skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess those are cases with larger or more established consultancies where there is already a reputation and probably at least a switchboard number.

If you're just hiring random freelancers who advertise on job boards there are quite a few fly-by-nights.
The Deadliest Number In Business
Don't you at least agree that if you'd replace a block of flats for thousand people with houses for 10 you'd seriously reduce supply of housing in this spot without affecting the demand much and so you'd increase the value and tax on each housing unit in this spot?

I'm no sure how land tax works in the US but in my country it is calculated by multiplying tax rate for given region by area of the plot and then divided between people who own the plot. Share is usually proportional to the area of the buildings or parts of them they own on this plot.
>Do yourself a favour and take a cold shower or perhaps seek help.

Do yourself (and everybody else) a favour and learn manners.

After that, you could try improving your reading comprehension skills. There was not even one "conspiracy theory" in my post, let alone an "above normal" volume of them.

Here's a breakdown for you:

>1) Because due to egotism, greed and lack of communal values, we have fucked up normal operation of society, and they are indeed are more prevalent than they were.

The first part of this is what is called social critique. You may agree or disagree with it, but it's not a "conspiracy theory" (except if you don't know what the latter means and use it willy nilly).

The second part is quantifiable and confirmed beyond doubt. In the US there are more homicides, mass shootings, serial killers etc, not to mention incarcerations, than anywhere in the so called Western world. You can look that up. There are also more than they used to be in the decades before the 80's.

>2) Because of watching them all the time in "entertainment", thus creating the impression that they are even more than the already too many that they are.

Another example of so called "social critique". Watching too much news and TV series, can make people believe serial killers, pedophiles, murders etc are more common than they already are.

This sounds like a ...conspiracy theory to you? Seriously?

>3) Because it's a good racket in order to sell "protection", a trillion dollar business, from politicians passing all the more extreme laws, to surveillance, to arms business, etc.

That would be a "conspiracy theory" if it wasn't common and acceptable knowledge.

You've never heard of the government, law officials, party media etc, play the "security card" or overstate some cases (like the importance of "hacking" or "piracy") to pass more laws, favour businesses etc?

Or even start whole (profitable for some) wars, in order to save people from (non existent) WMDs?

Have you even been paying attention to the whole security hoopla this past month, with the agencies using the safety excuse to tap into everyone's data?

>4) Because people themselves have stiffened up and treat other people like enemies even in casual urban situations, and treat their kids like they're prisoners for their own "safety".

Another case of "social critique". You might agree or disagree, but you'll find volumes of research on the issue. And not in the "conspiracy theory" section of the bookstore. Try "Sociology".

It's very sad that the level of discourse in HN has come (for some) to "take a cold shower" and "get help".

If I'm allowed a little snark, may I interest you to this Reddit site?
Let's not forget Iran in the 50s.
IRS database of nonprofits is filled with unredacted SSNs
Sigh. Google does not have a "partnership" with the NSA. They give the NSA data when they are required to do so by law. The problem is the law, which should be changed.
Newsconomy: A News and Bookmarking Sharing Website
Yes, not much has been done in the last 5 years. It would be fun to bring it back, however.
To answer your other point about replacing AM/FM broadcast with IP delivery.

This is not an efficient way of delivering the information. A broadcast is a single transmission that can be received by anyone without impacting the ability of others to then receive it. For large numbers of viewers/listeners it's a very efficient method of delivering information, and very cost effective, only having to pay for one big transmitter and a license for one channel.

If we look at it in terms of data-rates, a typical DAB radio channel may be 128kbps and might reach a million people.

Using a WiFi mesh network would mean that 128kbps audio stream would need to be transmitted to each user individually, so that's increased the data transmitted by a factor of 1 million (or however many listeners there are). Of course this is spread over the whole listener base, the real impact would be much more localised. Perhaps 10 people are listening to the same stream on 'your' mesh. That's still 10 identical streams going to 10 people where before you only had 1.

Of course there is IP Multicasting which reduces this problem, not sure how it would work in a Wireless Mesh environment though.
> I don't see it as a big problem to change plans
> somewhat at the start of a project, this is certainly
> better than doing it half way through.

There's a lot hiding behind that word "somewhat".

In his book Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art [1] Steve McConnell says that most project schedules can tolerate around a 20% change in delivery time without too much distress. So if the "somewhat" is within the manageable +/-20%, then the project can move forward. If the change is bigger than that, it almost certainly means that the project deliverables, schedule and fees need to be renegotiated. And if a client is constantly causing a project to be renegotiated, are they really a client?

[1] http://www.stevemcconnell.com/est.htm
Unhappy Apple TV owner? That's not possib...oh wait. Count me in.

Do you notice that streaming anything over in-home sharing is just plain broken? I've got everything in the house talking on 802.11n but trying to play a movie off the Mac just...takes....forever...to buffer?
What a horribly witten, uninsightful article. Basically Kevin is saying 'I think its cool', but heavens knows the business case for it!

"Getting scale in mobile is really hard" - It really seams like it, there's no cloud computing, distribution platforms, billions of mobile users... oh right. All that exists. You mean getting the share of hype in mobile is really hard, I agree with that statement.

"Snapchat is doing a really awesome job of creating new behaviors that you wouldn't expect" - Like what exactly? Sexting? Oh that's right, your messages disappear... UNLESS someone takes a screen shot.

