skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sun used to use the catchy slogan "write once, run anywhere" to refer to this property...
How to ensure freelance transaction is safe on both sides?
I'm finishing up a WordPress site for a client on Elance, and it's a fixed-price job with all of the payment being released at the end. However, this client would also like me to set up the site on their hosting account as part of the job. From the client's profile, they have paid multiple people for work, so I trust him, but I want to protect myself. How do I ensure that I get paid and he gets what he paid for? Do I send him half the files for the site for 50% payment and then send the other half shortly after for the other half? I was thinking maybe I could upload the site to my own server so he can view it, pay me 50%, then get the other half after setting it up on his hosting account.
Initial comments...I'd like to be able to add the weather app twice, and specify locations not just 'my location' (I commute NY/Chicago

Next, stocks app gives no indication of time of change... 1 day?

Great idea, had high hopes but so far, not quite there
Ah, got it. Looks great! Looking forward to the next version update.
I'd like to point out that one of the main reasons the airplane got shot down is it's transponder had the same signal as Iranian Fighter jets since it passed one before take off on the tarmac. (Discovery's Mayday did an episode on this accident)
MariaDB certainly seems like the path of least resistance in this case.
I'd also be surprised if any of that crime is counted towards regional crime statistics.
I think everyone struggles with this - building something is a lot easier than building something popular.

Advertising may be an option. Find relevant communities you can be part of. Write useful, industry-related content and share it with industry-related blogs. Affiliate systems might work. For software/apps/games/etc 3rd party marketplaces, publishers, distributors might help.

Persistance is the main factor though. Overnight success is usually backed by hundreds or thousands of overnight experimentation and failure.
Or maybe the people are OK with getting to choose to smoke or decide to own handguns or decide to go on the road but feel strongly that it is not permissible to let up on terrorism just because a simple cost/benefit analysis says that we statistically could.

Imperial Japan made the very same mistake in the lead-up to American entry into WWII. They knew of the industrial capability of the U.S. but figured that with hard enough blows in a quick enough time that they could negotiate a settlement in their favor.

What happened instead was that Japan ensured that American public opinion would support their defeat and ensured it would be essentially unconditional, no matter how long it took and however much it cost.
I was recalling your take on taxes (and some other things): you can't possibly make them airtight, there'll always be loopholes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5734713

Anyway, I'm curious to know more on why you think CU was the right decision. I advise watching all 31 minutes of the Trevor Potter vs. Floyd Abram debate if you have time and if you haven't watched/read it already.

I was very sad that ACLU came out in support of CU, I think they were wrong on this one.
Yeah, if you think the US is going to go fascist you're living in a fantasy land. You wouldn't just need a depression, you would need the whole fabric of society to unravel and become as poor as pre WW2 Germany.

No country with a high GDP has turned authoritarian. Authoritarianism doesn't work in wealthy countries.
So what are my real options for avoiding the JVM on new projects? Go? I'm not into functional save a bit if Scala. But not willing to invest time in something like Haskell.

I also don't feel like Python is an option. Seeking more performance from a single node is what he me move to Java from Python for many of the the things I work on.
Damn! I read this as "How to cash in secrecy rules surveillance policy"

Please herewith be guided thereto accordingly:

"Big Money has helped create that disconnect, even though Big Money is somehow written out of the story"
Hey Greg, we met a few years back in SF. Two [edit: three] small bits of feedback: I would suggest that you consider browsing without JavaScript (I guess a relatively huge segment of your audience, re: privacy concerns?) and also have obvious contact details or info about Blekko itself visually accessible from the main page. A ~live sparklinesque graph of search volumes or other upward metrics might also appeal and provide free marketing. [Third point: your default/suggested searches are culturally insensitive. How about putting in some consulted time for topic recommendations for non-US countries?] PS. Congrats on the recent round of investment!
"having to register to aid in central planning"

Wow. I'm pretty sure that aiding central planning wasn't the goal of resident registration.
I think you missed the Q&A with Snowden.

""" Q. Can analysts listen to content of domestic calls without a warrant?

A. NSA likes to use "domestic" as a weasel word here for a number of reasons. The reality is that due to the FISA Amendments Act and its section 702 authorities, Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as "incidental" collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications. Even in the event of "warranted" intercept, it's important to understand the intelligence community doesn't always deal with what you would consider a "real" warrant like a Police department would have to, the "warrant" is more of a templated form they fill out and send to a reliable judge with a rubber stamp. """

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-n...
What could a product or service do that would solve this problem for you?
Whatever. Look at their voting records. The Pauls are often the only ones voting against the majority on a bill. Actions are more important than words, and that's what's so disappointing about President Obama.
Steve Gibson presented a good case[1] that the companies are telling the truth, but that NSA nevertheless has the equivalent of full access by tapping the tier-1 or -2 router nearest to each. Fiber-optic "splitter" makes the codename "Prism" cogent.

