skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you fail to read my mind? Certainly not.

If you fail to read my comment, in which I explicitly state, "Here is what I meant and my intention", and then continue to argue something on which we are not in disagreement? Absolutely.

I made it ridiculously clear what my statement meant.
Depression (specifically Bipolar disorder, since it's the disorder I'm most educated on) is almost certainly as fatal as diabetes and more fatal than many forms of cancer.

1 in 3 sufferers of Bipolar disorder attempt suicide and 1 in 5 eventually die from suicide. Clinical depression is a very fatal disease.
The most popular end-user Linux distributions are...
What it would look like if planets were closer
Or just throw away the lock entirely, given that Google is in bed with the NSA.
You think this is not an intended use of the PATRIOT act? That's hilarious. The PATRIOT act explicitly creates and authorizes this monster.
Beating the drum in the echo chamber will accomplish two things:

* Jack.

* Shit.

As Steve Blank is wont to say, if anything is to happen, you need to "get out of the building". That means interacting with real life politics, not upvoting stories on a niche news site. Unlike upvoting stories, this is actually hard work.

What's the point of visibility for a story anyway? The point is to actual do something that improves the situation. Voting things up seems like "gee, I wish someone would do something about this, maybe if they happen to see it it will happen".
How to Pick a Recurring Billing and Payment Provider
Switching SSH to any other port is a good idea as it will reduce the random attacks against it.

Sure, those drive-by attacks are pretty weak and not much of a threat against a hardened configuration and the real attackers will find the new port anyway, but it reduces noise significantly.

Cleaner logs are easier to parse, so the net result is that you can spot attacks that you care about much more easily.
I'm sure I'm already on the NSA's Christmas list for donating to WikiLeaks. However, I haven't signed the petition to pardon Snowden because, although I'm basically sympathetic to his actions as they've been reported, I don't know enough about exactly what he did, what he's doing now, and what he might do in the future to lobby for a "pardon." It is becoming increasingly clear that his actions were not as well thought out as people have been assuming they were.

What would help at this point is for additional conscientious government employees and contractors to follow Snowden's example. ("If you see something, say something.") It would be easier for me to get behind a mass resistance movement than a single guy who, frankly, has said and done some things that don't suggest a high degree of mental stability.
I think it depends on your background. I'm guessing that you had a bigger net beneath you had a bigger net beneath you than most people (student at Stanford, probably from an upper-middle class family that would support you if things got bad). For somebody whose parents said GTFO at 18, going the boring route at first makes perfect sense.
Master things.

Be a good person.

Keep options open.

Explore.
Are you accidentally breaching open sources licenses in your mobile app?
The Old Reader is like the Google Reader of 5 years ago. I didn't care much for Feedly's flashy interface or browser plugin interface.
I can’t speak to AT&T, but my friends who joined Digital, Sun and SGI in their twilight years got to work on fascinating engineering challenges and built up great professional networks. When those companies wound down, some took buyouts with several job offers already lined up for them. In many cases, entire teams were hired intact by other large firms with generous retention packages.

There’s nothing wrong with startups, but there’s nothing wrong with going to the giants that are doing Real Engineering, either. Both can lead to great careers.
Metajs: visualize javascript AST execution
Odd safety car positioning can also be fairly poisonous.
Often the rich are happy to have the police not enforce the law and to do it with private security instead. Private security reports directly to their employers, the police have more public accountability.

Also reduced property taxes mean less police for everyone, so you get the "I only pay for what I need" anti-tax rationalization of those who live in gated and guarded neighborhoods which is ultimately socially destructive.
How important is the difference between ECDHE_RSA and DHE_RSA security-wise?

edit: I asked because Opera showed a site's free StartCom certificate as "TLS v1.0 256 bit AES (1024 bit DHE_RSA/SHA)". I checked with Chromium and there it is shown as ECDHE_RSA though. This is confusing...
URL Opener
http://www.elltop.com/url-opener/
URL Opener , Open Multiple URL
Open a whole list of URLs at the same time! Paste URLs into the field below and press Open URL (which will appear) to pop up all the websites at once, or open each URL individually. We recommend setting your browser to open new windows in tabs . Note: Opening too many at once can slow your computer. Paste URLs in the field below. Press Open URL .
Just one data point. I'm 35. I did startups in my early 20's, took 2 years off to travel and finish school. Opportunities were still there once I was done. You could say that no work history is the same whether it was due to traveling or because you're only 19.
IMO the [RedMonk ranking](1) which is a plot of Stackoverflow vs GitHub popularity is more relevant.

[1]: http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2013/02/28/language-rankings-1-13...
This "poison" is easy to deal with - just go again next year and win it.

