skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article talks a lot about cities now being the domain only of "one-percenters" and "global elite". This is demonstrably false. Consider the UK.

UK's population: 62 million

London population: 8 million

13% of the UK's population, therefore, resides in London. To say that only the "1%" can afford London is clearly not the case.

In France's case, 15% of the population live in Paris.

Perhaps we can't all live in London's Chelsea and whatever the most desirable part of Paris is. But both cities have excellent public transport...
I don't want to undermine this piece too much as I think it is an important issue and what I'm about to say doesn't address all of the details. But I also believe it's an issue that will be partially solved by automated cars. As soon as it becomes palatable to live further from the city and commute; and, to a lesser extent, free up space from car parks, this problem will be dramatically reduced.
> but in many areas it is not a big deal to drill a well and have clean water

Yet that is not how more than a miniscule fraction of houses in less densely built areas gets their water.

> Energy and food are still a big deal, but the mix today is that shipping fuel has less impact on food prices than real estate value (that is, the food at rural stores isn't particularly expensive and they usually aren't that far away). They may be less economical than city stores, but they seem tenable.

The real estate cost is irrelevant to the discussion of the efficiency of urban vs. rural energy and food delivery.
Actually Apple doesn't make the hardware anymore, it relies on external companies to do so.
I guess that promotes no-value projects with the purpose of only to be mentioned in CV, thus polluting the open source world...

I mean, for various reasons, quite a lot of experienced engineers have nothing to show on github or bitbucket, and _really_ contribute to the open source world.
So in short, this guy gets paid enough writing speculative narrative-fictions to live in Paris, but a family with decent incomes and kids can't? Maybe the kids are the difference, or their parents - unlike the writer - aren't nebulously attached to the great black fiscal hole of the financial services industry.
You do realize that Chinese is not even an ethnicity right? I mean, you have Kazakhs, Uighurs, Tibetans, Mongolians, Koreans and even some Russians who all are born in China and have Chinese citizenship.

Saying "the Chinese think blah" is the same as saying "the Americans think blah". So stop with the racist crap.

If he said "the Han do no care about pollution or the environment" then fine, you'd have a great point.
Paris is already the densest city in Europe, with the densest suburbs.
> the reality is that it is bilateral access (both parties must agree).

How do you know this on the basis of the slides alone?
Why don't we tell people their ideas suck?

Well here you are, talking to somebody who's spent months thinking about something from every angle imaginable. And you've given it five minute's thought. Who are you to say their idea sucks? You know nothing about it.

A much better approach is to ask questions. Don't say "your idea sucks", ask "Do you have any users?", don't say "your idea sucks", ask "What sort of growth have you found?" and so on. Eventually you will hit a question where the person doesn't know the answer. Congratulations, you've just helped somebody improve their idea.
I have a hard time believing NSA is monitoring people talking about 'Roswell' and 'illuminati'. It looks more like a made-up list created by various brand of conspiracy theorists.
If you crypt, Dropbox is fine. People need to use encryption. Every popular computer language has encryption routines, scroll through the source code until you find something accessible, twiddle something to personalize it while keeping it functional, perhaps convince yourself it will remain secure, etc, of course be cautious about that. Or simply, there's double encryption, fold it again. Know big 100 meg, gigabyte file size encryption, becomes vulnerable. Wikipedia is the best general crypto introduction I've see.
Lesson 1: How We Can All Be Great Developers
You use Linux for ideological reasons yet you buy Apple hardware? Doesn't make much sense to me.
Facebook Promises 'New Product' at June 20 Event
Might be worth noting if you're going through a recruiter they specifically want an MS word doc so they can remove your contact details and put their logo on your CV. The more shady ones will even add keywords and stuff to your CV.
I have to admit: I am having difficulty parsing it all; and this difficulty is not limited to the current media circus around PRISM.

For example:- last year I heard my grandfather-in-law admit playing a part in a massacre, which I am pretty sure is this one, 60 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lari_Massacre. The story was coming via a translator, so I am not sure of the details, but I got the vague impression that he was one of the organizers. What do you do with information like this? How should I feel? Mostly, I feel confused. Ironically, my wife was working with the FCO legal advisers when the survivors of abuses committed during British rule originally sued - (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/05/mau-mau-victims-...). Funny how the tentacles of past misdeeds reach to the future! Perhaps blown by that ill wind of legend?

Moving on to more contemporaneous misdeeds, when I bore mute witness the UN happily paying off drug dealers in West Africa: http://reliefweb.int/report/guinea-bissau/un-peacebuilding-f... ... not that the alternatives were any prettier, but still: When you deal with all the evil and mess of the world, you get a bit tainted yourself. As per my grandmother's folksy aphorism: "When you throw a glove in mud, the mud doesn't get 'glovey'. "

Compared to all the evil that is out there, PRISM seems pretty sweet and innocent - and, to be honest, the revelations were hardly a surprise since the (phone metadata bit) was leaked (or obliquely hinted at least) to me over 12 months ago.

