skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a non-American responder, are you talking about the original pledge, or the 1948-1954 changes that added the words "under God" to it?[1] The original was formally adopted in 1942 by Congress, prior to this change:

The original:
I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

This change was largely brought about by the realization that the pledge was dangerously close to the NAZI party's way of indoctrinating Nationalism (however Fascistic it was)[2] and that there should be some manner to differentiate between the good, moral, American version and the evil, unethical German version.

Nationalism (and Socialism) were ideologies of the 19th Century, and America does not have a great history of citizenship for all, with certain cultures not sharing in it until post WW1.[3]

So, I'm afraid: the pledge does, and always has had, a streak of Nationalism a mile wide to it. I find the modern American denial of this fascinating.

And, if you cannot see how it is used to indoctrinate children, then I am happy to provide non-wiki specific psychology papers proving that it does.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance#Addition_...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellamy_salute
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Citizenship_Act_of_1924
"Dickensian" is right, I once knew a poor soul that were making 1/3 what I was in a startup. I've known several that were ~1/2.

I'm not sure being full-stack really accounted for the full difference. Probably more to do with being viciously acquisitive and enjoying sales and negotiation.

Also, I'm not working on the fashion thing anymore, thought of a better marketing experiment to try.
An average radio audience of 1800 is not as low as you think.

1 M people within range of the average radio station /

10 radio stations per market *

5% of the time the average person spends listening to music radio

=

5000

I am not any sort of industry expert, and I could conceive of my numbers being off by a factor of 10. My point is that I don't think you can dismiss out of hand the chance that radio stations are getting fewer than 1800 pairs of ears per play.
Yeah, that's not how you do it.

1. Under-promise for a sustainable output pace.

2. If/when you finish early, everybody gets an appropriate amount of time off.

3. Repeat.

Your client is happy, and your team is happy, healthier, and ultimately more productive.
Most engineers as described in the article come from the developer group described in the article. I've found most hackers end up in systems administration, wall street, security, etc. Situations where there is a lot of work that involves systems integration, writing throw away programs to solve a specific problem, etc.
US Attacks China as Snowden Stays Free
Wrote a relevant blog post about this issue not too long ago. The article states the obvious of course. Talent isn't evenly distributed, but it is distributed. What's most compelling for perhaps Valley and New York companies only, is the wide disparity with regard to compensation:

Two Silicon Valley startups raise $1M and they each have need for a great team. Team One is on site. They spend a lot of otherwise productive time attempting to hire great engineering talent away from other equally impressive startups in the area. They pay $150k per person (let's call it $200k fully loaded) for talented, but not phenomenal people. Team Two is fully distributed. They decide to hire the best, no matter where they are, and at $150k per person everyone outside of Silicon Valley gives them a look with much less effort on their part. They save time, they save on office space in SV, and, best of all, they build a team of truly phenomenal folks who are happy to be making $150k, because it's likely $50k higher than they were making at whatever job they had before they got recruited.

Assuming you can build a better team in the Valley is only relevant if you have a reasonable expectation that you'll find similarly talented folks at the same price no matter where you are. That is simply not the case.

More on the blog: http://blog.workforpie.com/2013/06/04/the-case-for-remote-wo...
>But if the NSA got somehow Google's secret key, they can still MITM a SSL connection.

Security isn't my field at all, but I'd gotten the impression from HN that PFS is meant to protect against just this scenario. Am I mistaken?
In light of all the recent talk of privacy, I'd want to know more about how this is handled by the service. The web page is remarkably lacking in any click throughs for detail on the bullet points. Definitely a sticking point for deciding whether to sign up.
The photo of a fire hydrant drowning under ivy is especially striking. For some reason it communicates "abandonment" to me more clearly than the ruined buildings.
I'm just going to keep putting out casts for free, some will be Angular JS related in the future but my general idea is to focus on screencasts that will benefit web developers in general. Thanks for watching! :)
Is there something in this document that prevents you from reading it in your preferred viewer? The extension suggests it's just an Office Open XML doc. I can read it in QuickOffice on my Android phone.
I learned to love lua when writing basic sysadmin scripts for OpenWRT based systems. I had previously used perl for sysadmin stuff, but perl (even microperl) took too much space on OpenWRT boxes with 4MB flash drives. Lua to the rescue. Now I chafe when I have to go pack to perl.

I do wish someone had handed me this on the first day I realized I needed lua.
I made no claims about creating jobs or growth. I rarely make such arguments, since a) I think a focus on creating jobs is nonsensical and b) empirical evidence showing stuff causes growth is virtually nonexistent.

My claim is much milder. As a billionaire, basically everything you have is invested. If he has $100m less, then $100m less is invested.

