trackpads ;-)

W530 is beast-able, but prefer Precision series, dual fans are big plus with quad core and Nvidia chips.
It can be spun other ways too. Snowden could be heralded as "proof" that China is better than the US.

"US citizen flees oppressive government, seeking refuge
in China."

I'm sure that this incident will also enter the lexicon of North Korea when they try to bring up the bad things that US has/may have done in order to justify their own actions.
Government Denies That NSA Listens To Domestic Calls Without Legal Authorization
Its amazing in this day and age that people don't get how bad these things are to leave open.
Let's be clear though: "cannot" for the government has always meant "legally not allowed to" and not "technically not allowed to". The FBI was technically able to wiretap phones even after it was banned, for example, and you've already mentioned CALEA.

It's possible there are technical software restrictions within NSA and not just "analysts are trained to comply with policy". I would like to think those technical backups are in-place, but I don't know if anyone from NSA has confirmed that.
Except for cops.
Foreign state actors are not subject to your national laws. You need to protect your data in depth.
As someone approaching 30, but with very clear memory of their mdi-to-late teens, I will disagree. I did not pursue any of the "shallow" things in high school and I do not at all regret that.

I had only a few high school friends, I neither attended prom nor anther school-related party, never joined a sport-team[1]. Fast forward 11-15 years I have great friends (only a handful of whom were my classmates), am engaged to a wonderful woman, and have no dearth of hobbies.

What do I think was most important? Learning, pursuing things that were interesting to me and cultivating a passion for them (note how so many people are in a quixotic search for pre-existing passions, i.e., in a quarter-life crisis?), interacting with older individuals (they took me seriously, did not make fun of the way I dressed, did not mock my accent or my lastname, did not beat and otherwise bully me, etc...), taking AP classes as well as classes at near-by colleges (the last two activities opened my eyes to new subjects, taught me to learn, and convinced me to pursue a higher education), etc...

I regret not paying enough attention to academic subjects that I _thought_ did not interest me (in college, it turned out that they interested me a great deal), assuming that I had no chance of getting into certain colleges or paying for them, not cultivating an interest in topics like philosophy or history early enough (sticking to just computing, etc...), not participating in "nerdy" clubs (like robotics, programming competitions, etc...)

Yet on the "social" front I've zero regrets: it is much easier to make friends when you've got more in common with people then a school district boundary; dating is much easier when you're independent (not living with your parents, not reliant on a group of friends for all of your social outings), well read, educated (whether formally or self-taught), and otherwise interesting. I don't feel I've missed anything by foregoing that part of life.

[1] Caveat: if you do enjoy a sport, by all means join a sport team or play intramurally. Just don't play a sport for the sake of playing a sport or for a college resume (universities want well rounded student bodies, but they don't necessarily require that every student be "well rounded").
Yeah, you're right - an East Coast EC2 instance is about 220ms, but it's a very stable 220. No problem using SSH through that, and you can use mosh if it really bothers you. It's really much more pleasant than I'd expected, being the other side of the world and all.
Manning fits the definition of a whistleblower just fine, he brought a bunch of injustices to public attention.

As for not facing the death penalty, he looks like he's halfway at deaths door already, they're just taking their time about it. The world is watching the way Manning is treated and drawing its own conclusions from that.
The week before the Snowden story broke, the news was full of foreign spying against US industry and government. How is changing our laws going to stop that?
National Security Letters require that the recipient not say that they receive them. This may only seem a "lie by omission" but it's pretty clearly authorizing a lie by commission when an entity is otherwise required to answer a question like "who have you been spying on"

Q: Who have you given information about Bob to?
A: No one ... except if I did given information to the NSA, I couldn't tell you.

"[NSLs] contain a gag order, preventing the recipient of the letter from disclosing that the letter was ever issued."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter

Edit: And with secrets laws we also don't which laws might require even more.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/2004/11/111404.html
...and because of this, they have refused to make copies of documents that I have written myself. Not sure if the policies have become more nuanced in recent years, but more than once I had to remove the (c) in the footer of my documents before they would make copies of it for me, no matter how much ID I showed them. I understand why the clerks would be trained that way; was just a very strange side-effect. Felt like living in a minor Kafka piece.
What makes those chrome tabs? The extra wasted space?

You may be able to do that in Sublime Text 2 with a theme (not positive, but I use themes that modify the tab appearance now).

edit: Here's a theme that has what looks like "Chrome tabs" to me: http://devthemez.com/themes/zenburn
Frankly I think that level of privacy control has little appeal to the mainstream. You could of course argue that modded Android ROMs also have little appeal to the mainstream, and so adding non-mainstream features to modded ROMs is cool. (And I'd totally agree with you.)

But I suspect that Kondik might aspire to get privacy features like this into AOSP. Something like an all-or-nothing incognito mode has precedent in places like Chrome and Firefox, so I feel like something like this would have a reasonable chance of making it in. A fine-grained permissions system likely wouldn't.

However, I personally would like a little more fine-grained control. I might trust a location-centric app with my GPS (or at least recognize that the app is useless without it), but not want to give it access to my contacts.