So: I think my sense of unease is more strongly related to our collective capacity for evil than anything else.
Some work pretty well by waving, if spinning isn't going to work. The adafruit POV kit (I believe its on version 3 now) is a classic in that genre.
The pollution in Beijing was really bad this winter, its not something that the government can ignore anymore. We will definitely see some changes next year, its only matter if they go far enough.
I think part of the problem is just geography. A city like Boston or Seattle has a lot of room for suburbs, so if you have less money, you can go further out. In SF, you can only go South, otherwise you have to cross the bay. San Francisco, as someone else writes here, has a housing supply problem.
"Apple didn't even have any lobbyists until Tim Cook became CEO."

I don't think that's true. From personal anecdote, I've met one of Google's European lobbyists and during the conversation he spoke about how his counterparts in Apple worked. If they had people in Europe, I'm sure they had them in the US. Perhaps they don't spend much on lobbying but it seems almost foolish not to have people on the ground when you're as big a company as Apple. If only to keep an ear to the ground regarding political winds (who wants to be blindsided by regulatory changes?).

Edit: This doesn't mean they were 'cozy' with anyone, I'm just pointing that they likely existed.
Ask HN: When is the right time to quit work and be a freelancer? 
Hello.

I work as a junior Python developer, and seeing many of you guys who are freelancer makes feel like being overused in this job which undoubtedly I love and all, but nothing matches the joy of working for yourself at your own pace.

The question or questions are:

1- when do you think it's time to quit your job and start your own company.

2- if you're a freelancer, how do you manage your time? What do you do when don't get a job for a while? Is it worthy of the feeling that is you're definitely getting your paycheck at the end of month?

Thanks.
Windows 8 seems to have magical printer support. My printer was just there, I could print... no anything required. It seemed to install the drivers as soon as it saw it on the network. (Apparently this isn't so nice if the computer reboots when trying to install drivers magically)
Not only humans, wasps take advantage of these poor creatures.

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

While i am a moderate supporter of animal rights, i wouldn't go so far as to claim this is 'enslavement'
Is there a jurisdiction on the planet where data is safe from domestic wiretapping [1] (i.e. international espionage not withstanding)?

Serious question.

1. Clarification: I mean warrantless wiretapping.
Anyone know if there's a list of the project ideas (some of which it sounds like became startups) from previous classes? I've looked around on Google but didn't find any such list. It would be interesting just to see what some of the ideas have been and which ones got traction...
>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?

I don't find this an issue with vim using syntastic. When I save, I get notified in the gutter of issues like this and then I can use the official go vim support to do things like :Drop to remove the import without even navigating to the imports section. Syntastic picks up on most issues before you even think of compiling.

>There doesn’t seem to be a way to declare a constant array, what in a Java class I’d call final static String[] COLS = {"Red", "Blue"};

Constants in Go are evaluated at compile time and arrays don't exist at compile time. You can manage at the package level by using a unexported variable then exporting a function that returns it.
I don't tell people their ideas suck because the Internet has proven time and time again that success is often less about the idea and more about the execution.
The 15% you are quoting is for the 'Greater Paris', i.e. Paris and its suburbs, both rich and poor. The intramuros, i.e. inside the city limits, population of Paris as described in the article is about 2 millions people, about 3% of the population. We are closer to the 'few percenters'.
And you don't believe your data passes through a "communications provider"?

By the argumentation on your page, almost none of the electronic data targeted by the data retention directive would in fact be retained if the directive is not also applied to data that merely transit a providers network, given that the vast majority of e-mail addresses in use today are not hosted by "communications providers". If that is indeed an actual loophole, it will be closed quickly if/when everyone realizes that they're not getting the data they expect.

This is in any case a minor point, as in terms of dealing with backup data, it's the two first points of my message that are by far the most serious. And I don't think they're that serious, in that I don't really believe there are any suitable alternatives that are safe enough that you can prevent surveillance based on location, so you'll depend on the crypto, and the combination of the two makes the location of the data rather moot.
Regardless of autonomous cars, proximity and density will always be a decisive feature of cities, which is what allows humanity to thrive and innovate. The fact that only the rich people can afford to live in the center of the city is a problem, because it becomes harder to aggregate human ingenuity and innovation.

In fact, I believe autonomous cars will increases a city's ability to network, because it increases people's ability to aggregate into a single place. It will also make the city an even more desirable place to live and work, because autonomous vehicles reduce the pain of moving around in the city.
That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
I run linux into Dropbox. It's tedious having to manually select/enter files without the dragging the others get. There's language Dropbox API modules that automate this too.
I was more objecting the very marketing-y-and-not-very-truthy quote.