At what cost, though? From DHH's post:

When you expect to win, it’s merely a checked box if you do — after the initial rush of glory dies down.

Winning isn't everything, and in fact can mean very little. Spending exorbitant sums of money (LMP2 isn't cheap) and risking your life (not everyone who started Le Mans on Saturday lived to finish) might not be worth it.
This reminds me that the i815 chipset is limited to 512MB RAM total, which was used in lots of P3 systems.
Ask HN: New MacBook Air or Windows laptop?
Don't wanted to sound silly but I'm confused a little bit and thought of clarifying it with the great HN community.

I have a 2008 MacBook Unibody and have upgraded to SSD and bumped up the memory and is doing decently well but after 5 years of usage and the lure of the lightness of MacBook Air and the lightning fast SSD speed I heard on the new beast from Apple I'm on the edge of shelling out some $$$$ but wasn't sure if it's worth it now.

My contention points were,
- current MacBook Unibody is running decently fine even though I crave for more speed
- had a Windows laptop at home that just got toast with a coffee spill

Don't know if I should be shelling out $$$ on a Windows laptop for now and wait for another MacBook Air update later or just give the current MacBook to the family and move on with the new MacBook Air. I know the later would add one more $ sign to the bottomline.

For those of you who ask what I do with it, I do develop web and mobile apps (2 of them on the AppStore, free apps BTW) with it. So it's putting to good use but not sure if I have to take the Windows route or the MacBook Air route, even though I personally prefer the MacBook Air route but would be nice to have a Windows machine at home too, rite?
This is my first purpose written blog post. Let me know what you think (I've got a thickish skin and believe I can take both the worst you can throw at me or any middle-brow dismissal depending on the mood of the crowd).
Tell us what you think is missing. You don't "feel nearly prepared". Have you prepared? These interviews (for better or worse) tend to be algorithm based. How are you on those?
html / css / jquery skills
Yep. Stallman, Gordon Cook and other interesting names are on their advisory board. They have equipment running in KC and Austin, I believe.
Right, I ran my tests shortly after reading that Skype supernodes were getting centralized, which was after the MS acquisition. I just handwaved with "couple of years" because I couldn't remember exactly when.

Back then my conclusion was that actual voice / video traffic was still direct P2P, although it kept connections open to other IPs, probably for signaling/stun/relaying. I haven't had a chance to run the test again because, well, I'm on a mobile device :-)

But my bigger point was that on a forum ostensibly for hackers, there should not be so much speculation and innuendo about something that can be pretty easily tested.
Even if Vista wasn't delayed, XP would have received security update support for at least 10 years after release.
> This is what I meant by configuration drift.

I forgot to mention this before, it is strange that you credit yourself with defining this term when it has been well defined for some time in ops.

> More importantly, PFCTs enable and to some extent encourage modification of generated environments remotely, en-masse, without any significant capacity to ensure that individual instances within a group have not subtly shifted in configuration.

But this adds a significant weight over and above the "generative process" of running manifests. Yes, running manifests against your VMs can "fail or change in unexpected ways due to xyz" - don't do it against VMs that are currently in production! I'm not sure you've ended up with anything less error prone and you're still going to need a way to get from a fresh VM image and your output images - which is where Puppet would come in.

I'd really rather not make the entire disk image my build artefact, for fairly obvious reasons (ie: size).

You might like this, which is written by a colleague of mine, except that it is not in "opposition" to Puppet/Chef/etc:

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ImmutableServer.html
A formula for disrupting Construction in the United States:

* Pre-fabricate everything

* Assemble onsite using non-union labor

* Move away from "Cost-Plus" pricing structures

Construction has Razor Thin Margins for a number of reasons, not the least of them being the incentives associated with Cost-Plus bidding. Non-Union labor and Pre-fab would literally upend the industry.

The problem, as with most mature industries, is policy-based and not technical in nature.

Construction is as ripe for Innovation as Medicine, and an equally difficult water to navigate.
Substantial discussion already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5933422

Currently #7 on the front page.
Every country is built on the bodies of the people who inhabited it beforehand, since all the way back when homo sapiens killed off the other hominids in Europe and Africa. There are very few places that haven't conquered by a new wave of immigrants who massacred or enslaved the natives at one point or another. The past is a litany of sorrows and once you start feeling guilty about what your ancestors did there's no end to it. Instead, we should concern ourselves with current injustices and try to help disadvantaged people whether their parents were oppressed or unlucky or just foolish.
Dude, we continue because those that chose not to didn't do so well at promoting their genes.
I agree with everything there, however this popped out at me and I've gotta say I disagree using 2 days as a metric to judge the feasibility of a product.
Becoming employee number 50 at a company that still has a good chance of failure is the wrong kind of risk.