[1]http://twit.tv/show/security-now/408 for audio and relevant links
Indeed. And I'm comfortable lumping those xenophobes into the same group as those who believe that we should throw out the 4th Amendment, and have already discarded the 7th (and chunks of several others).
I think you have to start with your target platform. If you want to run in the browser it has compile to JavaScript. That has consequences. If you're targeting mobile phones it has to generate Android or iOS code, preferably both. On the server there are many more choices; targeting LLVM might be a good bet.

Language design is important, but being a good fit for the platform is more important.
There was a pretty dense discussion on the first option at Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5069791/challenge-maximiz...

The most viable target market for self-hosted products are still entreprises ; deployment via virtual images might be the most feasable solution for all parties involved.

Second-best option, specifically for eg. PHP, might be compiling the code into executables (via eg. https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php ), and distributing distro-specific executables.

Re: 3rd option, the specific worry about distributing code in any form isn't piracy (as pointed out by firstprimate, those aren't your customers); rather, blatant ripoffs engaging in marketing-only competition using a rebranded version of your own product.
Do you really believe that no one will ever look at it without proper authorization if it is allowed to be collected?
Actually C++ looks simple compared to Scala. E.g. C++ iterators seem complex and tricky compared to say Lua's.

But let's just look at one element of Scala's truly byzantine iteration logic collection: Iterable

Inherited: Iterable IterableLike Equals GenIterable
GenIterableLike
Traversable GenTraversable GenericTraversableTemplate TraversableLike GenTraversableLike Parallelizable TraversableOnce GenTraversableOnce FilterMonadic HasNewBuilder AnyRef Any

Implicitly: by traversable2opsby MonadOpsby any2stringaddby any2stringfmtby any2ArrowAssocby any2Ensuringby alternateImplicit

Source: http://www.scala-lang.org/api/current/index.html#scala.colle...

..and now explain what all these aspects actually do! And that's just one small element!

And look at the method set of that thing.. Whoa! Again C++ suddenly seems minimalist.
Bob Bemer, often cited as the "Father of ASCII", proposed escape sequences to extend ASCII to handle larger encodings in 1960, pre-standardization. http://www.bobbemer.com/ESCAPE.HTM
Every time I tried it said I was a robot. My ex boyfriend was right!
Let's go the other way then, would the crime rate be zero if the government never obtained any information about anyone?
Microsoft has open sourced F# http://fsharp.org/ and the fsharp.org community is very proactive. As for the CLR, it is an ECMA and ISO standard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Language_Infrastructure
My opinion hasn't changed at all. I don't want to make another thread about me, so if you have more questions, you can ping me via email.
Given their confidence that someone is foreign, I'm sure they have an equally impressive rate with identifying minors.

On the plus side, "think of the children" is usually something everyone can get behind, which is why it's rolled out so often :/
Good luck finding something that doesn't involve SHA-1 at some point. It wasn't merely reviewed or endorsed by NSA, it was invented by NSA.
Probably one of the best video introduction I've seen in a while!
Hi, I'm the author of Docker.

I agree with everything you said about lxc, but I'm not sure how you reached the conclusion that docker is a toy. Since Docker is a portability layer on top of lxc, it automatically benefits from all the awesome work happening in the kernel.

Or do you just use "toy" as a synonymous for "userland"?
I drew the box in the middle of the picture, despite what actual photo is (75% width / height of the original photo), 2 out of 15 times of trial, I get passed.
I don't know about anyone else, but I feel something isn't quite right. "Fearless Journalist Car Crash Into Tree And Dies In Explosion.". http://ktla.com/2013/06/18/driver-killed-in-fiery-car-crash-... Mythbusters have shown this doesn't usually happen. http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/crash-a...

EDIT: I made up the headline.
You should read the article. It prominently features a very interesting description of precisely why their `canonicalise` function turned out to not be idempotent, even though it was meant to be.
I agree completely. Generating traffic / gaining users is different in a lot businesses (to be extreme, you wouldn't try to sell a $50k/mo B2B subscription via banner ads on a porn site).

You're very lucky in the HN is an intelligent community that will most likely spend the time to point out where you can improve and what you're doing wrong with experience in a huge range of businesses. What they can't do is distill that information down so simply that it applies to all businesses.
I'm also using rss2email run on a remote server, feeding to a self hosted email account. I use mail.app, but if I wanted to use Thunderbird or mutt, all I have to do is set up the imap account. Easy peasy.
Concrete numbers would be nice if we had them, but the values offered by true believers are not data driven. In the meantime, I will continue not worrying about getting hit by lightning and, simultaneously, not worry about being eaten by a shark even though one is probably riskier. That seems reasonable to me when there are higher risk things to worry about.
> The only reason you have a constitution is because the "wolves" (the majority) voluntarily and democratically accepts it.