That said, digging a bit more into Jottacloud does not make me any more likely to use the service, for anything I would be concerned to store at, say, Dropbox:

Their FAQ is (intentionally?) vague. How do they encrypt stuff?

"all datatraffic between your computer and Jottacloud is encrypted with 256 bits AES high grade encryption, which makes it virtually impossible for unauthorized persons to use the information being sent.".

And then:

"If you log into www.jottacloud.com it’s possible to download, view pictures and share files with friends and colleagues"

Right, so they would have the keys anyway.
I interpreted the article to mean that the lobbyist Cook hired was the first one, but I guess it doesn't really say that. It does say that Apple maintained a very low profile in Washington until recently, and still spends about 1/4 what Facebook does in lobbying.
I often switch between languages and it takes google just a handful of queries to catch up and I can start omitting the language again...

I sometimes wonder if they have special case code for programming-related subjects, but I guess its more general than that. Clever googlers!
I was responding to you calling the distribution networks costly. If rural distribution ends up costing less, the efficiency isn't something you are going to get people to give much consideration.

This is why I then start talking about making more good cities, because that should presumably remove some of the costs that are more or less associated with lack of supply.
Datalagringsdirektivet is not applicable for most providers in Norway, only the big carriers like Telenor, Telia-Sonera/Netcom and Tele2. The practical rule is that if you have a ASN-number (Data Center) and you provide the relevant services, then you need to follow it. The email service I work for, Runbox, is not. Probably not Jotta either.
On topic, the best critique I have read of the failed hope that is Obama: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/15/broken-promise-b...
Yeah start with that stupid Eiffel Tower its a bloody eyesore!
Django-registration 1.0 is out
High School, College, a Job, and Leave a Beautiful Corpse?
According to Wikipedia[1], Paris is the 34th densest city in the world. 5 French cities are denser, and all of them are Paris' suburbs. Only 3 non-French European cities are denser than Paris.

Your comment lacks foundations.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popula...
Anyone capable of making the "next penicillin" or "a carbon-free plane" is going to do so without the need for a £1m prize. The implementation would make them hundreds of times more.

£1m is 0.00014% of the UK government's annual budget. This sort of "motivation" is nothing more than a ridiculous platitude that enables the government to pretend they're supporting technology and innovation with practically no cost to them. Frankly, it's an insult to anyone remotely entrepreneurial. 100 prizes of £10,000 would very likely do a lot more for industry, encourage people to get behind something imaginative, and perhaps would be enough of a start to someone who could eventually solve one of these problems.
I just poked around the AMCC website. Apparently they are claiming 80GB/s memory bandwidth and 10Gbe NIC on-chip. They also say something about "Coherent terabit fabric" and "ultra-low latency", so it sounds like they really are tackling the comms seriously. And looking at their product portfolio which mostly consists of communications processors, it looks like they have what it takes to make bits move fast.
Remittances Play Significant Role in Philippines
The article implies that it's a big problem for commodities to go to the people willing to pay the most for them. Housing is just another commodity; is it surprising that the people who derive the most value from being in a city center (professionals in finance, law, business) end up paying the most for the privilege?
How is this any different from the endless and dehumanizing suburban sprawl pioneered by America? Frankly, you're better off taking a train from the suburbs in London than you will be self-driving cars unless they can solve the congestion problem. The thing is, a lot of people want to live in the city, because they like to, you know, live in a city, not just work there.
DConf 2013: LDC (the LLVM-based D compiler) by David Nadlinger
Cops Plead Guilty to Helping Plant Drugs on Woman Sexually Harassed by Judge
Yeah, the final comment on the bug is also from Mr Bray, and isn't exactly a "thanks".

I was quite surprised by that combination after reading the diary blog post, they don't really match up.
Because it's in my interest not to tell them. What do I gain by telling them their idea sucks? I have an uncomfortable interaction and I potentially make an enemy, or at least someone who now finds it uncomfortable to be around me.

What do I lose by being "nice"? Nothing. How does it serve my interests to go out on a limb and tell it like it is?
So don't email that list to someone if you've not drawn attention to yourself so far. :)
The way company law is set up in Norway, you cant as a board member do anything else than what is best for the company you are board member in. Doing something different would mean you could be held responsible. They could fire the board, but the next board have the same rules to go by.
I think this might be slight hyperbole but can you link to some cases/incidents for support?