Investment has a chance of benefiting me. Consumption by the leisure class (i.e., beneficiaries of government redistribution) does not. FlyinRyan is simply incorrect in his claims.
That's 20 years out of date, though. I am tired of hearing free music advocates basing their arguments on how bad things were in the music industry a generation ago.
Funny, I think in part it's because few people care. Maybe I didn't have the right keywords, but I just wrote an article about this for nginx/stud, and it got 2 upvotes on HN.

Here's the HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5935988
Ask HN: Should I transfer colleges?
Hi, I'm a undergrad who just finished my freshman year at a large state school (ranked in the 80s according to US News) with a solid CS department. My major is CS with minors in math and econ. I chose my school because it was the most affordable option. Academically, I am doing well (3.9/4.0 GPA). In my spare time I try to code as much; I'm learning R at the moment, but know Python (along with some Django), Java, Matlab, some C/C++, HTML5, and Javascript. I also started working in a Professor's lab doing scientific computing in R/Matlab (and some Python). I would like to work in a startup one day or start my own. I'm particularly interested in machine learning/AI and its applications for robotics (i.e. computer vision) and computational biosciences/bioinformatics. Luckily, money is not an issue as it used to be. I've had thoughts of transferring since earlier in the year. I don't mean to sound pretentious, but I personally feel that I can do 'better', and go to a more rigorous school. I'm interested in transferring to Rice, Brown, Cornell, Michigan, and the University of Virginia. Beyond the school's network and rigour, is there any other benefit a more well known school provides? Does going to a school with exceptional peers really make a difference? I figure the only way to get better is to play a smarter opponent? There isn't really a great startup scene at my school, but I know the schools I've listed have had more measures taken towards encouraging entrepreneurship, so perhaps there's a greater chance of finding other founders. Does the name really matter? I sometimes feel I have to compensate for the lack of brand name value my school provides, such as when applying for internships. There's not really a lot of on campus recruiting, so it's more hustle from my side. I notice that my friends who go to brand name schools have fantastic alumni networks.
> Because it's an island with no infrastructure.

There was a hydrant in the pictures, so they had water and most likely, sewage. Electricity as well, based on the appearance of things. Remember, the island was actively used up until the mid-sixties.

> There's still tons of cheap real estate in the Bronx that's pretty close to Manhattan.

This is mostly the reason. People who aren't local don't understand that while real-estate prices are sky-high at the center of town, you really don't need to go far before they come down to earth.
Were you inspired by http://www.stavros.io/tutorials/python/, by any chance?
Which sounds exactly like a startup employee to me.

You forgot to mention the part where she could earn enough in equity to pay for private art school without working.
What's the best way you've found to manage that particular issue? Line-art slide decks instead of interactive demos?
A note to those that may be confused: C# 5.0 is the language version used by visual studio 2012, which was released in August of last year, alongside the .net framework 4.5. This is an updated revision, although a cursory look didn't reveal any differences to me.

I'm sure a few people were wondering if this was to go alongside Visual Studio 2013, expected to be released in beta later this week.
Expectations management is probably the most underrated skill in the world. (Cough Obama Cough.) The problem isn't the idea of underpromise and overdeliver, it's not realizing this is about expectations management (it's also about only thinking of the idea in terms of customers -- your team needs to be treated well too).

First of all, pad estimates realistically, add contingency estimates, trade off deliverables against shortened schedules, and then you're in a position to underpromise and overdeliver and not screw yourself. Oh yeah, and don't deliver early, ever. Wrong axis to exceed expectations on. Deliver more features than originally promised, or more polish. Never create expectations of faster delivery, you shoot yourself in the credibility.
Beware Of HTML5 Development Risks
> This is a pretty good article

Thanks!

> he states 5, I bet it is closer to 20

I think it varies greatly with many factors, but agree that it's probably closer to 20. I'm just trying to avoid selling silver bullets.

> Has anyone ever measured a Reading Comprehension score for languages?

While language is a huuuge component of that constant factor, there are certainly other components. For example, if you want to write a sudoku solver, you should start by writing a backtracking constraint solver and then implement the constraint solver on top of it. You'll write less code than trying to solve sudoku directly, but that code will certainly be slower to read. This applies within a language just as much as it does across languages.
I'm talking about the current incarnation which makes the most sense to me anyway. I know there were different versions but I like the current version the best. And it's clearly the most "liberal" in language.
You'll be surprised what google hangouts on a wired connection on both ends can do, especially when on-ramping people.

Why wired? Packet loss from wifi seriously degrades the conversation. Wired on both ends and packet loss is practically non-existant.