Note that CM7 did have a fine-grained permissions system. It wasn't as extensive as OpenPDroid, but you could flat-out reject individual permissions given to apps on CM7. Unfortunately it often caused crashes, as the apps weren't built to be denied so harshly. The fake-/no-data approach of incognito (also one of the options that OpenPDroid offers) probably won't cause any compat headaches.
For rape, not espionage.
Re the complaints about how idealized the hardware chapters are: http://www.amazon.com/Computation-Structures-Electrical-Engi... also covers the full stack from transistors to operating systems, but with much more depth on the lower levels. It's pretty old, though.
man that article was a pain to read for sure. One of those that couldve done with a TL;DR - "so this producer thinks that loss of DVDs killed hollywood" .. but still leaving a lot of questions for such a link-baity article completely unanswered.
I think the relevant claim is "Does the OS work well with the hardware it claims to support".

For OS X, the answer to this is yes.
For Linux, the answer is "Maybe, with some tinkering".
I couldn't agree more--OpenPDroid is great, and I would suggest anyone who values privacy and who is technically inclined give it a try.

Unfortunately, we won't be seeing it baked into CyanogenMod. CyanogenMod used to have a feature to disable specific permissions back in the CM7 days. As I understand it, Google insinuated that CyanogenMod would likely be banned from the Android Market if that feature continued; it wasn't ported to CM9. That's why I imagine this new incognito feature isn't configurable and can only be turned fully on or fully off.

Still, this is a step in the right direction. There's a lot of room to stand up to Google about data privacy right now, and I'm glad to see a big player doing it.
So is it okay to do this? Even diplomacy has laws, you know.

These actions are in breach of Articles 27 and 30 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (of which the US and UK are signatories):

Article 27:
1.The receiving State shall permit and protect free communication on the part of the mission for all official purposes.

Article 30:
1.The private residence of a diplomatic agent shall enjoy the same inviolability and protection as the premises of the mission.
2.His papers, correspondence and his property, shall likewise enjoy inviolability.
You need to read more history. Without commenting on Snowden, I think the US is a substantially freer nation then it was in the time of MLK.
Useless triva here: there is a 'statue' of Yuri in Moscow. I always called it the Rocketboy.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Yuri_Gaga...
I think the OP is just young and is trying to throw his hat into the "theory" vs "practical" debate that most of us probably find rather pedestrian at this point; perhaps this is a big discovery for him. I agree with you, of course, that it is overly dismissive of engineering coursework. If you listen to people on HN, college has absolutely no substantive value whatsoever, there are only a few that admit it might have some social value. Interestingly enough, most of those people claim that blogs and courses on Udacity or Coursera are the "real" places to get information (which is odd considering they are fine product but are simply faint, faint copies of university style education).

As well, I find it a bit assuming those who thing we should be focusing on teaching students "real, unsolved problems" when ... they struggle with solving the solved problems. I think there's a place for both but there's this "rally against the establishment" thing that goes on.
Why "response to criticism" - is that prevalent in your corporate culture? Sounds like a great reason to walk out of an interview.
Another book in the same space is "Understanding Digital Computers, by Forrest Mims, originally sold by Radio Shack. It's dated, written in 1978, but the basics are still relevant, taking the reader from the definition of a bit, though binary numbers, Boolean logic and eventually to a complete microcomputer and its programming.

I read this book as a teenager and I remember it giving me my first "aha!" moment of understanding how computers really work. In my experience, the prerequisites for understanding the book are pretty low, but the knowledge within is sophisticated.
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.

I'm not saying that the US will send in a strike team to Hong Kong (or Pakistan or another political heavy-weight) over Snowden. I was operating under the assumption that most of the countries with no extradition to the US might not have the political clout for "anyone to care" if the US sent in a team to capture or assassinate Snowden[1]. I actually went an took a look at the extradition list[2][3], and it seems there are quite a few countries that I could see him stay in without the US caring enough to send in a covert team.

[1] The assassinate is just to drive the point home about how little people might care (other than politicians everywhere decrying the act to gain possible political favour). I agree that the US is probably more interested in putting him on trial than 'taking him out.'

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_law_in_the_United_S...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_extradition_...
Well fine there's cloning a phone, setting a bogus or duplicate IMEI, or simply buying cheap throw-away phones. Here, have a look at a really terribly done video of one electronics market in HK. One of many. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxTR5X0PIP4
As others have noted, there is a lot wrong with these plans. I just want to focus on one point here -

Regarding the $1,017 for incorporation via LLC. You can incorporate for a lot less than that. See: Legalzoom.com

Keep in mind that will immediately add overhead costs and a little time consumption to maintaining the company / keeping it in good legal standing. It might be worth doing because of the bit of a liability shield you will acquire with it. Personally, I'd go as far as possible without spending that money (maybe at least until you have a few customers).
It's really curious how cloud services companies could be doing all this and more to build confidence in their services. Imagine, for example, NFC-based key signing parties - just touch your smartphones.

But not a word, yet. Not one word.
Oh I'm glad there is now a spokemen for "The Chinese People". Didn't realise you had a single voice, who frequented HN.