I agree. Actually, those VC darlings aren't likely to fail in the classic, pink-slips-for-all, sense because the VCs have already worked out an emergency acq-hire and a backup emergency acq-hire. They are, however, likely to fail you, which is worse. Now you have to explain a bad separation from a company that still exists and has pump-and-dump VCs and tech press (still in the "pump" phase, obviously) propping up its reputation.

If you join a company, my general advice is to join a company on a breakout trajectory. There are a usually a handful of these at a time, and they are usually identifiable to a smart young person.

Citation needed. I'm no longer very young (I'm 30) but I'm quite smart and still 0 for 2 when it comes to picking startups. Incidentally, I don't doubt that I'm better at judging companies than most engineers and VCs; I'm probably above 95th percentile in judgment of talent (judgment of character I could work on) but it's just really hard to forecast startups. Most people who think they can do it, can't. Most people who think they can't do it are right.

Also, most of us don't pick from the full space of companies, either. We pick opportunities that make sense in the context of our career stories (career coherency). For example, I'm reaching an age where non-senior/lead roles (except at top AI labs or hedge funds) don't really make sense anymore. If I'm not a strong match (enough to qualify for a senior role) it doesn't make sense for me to apply even if the company looks like a "rocket ship", because a junior role is not acceptable at my stage unless the people are known, world-class entities.
I wonder how long before unscrupulous individuals figure out a way to counterfeit Apple I's.
I think you're comparing yourself to the best of the best software developers on HN. I felt very bad about the code I produced until I started working at a big company. Now I feel more confident about my own code.
This is where playing poker has served me well for years. I know I can win. But I can't win them all. I technically only need a small percentage of wins versus losses to be a winner. So losing is okay. But I agree 100%, don't let your head get the best of you. I think every man struggles with his own competitive ego and the older we get the more we realize the damage it can cause.
Precisely. How is this not espionage?
After the last couple of weeks, no.

Everyone I know is bailing out on "the cloud". Even non-technical people.

This is like slapping a child round the face and offering them an ice cream straight away afterwards.
Indeed. The reason I am currently using chef instead of puppet doesn't have much to do with relative technical merits.
I love Stringer — https://github.com/swanson/stringer

Minimal, self-hosted, great codebase, implements a clone of Fever's API so it can be used with any mobile client that supports Fever.
Because they can learn.
Look at the history of the 20th century to see how that logic might be fallacious:

Teapot dome, Japanese internment camps, the deliberate nuclear bombing of civilian centers in Japan and the fire-bombing of Dresden, the corporatist colonization of Latin America, the Red Scare, blacklists, and House Un-American Activities committee, the attempted invasion of Cuba, the massed invasion of Vietnam under false pretenses, the covert bombings of Cambodia and Laos, the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile that ushered in the rule of Pinochet...

Then, a historical blip: the 4-year single-term presidency of Jimmy Carter, widely derided as one of the least effective administrations in the 20th century...

... and, bang: covert deals with Iran for hostages, the support of the contras in Nicaragua, the support of right-wing death squads in San Salvador, the bombings in Beirut, and on & on & 9/11 & on until today and the Obama administration.

It's possible that things are worse today than they were in 1978, but it's also likely that 1978 isn't a particularly useful date to compare 2013 to.
Ask HN: How does the US Government just "revoke" Snowden's passport?
Are the charges in question enough to do this without a fair trial?
Good to see tools that work as a system configuration framework and also allow command execution.

[ControlTier](http://www.controltier.org/) had (don't think it's actively developed now) options to execute general system commands, configure systems and application deployment. But it was fairly complex and required [ant](http://ant.apache.org/) skills.
Molecular transistor constructed with graphene
He's probably very clever, but his definition of "great hacker" is vastly different than your definition.

His definition is probably "someone who makes stuff work." Yours is probably "an expert in his field."
Having money is more than your checking account balance. If you ran out of money, did that mean foreclosure? repossession? homelessness? starvation? If not, then you weren't broke. Obviously I can't speak to your situation, and if you're a true bootstrapper, then kudos. However, I think you can agree there's a ton of 19 years old running around driving the cars mommy and/or daddy bought, with the iPhone and MBP also purchased by their parents. They can totally go for gold and fail, and still have somewhere to live and try again.
Startup gives farmers shot at fair prices, market access via text messages
Submitted and discussed at length many times - here's just one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2284007

They're all fairly old, so if you have something new to add you'll have to do it here. If you value HN wisdom at all, it might be worth reading previous discussions.
Collaborative Consumption 
I am looking to start a collaborative consumption mobile application and need some ideas. I considered a mobile app for on-demand haircuts, but it seems like a logistical headache and not legal due to CA Board of Cosmetology's rules.

