skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not hard. Just need some energy. Well, energy is specifically the problem.

You also need feedstocks. And a source of CO2. And limits on fossil CO2 emissions. That last pretty much rules out any use of fossil (or methane hydrate) sources and requires you stick to present cycling carbon within the carbon cycle (biomass, atmosphere).

If your time horizon is more than decades to a century or so, feedstocks rules out petroleum (which doesn't make sense anyway), natural gas, or coal.

Conventional non-breeder uranium reactors will suffer from fuel shortages if used for significant amounts of power generation well within a century. Thorium breeders offer a possible alternative, though the technology is unproven. Fusion is even more unproven.

Which leaves solar, wind, wave, and geothermal, all of which have distinctly limited upper bounds, and very considerable infrastructure requirements. Yes, we could get all the energy we need from solar by covering 0.5 - 1% of the Earth's surface with collectors. It's helpful to note that the built environment -- cities, towns, and villages, is on the order of this size. So we're talking about effectively doubling the size of the built environment (though in some cases solar infrastructure can be built over existing structures), with a much more technically complex instance (solar PV arrays, inverters, and power transmission infrastructure are more complex and demanding than ordinary buildings and structures). That's ... a pretty major undertaking, even if we grant ourselves several decades to complete it.

Energy is the problem.

On top of that, Fischer-Tropsch plant and capital are expensive and would take a long time and vast investments (trillions of dollars) to replace the 20 million barrels of oil consumed daily in the US.

Nuclear powered aircraft You're side-stepping your original statement. Producing hydrocarbons at that scale from electricity is unproven. Producing hydrogen might work, and for aircraft (limited in number, limited in servicing points) could prove viable, though with significantly more airframe volume devoted to fuel storage, and with much more complex storage parameters -- most likely LH2 -- than existing fuels.

Solar powered airships I'd suspect that either PV costs would come down, or array designs would be designed to be transferrable between airships, or both. My point was to demonstrate that where solar powered heavier-than-air craft are only just feasible (see the Solar Impulse, with the wingspan of a 747 but just able to carry a pilot), solar-powered airships are highly feasible. Of course, any fuel which would work for an HTA craft would also work for an airship.
!sp will search on StartPage, which is a privacy-proxied Google search. That's my fallback if the default DDG search doesn't work.
No, the default state of software is copyrighted and not redistributable. You need a specific license to give you the right to modify and/or redistribute software (though I think copyright should be changed to allow private modification for certain purposes).
After the railway minister thing, I imagine people will be a little more cagey for a while... ><
Yeah I had the same problem. If I'm going to be in DDG but most of my searches are on Google, what's the point of me using DDG?
I liked the cited success story: DuPont. I was very tempted to put that in the submission title.

A startup at some point will want to diversify, split into several divisions/offices. The article makes some good points.
(I'm from Nebraska and you are from Iowa.)

I've noticed a slight difference in how we in the midwest talk compared to how the west coast (Seattle and SFO) talk. In particular, I'm not perturbed by the writing style and I see clearly a confident young man who is building experience. In the midwest, often, modesty and humility are required for most public conversations. One way to express that modesty is to be quiet (think 'tough cowboy'). Another way to is be self-deprecating (sometimes it comes across as false-modesty), which is what you do. And yet another is to talk about the other person or make small talk. It's something we all do from here. On the west coast, in contrast, there is a common desire to talk oneself up either by referencing a pedigree, accomplishments, or trajectory. As a simplifying stereotype these descriptions don't apply to all people or all the time.

I would take away two lessons from this discussion.

1) The midwest modesty we both use is somewhat foreign to other cultures. Don't feel like you have to change yourself, but, don't be surprised that different people will understand you differently.

2) Focus on the product before fixing any analysis or blog or other meta-startup thing!
Because it's creepiest?
I am suprised the author does not mention growing a beard and wearing sandals among his career advice. That sure has kept me from having to interact with the likes of Patrick McKenzie.
Developing a fine-grained look at how digital consumers behave
Guide to debugging Django. How it is made.
Datadog is very cool. What are some of the other solutions out there that are similar? I like how it mostly just integrates with anything I need, that makes things easy for a non-enterprise-level project.
Which is an utterly meaningless term nowadays. I'd love to hear you try to define it in a way that wouldn't classify every human interaction as objectifying.
Just plain lazy. OP clearly hasn't even gone to the trouble of reading up on recent examples of whistleblowers, like all of the past NSA ones who had their lives systematically dismantled and careers ruined. For what? Not much, as it turns out - many of those NSA whistleblowers are on the record as saying that Snowden did the right thing here.

Oh, and the author's Watergate example?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/08/daniel-ellsberg-edw...

Whoops.
I sympathize very strongly with your viewpoint (and had my own horror stories with both domestic and foreign instructors, some tenured, some TAs, as well as some very good ones).