Cheers.
OMG a Le Corbusier nephew. Right, let's raze all historical cities, and build stell and glass cubes. And while we're at it, let's burn a few books and paintings too...
Even if you don't understand it, if you stick to a reasonably low words per minute, you can write down dots and dashes and simply look them up in a table. Unless you're pretty dense you only have to look up the two letters "dash dot dash dot (pause) dash dash dot dash" about 20 times before you memorize it for life. I did something like this with some Russian ham radio satellites, um, quite a long time ago. It turns out their telemetry stream didn't use the entire morse alphabet which caused me some trouble later on LOL.

Back in the "old days" PCs that failed their BIOS boot had a whole symphony of weird beeps to indicate which failure mode applies. So two short low pitched beeps and one long high pitched beep meant "video bios missing" or something (specific example made up, general idea does apply). I always thought morse code would be an infinitely better user interface. Although I had internet access, this was before widespread adoption of it and well before the invention of the www so you can imagine how much more useful plain english morse code would be for error codes vs seemingly random beep patterns.

I also used to own a pre-ODB2 car which output its "code failures" by a light flashing method very much like the article describes. Three flashes short pause 4 flashes long pause meant engine computer undervolt failure aka its time to replace the five year old battery, or at least it was something very similar.
In a similar vein, the complexity and suggested data structures for the input sizes: http://www.infoarena.ro/blog/numbers-everyone-should-know
> "Well here you are, talking to somebody who's spent months thinking about something from every angle imaginable." (emphasis added)

Sadly, I don't think this is often the case and it's a difficult thing for anyone to do. You're inherently limited by the angles you can think of (which is why you should get out and talk to people).

You're advice is spot-on though. I've been in a number of conversations where probing with questions and getting very well thought out answers has convinced me that the founder really know's what he's talking about.
This reads like an impersonation of a David Brooks and Tom Friedman column.

Can't wait for next week in which he dedicates an entire column to what his Parisian cab driver told him.
Suddenly.. I'm on Facebook.
Yes. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing; if you know a bit of mathematics, Shamir's method is particularly elegant.
"Plutocratisation": Great neologism.
Big data meets the bard: using technology to study literature
Are you planning on making this a paid service or will it stay free?
Also based on his G+ he seems to be a big fan of High Res displays, something both the Pixel and new MBP's have.
> To say that only the "1%" can afford London is clearly not the case.

ORLY. Consider the London borough of Camden. "40% of children are under the poverty line, but average house prices have just hit £1m." http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/21/mervyn-k... http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/05/hous-m24.html?view=p...

In other words, you can afford to "live" in London so long as you pay your salary on rent for a small, shabby flat and give up hope of settling or owning in London. You'll be the underclass who can always be moved on or moved out next year if the owners decide. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/feb/13/london-council-relo...
According to Wikipedia[1], Paris is the 34th densest city in the world. 5 French cities are denser, and all of them are Paris' suburbs. Only 3 non-French European cities are denser than Paris.

Then let make Paris even more dense than Paris' suburbs.
It does, but they dont offer email or phone services. So they are also exempt. We use Blix: https://www.blix.com/

What you call a loophole, was no secret in the hearings about the new law. The government wanted this implemented mainly for the phone providers. They understood that foreign email providers like Gmail and Hotmail that most use in Norway, could not be under the law in any practical way, so they restricted who this is applicable to.
Most young Londoners cannot afford to buy property anywhere near the center of the city any more. I employ several, and see this first hand.

In 2001 I bought a flat for (at the time quite a lot of money!) £200,000. I could just about afford it on a developer salary at the very peak of the dot-com boom. I sold it a few years later. Now that flat is worth about £700,000.

This article is accurate as far as London is concerned.
Just like very strong people aren't usually aggressive, really smart people aren't socially aggressive. Once you get past the point of "I can bash your head in and you know it", there's no use for overt aggressiveness.

Really smart people are helpful, appreciative and generally nice. The almost smart are the dangerous ones.
The 1% buy multiple properties in many different cities. There have been articles about how the City of London has neighborhoods of empty luxury apartment developments owned by various sheikhs and russian/central asian commodities oligarchs.

In SF when you buy a house you are also competing with dozens of investors from overseas paying cash who don't have any intention of ever living there. I believe that the Vancouver real estate market was also affected by overseas investors in a similar way, making it the least affordable housing market in North America.

Multiply this speculative real estate investment by 1% of 7 billion and it could very well be a major factor in pushing up rents, especially in certain super desirable cities like Paris. There's about 1.7 million residences there. Even if only 1% of the 1% want a pied a terre there, the rest of the people trying to live there would feel the squeeze.

I have personally seen the effects of this. When I lived in on South 4th street in Williamsburg Brooklyn in 1998, my floor through apartment was $700/m. Now the same apartment is renting for $3700 a month. That particular street is still a dump! The only people I know who can afford to live in nice apartments in SoHo or Tribeca are the children of super rich people.