No, this is not the case. The power of the majority over the minority is limited by the constitution - the Bill of Rights proscribes the oppression of the minority at the hands of the voting majority. The constitution itself is protected from the majority (the government) by the credible threat of a well-armed populace who are willing to fight to protect it.
The reason I use 50 years is because people are constantly thinking we're going to go the way of NAZI Germany. People bring up McCarthy and other examples from a completely different era that have a very different context.

When you start looking more than 50 years into the past you need to realize that this was a time when people thought blacks were lesser people than whites, women couldn't vote, many people were illiterate, people didn't have access to information, and maybe most importantly people were much much poorer (just look at the GDP). Now a days people for the most part live comfortable lives, and what we think of as "hard times" now is not the same as before (where it would often mean starvation for a large segment of the population) So to think history will repeat itself seems to me very simplistic.
Some developers seeing more active users running iOS 7 than are still on iOS 5
Fascinating. I have this visual of two strains of bacteria, long segregated, fighting over recently conjoined petri dishes...
apt-get update; apt-get upgrade after you try that on a clone machine. it's not a PITA unless you're super lazy which apparently many people are.
I'm sure they know that what they are doing is slimey. Asking them to change won't have any effect. Hitting them in the wallet is the only influence he has.
I have a background in breaking and designing CAPTCHAs at Microsoft Research; how is this un-OCRable?

If you're finding the objects automatically, you can write an algorithm to do that. If you're doing it manually, your corpus isn't going to be big enough, and I can just pay people to enumerate them.

Plus, for all of the examples I see on your page, you can just find objects of interest, which is fairly trivial, and that's probably going to be what you're looking for.
"Explosion" is likely a dramatization of "caught fire and burned rapidly".
I personally am really excited by Rust, but it's also still a fairly fast-moving target. Lots of work is still being done on the semantics of the language.

It's an industrial research project, basically. When the semantics stabilise I reckon it'll be a technical winner in its chosen domain.
GREAT POINT.
If someone could leak this much information as a sysadmin and do it effectively, how could it have not been sold?
The value of such information would be astronomical to other spy agencies who would be opposed to us.
Another article with additional details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5894449

An important note is that the supposed particle combines two quarks and two antiquarks, so it's not so completely unexplainable as the press article claims. However, no one has yet confirmed a particle like this, then this could be an important discover.
There is a third type of language: languages that people hate so much that no one uses them anymore.

For values of "no one uses" that set up the "like"/"not used" dichotomy, I'd say Perl is in both categories. With any luck Java will get there too one day, even if the JVM doesn't follow it.
My old Sony VAIO 505g claims otherwise.
Well there is company called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorded_Future that was created by Google and the CIA, they just need another partner;)
access to your contacts list using one of Google's APIs

Funny that more and more, email == gmail.

I guess there are a few of us around who still don't use it.
Video from local news crew: http://ktla.com/2013/06/18/driver-killed-in-fiery-car-crash-...
Shouldn't the first discussion be about the legality and constitutionality? If it is deemed to be such, only then does it make sense to be discussing whether it's reasonable. Or are you suggesting that the first part has already been covered?

NB: I'm not a US Person so I don't know the finer points of your legal system.
Because nobody's mentioned it yet, this has already been dealt with. There's a legal precedent:

Ameida-Sanchez v. US

But the search of the petitioner's automobile by a roving patrol, on a
California road that lies at all points at least 20 miles north of the
Mexican border,[5] was of a wholly different sort. In the absence of
probable cause or consent, that search violated the petitioner's
Fourth Amendment right to be free of "unreasonable searches and
seizures."
Come to the dark side. C# has been awsome since about 3.5
> That's why VPSs are killing shared hosting; it's actually easier to manage a bunch of VPSs than a bunch of people with shell accounts on the same box

I came to the same conclusion nearly 5 years ago:

http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/07/10/shared-hosting-is-doomed...

I overreached though. The thing that keeps shared hosting alive is the gigantic momentum of PHP apps like Wordpress, various bulletin boards etc.
Just an educated guess, but I believe he lives in the Philippines as it matches his description.
You think so? I'm not very keen to work on an AI if there's proof of a quick win.
Well then yes, Google stock is like $900/share, But is it currently pre-split $9000/share? No. Google processing `metadata' is arguably not insider trading. Google gets to openly play in Mr Market, NSA does not. Game over.
They tried. Does nobody else remember Perl 6/ parrot?
Lessons From GoodApril's First Hiring Mistake (TS '13)
So it turns out we should have actually listened to Shia LaBeouf back then:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNRgP4FVDzA
Scala is one of the best languages out there if your job is to write code. If you spend a non-trivial amount of time reading it, it depends on which of the sublanguages the original writers used.