That said: among the most powerful and valuable lessons I learned in college, and ones I really wasn't prepared to even understand were part of the "curriculum" involved dealing with combative instructors (getting screamed at, in the locker room showers, while both of you are nude, by your professor is ... an interesting experience), or complete foulups in financial aid disbursement (calmly telling the woman who told me I'd have to call another department, which had just closed for the day, after I'd realized where the check I should have received a month before had ended up, what my demands were, and picking up their distribution the next afternoon, felt pretty good). Relationship ups and downs. Deaths in the family, of family of other students, of other students and friends.

It's not like college was a war zone (though it had elements of that), but there were definitely some learning experiences.

And a few skills I picked up, many of them outside my core coursework, or even any coursework, which I still practice daily now to great profit.
The author does say that Snowden was an NSA admin and should know how to be anonymous.
Snowden was honest about it. He didn't try to hide his identity. That takes more strength.
This article is also not about the underlying issue. It's about Snowden. Not Snowden himself even, but OP's opinion of Snowden. It also reads like a rant.
No, the Internet companies have said that's not what's happening. Facebook has said, for instance, it has received a total of requests covering 18,000 accounts over a 6-month period, which includes NSA requests and local cops trying to find a missing person:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589461-38/facebook-micro...

The Facebook etc. statements were designed to address precisely the concern you raised. Verizon and AT&T, on the other hand, have remained very, very quiet. For good reason:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57591391-38/surveillance-p...
Cool idea, but the page needs serious redesigning. Also, for the love of god put 'cursor: pointer;' on the FAQ links (or just make them links)

But yea, definitely awesome to see Valve wants to engage a younger workforce, though we'll see if they actually commit.
As far as I'm concerned, the strategy of a whistleblower is their own decision. Leak quietly and you may go quietly. Do it loudly and you may be martyred without political gain. There is no risk-free formula here.
Yes, and maybe he knew it could not be done with sufficient reliability.
I think that is an acceptable price to pay for the benefit of requiring our representative to at least understand the issue enough to restate it in their own words.

That's the rule I have for my kids, if they claim they understand what I'm telling them, I require them to state it back to me in their own words. Seems like a reasonable expectation of the people hired to represent us.
You know what's funny? I had the same feeling when I was working with Jason Long who designed the git-scm.com logo [1]. I asked if he could help me design a logo for http://gitignore.io and he came up with an awesome design [2]. It took elements from the original git-scm.com and used them in a creative way to emulate a dot file. I showed it to my friend and he was like "That's so easy to do" and my response was "yeah, but you would have never come up with it 100 designs." My friend didn't refute that.

[1] - http://git-scm.com/images/logo@2x.png

[2] - https://raw.github.com/joeblau/gitignore.io/master/public/gi...
I would so choose this over Auto Shop.
Jellyfish won't be able to give you such a product because they don't exist. Your comment is 100% accurate. Bose is not the absolute best, but the absolute best is 10x or even 50x the price.

I would maybe agree that Bose has cultivated a reputation among ordinary consumers as "the best" which is not accurate. There are other equally good brands with a similar price point that don't get as much attention. There's also audiophile gear which is much better, but also much more expensive. What does not exist, though, are products superior to Bose as half the price. (Assuming you're not factoring in used gear or some kind of blowout sale) That goes for any brand, though.
Yeah, you could try hitting up the air force. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/02/18/revealed-air-force-ord...
Silicon Valley on the Middle Class and Unions
★ Is Flipkart is blatantly violating FDI in multibrand retail?
In case anyone else is wonder WTF an "LI interface" is -- it is a "Lawful Interception Interface." A way for a 3rd party, nominally a law enforcement agency, to make direct copies of certain specific data that passes through a router. In the US it is the kind of thing that the CALEA bill mandated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...
Author is the putz, not Snowden. It's not attention whoring to show yourself, say who you are, and tell the truth. Nobody "blew it". This fire is still burning and I hope it will just keep growing until we've burned out the kinds of dangerous government psychopaths who think they don't actually need consent from the people they're governing.

If he's still alive years from now, Snowden will be holding his head high. At that time, the author of this thing will be hoping nobody reads his blog.
Getting information out of a top secret system and walking with it? Not that difficult.

Getting information out of a top secret system without being logged, tracked, and identified? Damn near impossible. I'd bet money it was only a matter of time (hours?) from the disclosure of the info until the feds were onto him anyway. There was no way he could have kept this quiet for 30 minutes let alone years.

What's he supposed to do? Go into work the next day?
To have access to the kind of info Snowden did, you have to pass a polygraph. The kind where they specifically ask you if you've mishandled classified documents.

Snowden's got balls of steel.
And this is why Abercrombie&Fitch has no cashiers, only "models".

