skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there's a distinction to be made between a web site and web application developer. One builds posters on the internet and the other builds software that just happens to use HTTP.

I've found the latter to be considerably more lucrative and engaging. The work I've done ranges from language teaching software to automated trading bots for second hand books.

The market for this sort of work is so screamingly hot right now that if I did all the work that my current clients are asking for in series, I'd be booked into early 2015. And that at a daily rate that the me of three years ago would have trouble even asking for at the negotiation table.
So what makes it a decent article for hn? Are there really a bunch of folks around here who haven't noticed this controversy yet?
He worked at the CIA before BAH.
Funny how they use crystals in many movies for data storage and I always found it a bit stupid... But in reality, it looks like they're the future of storage - I remember they experimented with writing data using lasers to cubes about a decade ago...
Most comments seem to be missing the point.

Why did Gladwell make such egregious mistakes and resort to lazy, analysis? Why did most readers lazily accept such explanations without asking relevant questions? Why do journalists immediately jump to cultural explanations in lots of cases without having a strong understanding of the facts, the details and/or actual knowledge of the cultures that they are holding accountable?

Because culturalism makes us feel informed and superior. It allows us to form a sophisticated-sounding opinion that confirms your own cultural superiority without knowing anything. It allows us to quickly come to a wrong conclusion in a lot of different contexts - it's difficult to get to know a specific person, but it's easy to recall a cultural stereotype. We want to feel like we know what's going on, even when we have no idea. Culturalism gives us that feeling. It's knowledge saccharin.

This comes up a lot in technological contexts. for instance, with just programming languages and platforms, we see these (or some politely worded versions thereof) all the time: .NET developers are copy-pasting Microsoft drones who can't solve difficult problems without wizards holding hands, Lisp programmers are non-bathing egotists who can't work with others, Java programmers are cargo-cultists who prefer verbose incantations full of acronym soups and unnecessary hiearchies of meaningless classes to clear code, Perl/Ruby/Javascript programmers can only write short scripts, not maintainable, performant or critical applications.

The lesson here is clear - distinguish between actual knowledge of the world and poor, phony substitutes that merely give us the feeling of knowing. It'll make us better at what we do and incidentally also lead to a better society.
Congratulations on making me snort tea up my nose :)
The fact remains - the Guardian's LIVE BLOG, which has been the definitive news source of this worldwide news for the last 4-5 hours -- never made it onto HN's homepage.
What's the motivation for replacing Ocelot? My understanding is that it's mostly a drop-in replacement for XBTT (please correct me if I'm wrong); is one of the design goals of Chihaya to modernize the API?
I think they're more the type of thing people seek when naive, very readable solutions don't work, so maybe weekly. But when you find the right algorithm for what was previously a tough challenge, it's fun!
Standard Treasury (YC S13) Is on Road to ‘Revolutionizing’ Bank Technology
Next NuPIC Hackathon Location Poll
Obamacare Open Enrollment Explained
Poor you... Seriously there's no competition in my mind: freeagent compared to that spreadsheet is like being fed ferrero rocher by Angelina Jolie at the ambassadors ball verses having faeces flung at you by drunk chimps at the zoo!
As for Smith, there might be a way around it:

http://www.volokh.com/2013/06/07/why-does-a-terry-standard-a...
Not only is Snowden brave, and smart enough to outwit (so far) the most powerful institutions of our day, he's also an excellent writer.

To David Brooks and all the others who mock him for not finishing high school, take this statement as a model of clarity and forthrightness.
There's a power / height chart in the world record claim form (as well:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5093348/Draft%20Atlas%20...

More considerations are the additional power needed for control inputs and to resist wind, and to compensate for thinner air at altitude, and the weight of a craft strong anough to operate outdoors.
Check out http://forecast.io
> If you have done more than one day's programming in any language you will realise that this is an important building block for programmers.

I guess my any languages are different. Never realized it's importain in haskell (except it is ⊥).
Thank you, that's the kind of answer I was looking for.
OF COURSE its unconstitutional. However, I don't see the point of even debating it. It's like when people got super excited that citizens were suing the NSA to obtain this data as if there were anything other than a 100% chance they would be denied.

There are a few possible outcomes to this debate:

-The NSA says, sure, its unconstitutional, but that wont stop us from doing it.

-The NSA continues to deny/lie about what they are doing with the program.

-The NSA appoints an oversight committee with no actual powers to make sure they "don't continue to do the same thing"

-No comment, forever.

Any of those options mean that the NSA keeps doing the same thing, tells us to STFU and we realize we have no recourse. I hate to say it, but it seems like this debate will have to end in violence or it won't end at all. :\
or on a different computer.
I envy you because you've yet to discover Greg Egan. You'll want Axiomatic, Permutation City and Diaspora, in that order.
Doing that doesn't increase value though.
I think these discussions are always funny, the internet has not killed the working class. The working class was destroyed by the loss of manufacturing to other countries. What does the internet have to do with this? Its more about globalization.
>>This article is trash, the discussions on this issue are trash, and everyone is running around like a headless chicken.