In all seriousness, some tips:

- Stop being racist

- go and learn a little bit about Chinese political landscape, and modern history

- Reduce your ignorance.

The Chinese (government) care greatly about the environment and the people, and that is why they have year-on-year improved hundreds of millions of lives in both health and wealth for the past 60 years.

Yes, they are a 1 party communist political system... but so what, judge by action, not ideology.
Howto hack investing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dogs_of_the_Dow#Results
maybe just flush it down the toilet, save time
If "listen to" is something that a person does, does that allow that "speech recognition/transcription" is something a machine can do? If I were servailing en masse, I'd prefer to start with some machine learning filters against all that audio. Is it legally a search if a human didn't do it? What if it's meant to establish "foreignness" percentage? I've noted a lot of "no one's listening to your phone calls," and it seems the sort of "least untruthful" denial a clever government might use.
"not only that. there is an emergency kill switch. if you release the patch i will pull the switch and no one can use the software. your exploit will not work if i do that. the plugin will become useless until i turn it back on.

kevin"

I am really scared by some kinds of people who develop forum and e-commerce software.
Children Painting in Gezi Park [video].
vim, tmux, zsh, mutt (ppl & ldap for addressing), vimperator, qemu, pass, homebrew, seahorse, general programming languages, general unix utils, pandoc (& LaTeX), ffmpeg, kdenlive, lots of associated plugins and helper scripts, keyremap4macbook, tarsnap, rtorrent, nginx, plex. Probably much more in the future (homebrew's repo is huge); I'm just recently making the switch from Arch.

I'll need a better free & open cloud sync solution, but I was using Dropbox on Linux anyway.
"The same way that VCs invests in 50 shitty startups and expect to make maybe one phenomenal exit, it’s unreasonable to expect every or even many startups to make something truly revolutionary and socially impactful."

I might agree with this, but if it's the case, then some folks need to stop pretending each and every hot internet startup is Disruptive, Revolutionary and Socially Impactful. And the weight given to What SV Entrepreneurs Think should probably be reduced if most of them are just building better ways to order a pizza.

There's nothing wrong with coming up with a better way to order a pizza. But it doesn't make you a noble visionary of things to come.
OT: Jeopardy screens in Australia?
There are two major types of problems while programming. Firstly how to break down a bigger problem into set of smaller problems. Secondly how to solve small problems quickly and efficiently. Large scale design question represent the former. Type three interview questions test the later. While raw IQ may he correlating with it this is not what big tech companies are looking for IMHO.
I'm sure Kim Dotcom thought his move to NZ had "worked pretty well".
Or why do you even need to track? I have disabled tracking in my web server and I am not really feeling missing out on the user statistics on my puny blog.

There's also the possibility of saving the data for a shorter time period if you really need it, like to detect attacks and such.
You read San Francisco is the center of the universe because there really is a network effect for software development. Companies looking for a bigger pool of talent to draw from relocate to the area, post jobs, and bring in yet more developers. On your South Florida island can you find someone with ten years of Cobol or five years programming 12F675s? If I started a company there, how many people could I hire that have solid experience in Scala? Not "I played around with it after work" experience, but real experience?
The problem is that the 4th has not, in my opinion, been satisfied. I'm not happy with all of my data being sucked into a database which is a very tempting target. The administration does not think this violates the 4th, I think it does.

But even if we grant their theory that it does not violate the 4th, there is no question that searches have been conducted under any definition of the term that can and do accidentally sweep up Americans. Proving that it happened to you, individually, is very hard. But it happens. The 4th is violated. And once it is, we're dependent upon the good will and honesty of the government to forget what they saw that they were not supposed to do so.

The standard which I want to see for all parts of the Constitution - including the 4th - is that the burden of proof is on the government to guarantee that no wrong is done. That, in another context, is the whole point of habeas corpus. The same standard should be applied here.

As a US citizen who grew up in another country, 50.1% confidence does not comfort me. As a person who has seen people with privileged information who were not supposed to leak it leak it in lots of other contexts, I have little trust that government spooks are going to be better. (In one example, a stalker bribed the CA DMV to find the address of the car owned by a woman I know.) As a person who has seen databases abused, I know how easy that is to do once you've centralized data. (One amusing example involved a woman who worked in a bank who did a search for all single men in a particular age range with incomes over a certain threshold in a particular geographic area...) And once you've centralized the data, I think it is just a question of time until bad actors manage to get their hands on copies of it all.

Yes, I know that the people who are doing this are convinced that they are saving the world. But in the long run, their actions scare me more than the terrorists that they claim to be protecting me from.
What do Bosnia, Bulgaria and Brazil have in common?
No that's not why I write. You don't have any clue about it.
"Go back and read some of your stuff in another 5 years, and then another 5. And tally the face palms."

If you could run the experiment the other direction, I wonder how different the results would look. That is, what proportion is "growth" and what is simply "difference".
And the military.
Frankly, I think the offending comment is insulting to the intelligence, as well as to the (collective) experience of people who were the target of racial discrimination laws. I don't want to be political about it, but HN as a community is sometimes subject to an alarming degree of demographic myopia.