You can't legislate away reality...
i'm seeking a software development job
Snowden went public with his identity in order to protect his life. Best place to hide is in plain sight. Tech nowadays is way different than during Nixon era. Snowden knew if he leaked anonymously they would find him in days. They have the internet router level data for chrissakes!
Little known fact, PHP was created by a grad student from Miskatonic university.
I think this is where Ruby shines with the ! to indicate destructive.
Do they actually still use polygraphs in government?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph#Validity
>The President resigned and Bad guys in government went to jail. And maybe it’s because Deep Throat Kept His Mouth Shut. He never talked.

That's a pretty massive assumption. I'd say Nixon resigned because he would have been impeached based of the evidence, regardless of whether the whistleblower was outed or not. In the same way, I suspect the numerous NSA programs will come under scrutiny of the true supreme court, regardless of whether we know Snowden's name or not.

If anyone is to blame for the story's focus vacillating between Snowden and the various programs or allegiances exposed, it is the media outlets that cannot maintain their own integrity in the face of advertising revenue. I'd suspect that was part of the point of his coming out publicly. That and the fact that, in appropriating the data he did, I'd say it's a reasonable assumption that he left a massive access trail that the authorities wouldn't be far behind in tracing.

We still would have heard about Mr. Snowden. We'd just be getting the story from an amalgamation of corporations and governments that, as the series of leaks has proven, just can't keep its story straight.
Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, not Watergate.

Otherwise I agree with you.
Odd that this sneering piece, which says very little (and nothing original), got upvoted.

TLDR: OP thinks Snowden is bad for revealing his identity (and doesn't consider the possibility that Snowden revealed his identity to gain protection, through visibility, from extrajudicial measures).
Because at the very least it doesn't use tracking cookies, which we know Google does. Whether it tracks based on IP and/or browser fingerprint is impossible to tell - there we have to take their word for it.
I agree. There will always be someone who comes along and says that the people who have actively done something to make the world a better place don't count because the doers don't live up to some arbitrary standard of that critic.

I am the first person to say that you don't have to be a baker to know when the bread is stale, but I'm also not one to ignore the price that any whistleblower ends up paying. The day Snowden is wealthy, healthy and staring in a hit reality tv show -- then we can have a talk about if he did his whistleblowing the "right" way or not.
Except the moment you know there's a leak, you can start to monitor network access closely and vary certain bits and pieces in documents etc., and see who has/had access to whatever leaks next to relatively quickly pinpoint the source.

He might have been able to stay anonymous if he did a one time dump of data (as he did) and leaked that and then kept his mouth shut. He'd be caught relatively quickly if he kept leaking documents over time.

And it's one thing to have access, another thing to have sufficient access to delete all your tracks. If the NSA are serious about their security, there will be certain audit logs of activity that goes to printers in locked rooms.
WordPress 3.6 Release Candidate
On my Linux fullscreen (F11) shows nothing but web content.
Couldn't the NSA easily tap this server? The email is only encrypted at rest. The datacenter is in Dallas, TX.
It would be great to see this more. It could provide some interesting data. I would be interested to hear if anonymized resumes closed the gender gap for getting an interview or not. It could also expose a possible bias if the gender gap closed for getting a first interview but then the gap simply shifted up one level when it came to the second step of the process (ie, disproportionately more men move on to a second interview). Although, it might actually be harder to show a bias at that level since a lot of the interview process has to do with how well the person sells themselves, articulates their answers, presents themselves physically (ie, dressed appropriately), etc. These things also happen to be very subjective so it is kind of difficult to prove there was a bias. Which is also why it is equally difficult to prove there was not a bias. (Did you not get hired because of your gender? Or just because you didn't interview well?) I have no doubt that people get turned down based on unimportant "qualifications" like gender, race, age, etc. And that is wrong. But I also have no doubt that some people who felt they were turned down for one of those reason actually just wasn't qualified or blew the interview and don't think to look internally before they look around them.
I have saved a really good booklet from my past employer about sexual harassment. Sexual harassment is actually gender neutral, and it doesn't have to be about sexual advances. Moreover, a man can be harassed by another man, as much as much as a woman can be harassed by another woman (happens way too often in my experience). The legal definition says harassment should be both severe enough and impose gender inequality (i.e. telling dirty jokes to both men and women doesn't constitute sexual harassment as long as they are not more derogatory to one gender). The problem is that there are too many stereotypes about sexual harassment, some are spread by corporations themselves (because they try to avoid lawsuits, nothing to do with employee fair treatment).
Nope, Shut it down.
In this case it doesn't matter too much if you disable javascript because extensions are still working. The disable javascript option disables only the script in website contents not in extensions. So it will disabled scripts injected into the pages but scripts in extensions are still working.
Thanks. You sound like you have some vague disagreement about what I said, but can't express it in any meaningful way, so instead you came up with that.
Site Told To Pay $338k Because Of Someone Else's Comments
You have obviously never experienced the pain of a prolonged car trip with Bose. I never knew what ear fatigue was prior to the unfortunate experience of owning Bose car audio.