This article is more than trash, it is totally misleading in almost every way. Any discussion of the fourth amendment in the context of Patriot Act 215 will invariably bring up a discussion of the third party doctrine which states that: "information loses Fourth Amendment protection when it is knowingly revealed to a third party[1]." The author seems to go out of his way to avoid discussion of any of the extensive legal precedents that have interpreted the fourth amendment. Just hyperbolic rhetoric and comparisons to the colonial government. It isn't helpful at all.

1:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1138128
View and fork does not mean view and fork and edit.

Some of us fork just so we can security audit the code once and then have a safe place to clone from.
Taxes reward those who don't produce and punish those who do produce. But, taxes are the price of living in an organized society. Also, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Money isn't the problem, it's a lack of education about how money work that is the real problem. If you give poor or lazy people money it'll just find it's way back into the pockets of people who understand how money works (the rich).
Even if we take everything from the rich, they'll just get it back because the average person, with no financial education, is incapable of preserving or creating wealth.
> If you are a Django developer, by all means leverage advice such as this. If you are not, consider looking to alternatives that meet your performance target out of the box.

Before you do any of this, consider what your performance needs are. I think we as developers get caught up in this performance/benchmarking game a bit too much at times. If you like Django+DRF, chances are it will probably be "fast enough" for your project. DRF is extremely easy source to read through and work with, the documentation is great, and the maintainability/usability/devspeed wins are huge perks to us.

Unless you have very specific, strict requirements to deliver things at the tiniest fraction of a second possible, choose what you think you can be comfortable with and worry much less about performance (within reason). The article hints at this, showing you that you're going to spend a lot more time waiting on IO than in framework land.
I read chapters of it a few years back, too, but forgotten the details. All in all, I was pretty convinced of the soundness of the approach at the time.

My recollection is that this framework of causal inference allows one to ask questions about a probabilistic model that one can then try and measure to test causality.

These questions are interventions or assertions (the do operators) that something happened.

So one would start out with a Graphical Model like in the smoking example which defines a probability model, and then make do assertions on the model for various candidate causes and see what that would imply about the change in probabilities and then design an experiment to measure them and confirm them.
> I'm getting more and more skeptical of any claims that all of Snowden's actions are part of some brilliant plan.

This is a very dynamic situation. I'm not going to fault the guy for trying, but he is obviously out-gunned. Everyday he avoids U.S. custody is a win. Personally, I think there needs to be greater efforts made at home to protect his status as a whistle blower. The current administration obviously isn't losing their interest in getting him. Perhaps the next one will be different (not holding my breath).
Data always expands to fit a technology
Definitely,

I was so damn surprised, man!

The last story I had on the front page was like 6 months ago so I said to become active again and thought timing was crucial with this one.

I got the timing right :D

What I want to ask is this, with the current title, would it have been as "baiting"? I mean, did it have a chance of getting on the front page with the actual title? Because if it did, then it's too bad :(
That technical infeasibility is precisely why the business exists. If it were technically feasible, a person could purchase their own device or system to manage such tasks and Fancy Hands and similar services would become obsolete, or graduate to more complex tasks that are still as yet technically infeasible.
The current geek want it, the future geek with the robotic gun in his head don't.
Autoforward everything you get to it to one of your custom domain emails, and set up an autoresponder that says you're no longer using GMail, points to your new email, and tells the sender you'll stop checking GMail soon?

After about a year or so of that (plus having the presence of mind to update your email address whenever you use a service), you should be able to delete your account without too much inconvenience. Yes, it's a pain, but that's how lock-in works.
Man makes own dialysis machine, displays amazing will to live and ingenuity
I use SyncBackPro (1), a Windows app which allows me to create automatic daily & monthly mirrors to Amazon S3, external USB drives & an ftp server provided by my email provider.

(1) http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/sbpro-features.html
It think there is a lot of variation beetween member states.
Inside RhodeCode, No 2 - the new hosted SCM for Git & Mercurial
> Both republicans and democrats have rushed to defend the NSA.

In terms of realpolitik, that only makes sense. Politicians will defend anyone that they think might have the dirt on them. Intelligence apparatuses in all ages exist to control the political class.