If Scala is used as "ML with OO features when really needed but not otherwise" it's quite nice, but I would not advise using Scala without a style guide for a multi-developer project.
> history shows much greater returns from HUMINT.

except that signals intelligence won the battle of the north atlantic and the battle of the pacific and secured an allied victory over the axis powers in the second world war.
terrible comment. joke or completely unsupported assertion?

downvoters: you are the cancer.
I totally agree that success rates are far from the only consideration here.

That said this discussion is very important because many people see things in terms of an overall tradeoff -- between security and privacy; or the amount to invest in different kinds of security. No matter whether we think of it that way, many others do. So it matters a lot if all the government's own examples of "success" are not in fact significant successes.

Also, with the current oversight mechanisms many of the government's statements come down to "trust us". When they are seen to be spinning something like this so blatantly, it erodes trust on anything else.
Rolling Stone has always been a political magazine. Often with a certain je-ne-sais-quois (see Hunter S Thompson), but political never the less.

In the 90s they shifted to a more media-based based magazine, compared to previously and they have endeavoured to move back to being a political magazine.
Easy for one machine. Now do it for 5, or 10, or 100.

Remember that those machines all have slightly different software on them, so it's not simple to automate. Unless you're manage systems with something (eg puppet) it's not just a PITA or a question of laziness - it's a real task that takes up hours, not a quick 15-minute job you run over a coffee break, and that's assuming no breakage.
Oh, my point was that two kinds of names should not be used interchangeably. To store or not the .lower() is a matter of taste.. (Personally, I would store both names, just to avoid wasting computing time)
I wouldn't be so sure about Google vs. Facebook. All they need to do is hire away the right person (or simply conduct corporate espionage themselves).

But as you mention, that monopoly on force is tied to the will of the people.

If the government were to use force in a way other than approved by the laws setup by the peoples' representatives then you're already talking about something much worse on the totalitarian continuum than phone metadata.

And at that point, once the law has no limiting effect on the government anyways they could setup things hundreds of times worse. But they would hardly need to, as they could manufacture evidence of supposed "crimes" if need be and carry out sentences of their choosing for any reason at all.

They would only need things like Prism for dissidents, and dissidents would already assume that things hundreds of times worse were in place and take defensive measures accordingly.

So you're right that the monopoly on force is dangerous, but it has always been so. That's why it requires that tremendous system of transparency, accountability and oversight that you mention.

But given that we're able to provide those controls in the first place (controls which we cannot enforce on private companies, btw!) it makes sense again to ask the question of whether programs like these are both reasonable and effective, whether they can be properly supervised, and if so whether current systems are "proper supervision".

"Monopoly on force" is a warning about government, not the NSA. And especially not in the context of knowledge, where the government is mostly far out of its league compared with the private sector, and it's only getting worse.
First reaction: wow. We are all walking around with fat low-power parallel processing in the form of smartphone GPUs already. A little effort and we can 3D model anything with touch. VJs and other artists of the future will have the true canvas of reality to remix, collected casually in realspace and projected/manipulated in as many dimensions as required.

Reality check. While on the face of it this is potentially huge, let's look at limitations.

The biggest limitation is that it is indoor. Sounds that don't return in the vastness of a field or desert tell you nothing about the space.

Secondly, many conditions can complicate audio collection, including wind. This makes using the technique from drones or other elevated locations somewhat more difficult. Also you are out of luck if you have .. say .. noise-dampening curtains hanging around the room, for instance in a concert hall.

Thirdly, there will be lots of gaps .. for instance standing in the 'head' of a mandlebrot-set style shape comprised of two conjoined circles, the majority-space (or at least portions thereof) would be very unclear.

Fourthly, actively producing sound can be polluting or undesirable and .. failing that .. it would seem that individual, distinguishable sounds are not always present in all environments.
I wonder if NSA really comprehends the breadth of what's going on here. I don't think Snowden was a singularly disgruntled guy who happened to have clearance.

His former coworkers are going to be smart, American, and patriotic too. Some percentage of that class of people will have strong opinions about being complicit in borderline-Constitutional activities. Snowden was the first to come forward, but do you really think there isn't a significant pool of sympathizers still at NSA considering making a similar move?

Requiring cooperation between two analysts does raise the bar somewhat. But I think NSA would be making a mistake to assume that this is an isolated problem, with a tactical solution. I hope that the next guy (or pair) to come forward is as circumspect as Snowden seems to have been. Thank goodness Bradley Manning didn't work at NSA -- that scenario would have real consequences for the world, instead of the noisy internal (and important and necessary) squabbling we'll be doing for the next several months.