Thankfully, most car manufacturers have stopped using Bose.
Would be nice if they made the permissions more fine grained.
For example split the 'Public repositories and organizations': instead of granting access to all public repos, grant access to only specific repositories.
I've never put on a pair of Bose so I can't attest to the sound quality, but I have held a few pairs and it bothers me that headphones in that price range can feel so fragile. There's this cheap plastic feel to it. My Sony MDR-V6 feels like a tank compared to them and these are plastic too.
For tech companies it shouldn't be a problem to interview candidates blindly. Give some questions as written tests and coding assignments. If talking is necessary, there is software changing voice pitch. Skype has a plugin like that. Just interview a candidate sitting in another room, streaming what they write and use the same voice settings for all candidates. My impression that nobody uses written tests because companies want to keep bias, not to eliminate it.
Youth haven't been conditioned and molded yet by their industries, they're young, stupid and make mistakes and in the process find new ways of doing things. Because they're young they don't have experience nor families to take care of, and thus will take low wages. They don't demand too many benefits, and you can work them like mules. They also flood the market and are over supplied and under demanded. The average game developer is a 31 year old white male. As soon as they start settling down and wanting to have a family they leave the industry. They burn out, and they are replaced.

It's not the "right" way for every company. Valve and other companies do the opposite. But for most of the industry it is a cost of doing business.

I could have chosen to be politically correct or realistic & honest. I chose realistic & honest.
So surely some open source hardware + software voting machines are being developed somewhere...

True?
Meeting Edward Snowden
What is the point of involving S3? Why not just run the emergency site directly on the Apache installation doing the rewrite? Unless your traffic is absolutely massive there shouldn't really be any need for the S3 step.
Shure is fantastic. I've owned countless pairs across various price levels and have never been disappointed. While I find that their top of the line SE535 break easily at the gym, their warranty service has been exception and lighting quick -- usually next day servicing.
I do hope you weren't talking about my comment. I would not like to think I was contributing to this perceived decline in HN standards.

I wrote what I did because I took a kind of offence at the assumptions baked into the article. I felt large parts of it were concerned with a kind of condescending, "tut-tut" economic opinion - look at what these crazy chinese are wasting their money on! And this opinion seemed to be rooted in what I consider to be a profoundly flawed economic theory, which I wanted to raise questions about.

I'm sorry I derailed the discussion about this interesting project, though. I've been through the Seikan tunnel a number of times and it's an absolute wonder of engineering (do you know there are 2 stations inside?). But I couldn't let the article's smug little swipes at those wacky Chinamen go unchallenged. Perhaps, for the good of the community, I (and everyone else) should have.
How to be a leader
While I agree with you that numbers matter, having the infrastructure in place and a secret court system which simply passes almost every request allows this to be used as much as the NSA decides is reasonable, and for that use to increase exponentially over time. That in itself is dangerous, because we have no idea what future administrations would use the data for.

A manual process would ensure that the number of requests is kept reasonable.
but it's not like riding a bicycle

Interesting tidbit on this concept. When I was 17 I had a cycling accident where I flew over a car and landed on my hip quite badly. I gave up the bike for ten years (wasn't a huge fan anyway), then eventually thought I better get a bike again. So after not riding for ten years, I had a bike out on a test ride in a side street, and on that first-ride-in-ten-years, I was riding quite happily hands-free. There really is something to not forgetting how to balance on a bike. I decided not to push my luck and resumed a normal pose before I reached the speed bump though...
The reputation in the US: a company that runs infomercials. The "fill the room with sound" ads are on par with Snuggie and Big Mouth Billy Bass.
Header image is hotlinked from wallpapersus.com.
If I remember correctly, it used to be common for disc-based PC games to refuse to run if they detected certain software often used for piracy, like optical drive emulation software.
Isn't it also plausible that after the first programmer hire (by non-programmer), any subsequent hiring will at least involve this first programmer?

I would even go as far as saying that an 'expert opinion' from a programmer would typically be involved in the hiring decision (be it from an external consultant, a friend or what not). Given that the non-programmer would typically realise they don't have themselves the skills to evaluate programming abilities or CVs.
The author of this article is a moron. Snowden reveled his identify for a number of reasons. His life is safer now that is public. They can't just kill him. You don't think that the US government KNOWS the identify of a leaker? As soon as he left the country, he set of red flags. He reveled himself for his safety. We'd have never even heard from him again had the US caught him and he not gone public.
Who Is a Fed?