Hoover's reign at the FBI is a history of political control via intel.
Golf is an extremely bad example to compare to flying an commercial airplane. Why? Because it's a single player game and not a team sport. You don't need to work with and communicate with others to win. When you're communicating and working with other people, culture does matter.
We're a long way away from this yet, but eventually we likely will run out of work. Some jobs are harder to automate than others, and some arguably will never be (robotic artists seem a little silly?) automated. At some point in the future we're going to have to ask ourselves the question: what the hell do we do with ourselves? Working less would probably be a good start. But then what? Do we turn into a dystopian planet of hedonistic oafs?
This is a totally awesome idea. You are still in trouble if the load balancer has problems or S3 has problems (unlikely, but not impossible!). It's always smart to have a couple of ways of failing over to something if your main site has problems - for instance, I'm always surprised that more people don't spend time customizing the default rails error/maintenance pages for heroku.
The article is trying to highlight two different types of "jobs": ones that can provide a family with a "comfortable lifestyle" and ones in which people struggle to make ends meat.

I think the article makes a far leap to say the internet is responsible for the decreasing middle class. There are many factors, such as manufacturing automation, in our changing economic conditions.

Overall, I do not think the internet will be huge catalyst for job growth - in terms of providing millions of new jobs. But it will always be a huge catalyst for economic growth.

The following was insightful:

"It suddenly occurred to me," wrote Packer, "that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up."

Hopefully those twenty years old developers will solve more meaningful problems than sharing cat photos.

As an aside, I'm surprised that any discussion on "basic income" - you know it's coming - hasn't mention the Star Trek economy. Seriously, how do people in Star Trek universe survive in their economy?
Wow, 1 million servers across all of their datacenters. I wish I could visit such an operation just to get a sense of the scale. And how do you exactly manage that much compute/storage capacity? Amazing.
They can't be made for less so if the value isn't there for you, stay out of that market (I never have or will bought a 3D TV for this reason). Buy your "dumb phone" and be happy.
> Tuples constructor

Confusion is avoided by understanding that comma ',' not paren '()' is the tuple constructor.

> Python doesn’t have multiline comments. Instead, multiline strings are used.

No the are NOT! Don't use strings for comments dammit.
Indeed, further down in the comments (on the article) one of the Go team members pointed this out and the author just called this solution "measurably worse" without any factual basis. It's a pity that so many seemingly technical articles are littered with bias and unfounded opinions these days...
That could also have to do with location. I'm in Chicago so I have to admit you're right and that market is hot. I think the trouble there is breaking into it. Toward the end of my run as a full time freelancer I tried to get into web applications. The trouble was that I still got a lot of people with an idea for the next Facebook but could barely use MS Word and thought a web developer was the same job as the guy who fixes your PC when it crashes. I was able to build a few web apps but budgets and preparation were so awful that gaining credibility was tough. I could build a great web app but not for $2k and a Month's time. So many people think they can hire you to build an eBay competitor and that the site will magically just create money by simply existing.

You're right that there's a huge market now but I would qualify that statement and add that the future is in specialized web applications for people with domain knowledge and an actual business plan. I might have been doing something wrong not to find those people or maybe I was unlucky.
I have come across COFFEE before, its just a forensic tool. It doesn't do anything more than what 3rd party tools can do. It looks like a toolkit put together for investigators. Do you have any source to support that it can decrypt/bypass Bitlocker encryption? I couldn't find any information online.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Online_Forensic_Evide...
identi.co

I have no idea what to do with it ;)
> Real people don't work that way. At least 99% of us don't.

This statement rings with me quite a bit.

I'm reminded of the day the FBI released the video and photos of the Tsarnaevs just after the Boston bombing and it was discovered that they were from Chechnya. If you visited twitter and searched for their names, you could have found a few thousand tweets asking why the Czech Republic was attacking the US. Here are thousands of Americans, typing words into a computer connected to the largest distributed information storage network ever conceived by man, and they don't bother to verify that Chechnya and the Czech Republic aren't the same place.

Most people aren't stupid, they just don't care. How many times last week did knowing the difference between Chechnya and the Czech Republic come in handy for you? Likewise, knowing that the NSA is actively slurping all your phone calls and emails, what can you do that doesn't require massive lifestyle changes?
Tell Me Which Founders to Feature on StartupGuruTV
Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker purports that the US Ambassador to Russia is denying the conversation stated in the 1st paragraph ever occurred: https://twitter.com/RyanLizza/status/355717218895536129

I don't find Wikileaks as a credible source on this topic in general.
Phew,

Clive, this should've been the first comment I got, not all this :(

I guess the answer to your question is this - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb895144.aspx
These nations, including Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador have my gratitude and respect for being the first to stand against human rights violations carried out by the powerful rather than the powerless.

Are people really not bothered at the irony in this sentence? Russia, as a country that stands against abuse of the powerless by the powerful?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/12/world/europe/russian-court...

If the posthumous prosecution of Sergei L. Magnitsky, the lawyer who was jailed as he tried to expose a huge government tax fraud and died four years ago in a Russian prison after being denied proper medical care, seemed surreal from the moment the authorities announced it, the verdict and sentencing on Thursday did not disappoint.