There are downsides to not being distributed too. Being distributed for example lets engineers control their interruptions and environment far more. If companies really really cared about building the best teams, they wouldn't do the nearly industry standard open office layouts. Open office layouts make for easy management and harder development.
Because if you let a software deadline slip, you'll be the first person to ever do so...

(I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.)
150m users is about half the population of the US. How big of a market does Pandora need before it offers decent terms to its suppliers?
That's not the case. Let's assume we're talking about an average radio station, in terms of sales.

Music rights are negotiated as a % of sales, not on a per play basis. So large stations with large sales pay a fortune in music royalties. It's not a set rate.

With an average station, those 20,000 plays cost a radio station $10,000 +/- a few grand depending on the sales category they fall into with the music rights companies.

24/7 music for a year would cost around $60,000 (for said average radio station).
This is such bullshit. Snowden still committed a crime, he leaked confidential information belonging to the United States government. An action he knew was illegal. And this is the _sole_ reason why we revere him and the sacrifice he made.

The action still holds consequences. When a piece of information is kept confidential, the US Government makes that initial decision to do so. Just because it pisses the public off, that is no excuse for anyone to leak information at will, let alone be pardoned for it.

Don't get me wrong. Snowden is a hero, a far braver man than I might have been. But he is still a criminal.
Here's a small, concrete example I wrote to showcase ansible: http://www.stavros.io/posts/example-provisioning-and-deploym...
Is Airbnb really more affordable than a hotel? See for yourself
Holmes was actually a cocaine addict ;)
Mechanical bird gets attacked by a hawk
I'm sure she would be capable of researching this for herself. An employer doesn't have an obligation to point out that the guy over the road is paying more. Besides there are other factors that come into play besides salary.
This is very cool, the only way I can see this could be improved upon is by adding unit tests somehow (so that you can catch behavior changes when upgrading to a newer version of lua).
Because it's so easy to make slick mockups a lot of developers have forgotten that lo fi prototypes are a Good Idea, but obviously you're also selling against folks who will show clickable prototypes that look finished, so it's a matter of building a relationship where you can avoid this kind of silliness.
Enjoy Nature
I like this goal! What's the best way you've found that helps poke fun at yourself?

If I could ask, what kind of prediction about what will make you happy have you been the most wrong about?
Startups will pay well if you know how to negotiate and have leverage, but if not, you'll get screwed. Usually the equity is pretty pathetic too. They're much more likely to exploit transient weakness than larger corporations, which have lower bounds on salary range as well.
Adobe Dreamweaver CC review: first look
The problem this, and many articles are missing: it isn't that the gov is taking the data from the cloud providers' servers. It's that the gov is mirroring all internet traffic and backing it all up.Thus they don't have to gain access to a cloud provider... let alone to a closet server, to get your traffic/emails.
You've missed the point that there are other countries likely to push back on the US extradition request that don't have bad human rights records or an antagonistic stance towards the US. Like Iceland and Sweden, as I explained above.
Always build something. Nothing teaches you about a technologies limitations and benefits like building something with it.

I don't think you really know a technology until you've build something with it.
That's a very interesting article that I didn't see the first time around. Thanks for linking!

Some of the discussion is interesting as well. The point about the tech industry being ruthless at extracting surplus value, and that not always producing socially beneficial outcomes, seems correct.
The constitution is the "legal" document that ratifies the formation of the United States of America so it is far from symbolic. If you do away with it you would effectively dissolve the Union.

In pledging allegiance to the constitution Snowdens' actions are only illegal in the sense that the current government has laws against what he did and justify those laws based on its constitutionally granted power. On the other hand every citizen has a responsibility to uphold the constitution, so his actions while illegal under the governments' laws are supported by the constitution and its founding principles.

Amnesty is coming from a different position where they are making their judgement based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of which the United States is a signatory.

Articles 12 through 14 make for interesting reading.
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml#a12

EDIT: grammar
Lots of RedBull
I would not say that is a reason why all configuration managers suck. The feature you'd like to see would represent a significant increase in overhead, complexity, and potential drawbacks that not everyone needs yet.

Meanwhile, a disciplined system of designing and documenting tests and rollback procedures before committing changes will accomplish this without the need for additional software.

My guess is that if you are not disciplined enough to design tests and rollback procedures on your own, then you are probably going to just switch off or work around those features if they are built into the software.
In my experience, yeah that's basically it. If it helps to have an interactive demo to communicate things, keep it ugly when showing it to the client, and show them the final UI designs separately as static image files. Even if you've already done the work to bring the assets into the demo, avoid showing this to the client as long as is reasonably possible to manage their expectations because they will almost universally have a hard time separating the UI/UX functionality completeness from everything else.