Does anyone have any good ideas that you would be willing to share?
It is not my concern that some indie developers use whatever they are familiar with. We've been playing those funny stick figure flash games on rainy days anyways. They can be fun to play and fun to develop.

However, it is the big studios that should not push to this platform. They had compile-time guarantees, insane ecosystem, known performance tradeoffs. And now some of them want a huge pile of (as in million+ LOC) game engine running on top of a broken scripting language. And for what in exchange? So that the installer's gone and assets are delivered on demand? MMOs have been doing this for years on the desktop.

In short, if you do it for fun, please use whatever feels good. If you do it for the money, please do your research and don't make my browser freeze -- I'll just go to Kongregate where the former publishes their games.
That's what the people selling EV certs said. But EV certs have been a failure too, and they had a much louder UI.

And at least EV certs were backed by a concept that people could understand. It's unreasonable to expect people outside of tech to understand "forward secrecy".
However, other divisions of MSFT (and where this person was going) have some of the worst people I've met.

Plenty of startups have worse people than the worst of Microsoft. Some of them have people who couldn't get a job at one of those stodgy, blue-chip companies if their lives depended on it.

The range is very wide at most of the startups. I worked at one where there were some seriously good engineers, but a really bad one ended up becoming the lead architect and things went to hell quickly.
Mobile Hacking 101
>people I've met

That's a pretty small sampling to make such big claims about a company.
Why can't you version control database code/schema? I can do it fine using Rails migrations. I've also been looking at http://sqitch.org/ as well.

If you're willing to use a third party tool to manage the database, and ONLY use that tool, then you can solve version control/migration. I've used and written such tools myself.

However once you have software development and database administration separated, the DBAs generally need access to the database in a way that does not go through your tool / software development cycle / etc. And once you have random things in your database that your tool knows nothing about, you're on your way to maintenance headaches.

Furthermore third party tools like this generally want your site to be offline during database migrations. But if you've got a production site going 24x7, then you really want to figure out how to roll out upgrades without downtime. This is much, much easier if you can upgrade database and website independently of each other, with the database going first. That important detail tends to be poorly handled in my experience. (Though things change and I'd love to hear if that had improved.)

Furthermore you have the headache of identifying the difference between data tables and metadata tables. That is, some tables contain data that gets modified on the fly during normal use. (eg user information) Other tables contain data that is really application configuration. (eg allowed statuses for something)

Why can't you create parallel instances for each dev/environment? (If licensing costs are a problem, maybe look at a free one?)

You can. The difficulty lies in keeping them synchronized with what is in your repository. And also in providing ways to copy user information to the private instances so that devs can reproduce production problems. (Doubly so when your production problem is a performance issue that requires a copy of production data to recreate.)

These problems are all solvable. I've solved them. But the general story that databases provide on these issues does not match the simplicity and flexibility of having databases focus on providing a common data structure, and the application being stored elsewhere in your favorite source control system (eg git).
I think the App Engine is perfect for developers who don't want to have to make decisions about servers and infrastructure. This can be beneficial. However, your design must fit their infrastructure. Depending on your application, this may or may not be a good thing.

If you ever need/want/have to migrate your application elsewhere, you'd have to replicate their environment or rewrite the application.

For the kinds of applications I work on, those are deal breakers so I use AWS (which also has its limitations) or some other server hosting service instead.
Google is the only major player even employing perfect forward secrecy; hardly a case of a company trying to get extra-cozy with the NSA.
Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.

Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.

Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.

Care about people's approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

-- Tao te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0061142662).
You're missing the step that includes a decades long pr campaign to destigmatize pre-fab housing.
I don't see how this really helps, though. The NSA can still force a CA to generate certs for any domain they wish to intercept and MITM everyone they care about. They are likely to have the resources for that.
The principal law enforcement reasons for the U.S. State Department to deny
or revoke a passport are the existence of (1) a valid federal or state felony arrest warrant; or (2) a
criminal court order, condition of parole or condition of probation that forbids departure from the United States (See 22 C.F.R. 51.60-51.62).

SOURCE: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/smart/pdfs/passport_fact_sheet.pdf
From what I have read elsewhere, passports remain the property of the U.S. government and they claim the right to revoke them after charging someone with a felony.
A lot of this feels like bad advice. Like playing penny stocks rather than index funds. I am 18, and saying that my most productive years are from 20-25 seems shortsighted and arrogant. The startup community, although cool and interesting, seems like a gold rush situation to me.

That's why I plan to get my CS degree, and get a stable job, such as one at MS (which the author seems to look down upon). I could see joining/starting a startup, if the opportunity popped up, but seeking a risky situation irks me.Maybe I am just risk adverse?