By all accounts, it was Russia’s first trial of a dead man, and in the tiny third-floor courtroom of the Tverskoi District Court, it took the judge, Igor B. Alisov, more than an hour and a half to read his decision pronouncing Mr. Magnitsky guilty of tax evasion.

It doesn't matter if it is hypocritical of an American like me to point this out, when it goes on in my country/government as well - but I find it willfully ignorant to label the Russian government as a defender of human rights like this.

edit: here is some more reading on Russia and this topic: http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/04/24/russia-worst-human-rights...
Because unless you have $500k sitting around, your choices are to sit in jail until people-who-go-home-every-day decide it's time to have a trial, plea, or contract with a private company to loan you the $450k and pay their massive fee. Once you realize how this end of the system works, it's quite hard to tell yourself that the words "innocent until proven guilty" mean anything.
So by "votes being paid for" you mean the conspiracy theory that Diebold machines altered vote totals?
flab.by
I don't find the US government a credible source on anything fullstop. Can't you see whats going on here?
Do we turn into a dystopian planet of hedonistic oafs?

I guess you haven't seen any of the recent reality TV shows lately...
This is not completely true. Even back then, certain computers running skype could become "super nodes" that handled incoming connections to devices e.g. behind NAT. All you needed to do to wiretap was become one of these nodes, which wasn't hard to do.

But yes, if you made sure neither computer had NAT and used no super nodes it was possible to be pretty protected (except for the problem that PRISM is tied to the network hardware and can read anything anywhere on the internet).
This is just a friendly warning, but I've noticed you've got an error on your about page[1] as well. You have the same paragraph posted twice inside itself (I'm guessing that's just a copy and paste error?).

I can see what you're trying to do - and genuinely wish you the best of luck for your site. But since sites such as those are very common already, you really cannot afford to make silly little mistakes like those as you'll risk putting off potential repeat visitors. So I'd recommend giving most of your site a re-read before posting future content.

[1] http://wind8apps.com/about/
I assume he didn't expect US would invalidate his passport that quickly, and get stuck in Russia.

He should have. In fact, the US were incredibly slow in doing it- they could have stopped him travelling to Russia in the first place.
Are You Sure You Want To Be An Entrepreneur?
My main advice: work on your sales skills before you do anything else!

I'd like to think I have decent people skills, but when it came to sales, networking, negotiating,... it wa a rough ride to the point that I'm back to look for a day job after 3 years, despite loving the flexibility freelance gave me.
Now hopefully Russia will do the right thing and at least let him leave the damn airport. There are a number of routes from Russia to Venezuela that don't cross over Western European or US airspace -- can't VZ just send a private plane with a military escort over there and bring him back?
The US Govt illegal activity couldn't have been exposed by a nicer guy. He's self-less and motivated by altruistic goals that serves everyone's interest but the US Govt's (and other Govt's they can influence).

It certainly helps our cause that he's both intelligent and articulate.

The fact that the US Govt can continue operating at full will irrespective of legal and constitutional boundaries shows just how much power and influence they already have.
I previously wrote about making a downtime page:

http://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2009/08/24/downtime-...

One thing you'll probably want to do is set 5xx HTTP status codes on your static site, and to try to get things to not cache it as much as possible.. A redirect to a subdomain hosted on s3 makes it more likely something like Google will pick up on it.
The flaw in cultural "explanations" is that they are not in any way explanations, but simply associations. Explanations involve cause and effect.

Illustration: The causes of ascribed cultural trait X which has a 75% prevalence in Fooistan may be identical to the causes of that same trait X in Baristan, where it has a 5% prevalence, and the difference may be entirely due to random circumstance and network effects. Explaining why a person in a particular incident acted in accordance with trait X with "He's Fooistani and they are often X" is not an explanation, just an observation, and offers no insight into the 25% of Fooistanis who are not X. The equivalent statement in the latter case is "He's Fooistani, and sometimes Fooistanis are not X" and has equal explanatory power: none.

As a Baristani, though, it is a very comforting "explanation" if trait X is a worrying trait, because being Fooistani is not something that they have to fear.
The one that always confuses me is that multiple "for"s in the same comprehension work the opposite way from how you expect:

>>> [[(a, b) for a in [1, 2, 3]] for b in [4, 5, 6]]
[[(1, 4), (2, 4), (3, 4)], [(1, 5), (2, 5), (3, 5)], [(1, 6), (2, 6), (3, 6)]]
>>> [(a, b) for a in [1, 2, 3] for b in [4, 5, 6]]
[(1, 4), (1, 5), (1, 6), (2, 4), (2, 5), (2, 6), (3, 4), (3, 5), (3, 6)]