Obviously there are situations where the client will, in fact, understand the distinction, but I assume they won't until proven otherwise.
The Microsoft breakup that never happened
I think what you describe as your experience of hacking is mostly a process of learning through experimentation. Many people learn differently - some first want to understand by studying themselves and do not like to experiment. Others like to be taught and told and follow instructions. For managers it's really important to understand that learning curves are very different - someone may be faced with new technology and write functional code within the day, another person may need several days. It doesn't mean one is worse than the other over the longer term.
I have worked with people who would read through programming language books and only then would start coding, while I met others who would start entire projects from sample code. Like yourself I really like the experimentation path.

Regarding the career of someone as a hacker, there are many of them, they just have to find the right environment with enough freedom to work in. Difficult to find it in a corporate environment, but I have seen it happen.
'technology...allowed musicians to work hard for some months, and then get paid for a lifetime from the results.'

As if that were the norm.
Anand wrote "I spent a good amount of time trying to work around this issue, even manually setting TCP window size in OS X, but came up empty handed. I’m not overly familiar with the networking stack in OS X so it’s very possible that I missed something, but I’m confident in saying that there’s an issue here."

I wonder if he tried net.inet.tcp.win_scale_factor=8 and kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=16777216 as recommended by http://fasterdata.es.net/host-tuning/osx/ and other sites?
Here's another version: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4n6sg31v0v3nfok/CSharp%20Language%...

5.48 MB / Has bookmarks from document headers / For download and offline reading if you want to navigate to specific chapter quickly / Not for online viewing (the parent version is only 3.70 MB and is better if you're bandwidth-capped).
The margins vary wildly in radio. It's a sales driven business, once you meet core costs it's 85% gravy after that (the only things that scale with your sales are the music rights fees and commissions paid to sales persons). I've seen mom & pop stations that can't get by, and I've seen modest small market stations with 40% margins because they run a slim ship.
Probably not, since the article said the issue was TCP connections being left open. That doesn't describe the AV Foundation bug.
I wish we had an accurate spec for Ruby. RubySpec project is great, but we still let the language be defined in terms of MRI implementation.
I'm betting it would have been 2 if there were better examples. The concept is trivial to get and the reference is great, but a few more fleshed-out examples would be nice.

After having used it for a while, I adore it. One minute and one command to go from a new project to a full deployment, what more can you ask.
> [...] except in certain niches like Lua as an embedded scripting engine, when you really need something that can be trivially sandboxed.

Isn't that exactly the reason JavaScript exists in the first place (i.e.: an embedded scripting engine for browsers) ?
I don't think there was condescension in my comment. I am saying that if you believe something, you should be able to defend it. I am confident that you are right, a free society is something that is to be valued, and I am confident that you could teach it. If you are also confident that you are right, then you don't need to brainwash your children to agree.

So if you are pleased with what you are teaching your children, as you claim, then why is the pledge important? Your lessons should carry sufficient strength. Brainwashing is the tool of people who are not confident in what they say; it is not a tool for you.
If it's something similar to what I already use (like say trading one web framework for another), then I just look at the official documentation/examples and some decent guides. After that, I start building something with the new tech.

If it's something like a new language or database, then I might be more interested in getting a book on the subject (if there exist any decent ones). I'll usually skim through the book looking for areas that differ significantly from previous languages/databases and focus on reading about those parts. Following that, build something with the language/database.

Reading stuff only online if it's not official docs, can really burn you though (not that books can be any better at times, but books at least get reviews). Most of us probably already know that, but the quality of content of many blog posts and tutorials can be sub par (especially for things like PHP and Android). The faster a piece of technology changes and the way one uses it, the higher the variance it seems in quality of online content (just looking at bad practices in PHP from version 5.2 and before to 5.5 and also Android 2.x and before to 4.x).

Pretty much though, it all comes down to building. Reading can get you past some of the basics, but applying what you learn reinforces. Also, it doesn't hurt to eventually teach/discuss what you're learning with someone else, as it helps to also reinforce what you already know and question what you are unsure about (either actively or in retrospect).
If you're washing your clothes in seawater, you're doing it very wrong.
Getting started with Puppet
what on earth would you expect?
Just because it pisses the public off, that is no excuse for anyone to leak information at will, let alone be pardoned for it.

I call bullshit. The government exists to serve the people, not the other way around. What is "legal" or "illegal" is bigger than just what Congress, the President or the Supreme Court think. As they say, "An unjust law is no law at all".[1]

Certainly an arguable point, but it's one I adhere to, and I think a lot of other HN'ers do as well. As well as a lot of Americans, and, for that matter, a lot of people period.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_iniusta_non_est_lex
Not That Sort Of Java