"Snap a photo or a video, add a caption, and send it to a friend (or maybe a few). They'll view it, laugh, and then the snap disappears from the screen - unless your friend takes a screenshot!"

So they kinda have this 'idea' that works but really doesn't.

"I definitely think it can happen within an organizations," Systrom said. "Risk-taking, if done well, can be done within organizations in a way that is much safer than having to drop out of school to do a startup."

Pearls of wisdom from a seasoned vetrean of the industry. The guy is clearly smart, and I don't want to take anything away from what he's done but he has exactly 0 experience managing innovation inside a large organization. He has no clue how this works or how this is done. I'd prefer he would give some concrete insight to exactly WHY he thinks snapchat is worth the 800M (beside pure VC speculation or a gut feeling) which he is in a unique position to do, then wax philosophical about innovation in organizations. Maybe if the author did some 'journalism' and pressed him for some real answers instead of half formed opinions we'd have something worth reading.
I highly recommend this plugin! I find it really snappy on my projects.

I haven't had the opportunity to try it on any gigantic projects, but I have found configuration files for YCM in the Chromium source tree which suggests that it scales nicely (assuming it's usable on the Chromium tree).
A guess:

To the question "What do you think makes some programmers 10 or 100 times more productive than others?"

Guido van Rossum answers "Genetic differet brain structure." (sic)

Tim Bray answers "The surprising variability of the human mind."

I think they're basically the same answer, but Tim Bray's is the very American politically correct "hooray to everybody!" version. Given that the title of the blog post refers to "great programmers", Guido's answer could be read as "my brain is super awesome and yours is not". Which, I bet, is not what he meant.
Going to college made me realize that I wanted to study computer science. If I had never gone to college I may have never known that. I agree that it's totally possible to educate yourself at home, but for some people (like me) who had no idea, college is a great place to access those resources and network with people in the field.
Checkout cygwin [1]. I think the main problem with a good terminal on Windows is that terminals depend heavily on having programs to run on them, and Windows, because of its lack of good terminal, doesn't have the programs to run with it. From what I have heard, PowerShell looks promising.

[1]http://www.cygwin.com/
> am I alone in confusing Mos Def with MOSFET for about a decade and completely mispronouncing (and misunderstanding) the guy's stage name?

Most Definitely.
There were 3000 casualties.
Looks nice. Has anyone tried tailoring one of these services to appeal to client <-> developer relationships? e.g. selling "your clients can easily edit the emails your app sends out without bugging you / requiring a redeploy."

That seems doable with something like alphamail, but I've yet to see a service that targets that specific need.
Suggested Pull:

@user: NSA

---

+++

In order to comply with NSA Directive [REDACTED] and FISA Court Order [Classified], anyone using these technologies will be required to install LiterallySpyingOnYou.exe or an equivalent binary for your OS of choice.

Failure to comply will result in <strikeout>your immediate offshore imprisonment</strikeout> a fair and impartial trial by your peers.

+++
Using Google Reader's reanimated corpse to browse archived data
So how does that work? They hire you for a year, pay you 20K, and how many hours/week do they expect to get (is that in the contract)?

I do consulting myself, and I've never heard of such a strange arrangement.
Brazilians cheering 9/11, if true, is completely disgusting. It sounds like they are also fed some propaganda.
Didn't this happen during the last Superbowl ?
Not sure whether they were able to find what caused the power to shut down.
I agree about the privacy issues. Siri as currently implemented requires sending data off to the Internet, which is one reason why I don't personally use it very much. One of the technical reasons that Siri itself can't do this currently is that on some providers it can't do data and voice concurrently on the GSM radio. I don't know how much of Siri could be done locally on the phone, but that can't be far off.
Ok, I understand your comment now. The emphasis wasn't on me saying that the UK plant was the ONLY one that had interesting challenges, I was simply using that as a way to the say that any CocaCola plant (or similar, as I mention in the brackets after) has interesting engineering problems and that there IS a plant in the UK. I think people often dismiss manufacturing as "done" and easy hence that became one of my examples.

I think our definition of interesting is different as I find nearly anything in manufacturing interesting, standard or not, and making them better/faster is always a problem to me - I recently toured one of our suppliers who supplies our extruded parts and I was fascinated about how they use their machines, not one of which was less than 25 years old, to make useful shapes and multi material extrusions - on the surface everything was standard and run of the mill but below the surface it was much more interesting.
DreamIt Ventures and Saborstudio Take Potatoes On World Tour
I work in the WCIU building. We should grab lunch sometime!
You better thank your lucky stars you aren't installing on Windows! Took me many days of tinkering to get this working correctly with clang support, and its still not all the way there yet.

Regardless, amazing vim plugin!
Not personally, but I have worked with people who do.
There is always some measure of due diligence performed where "this guy only has a google voice number" would be unlikely to pass.
What's a reasonable alternative? Anarchy? The "state" -- most rational people would say "government" -- you discuss is a collection of municipal, state and federal government, with differing goals and political orientations, and how should spectrum be allocated other than by a government agency? Where is it done differently? So I can't publish a book without the government's approval of it? Which government? Which agency approves books? As another poster said, what is correct in your post? You have to justify such ridiculous claims that are contradictory to reality.
Amusing that Autonomy is listed as an acquirer, given how desperately they had to be acquired themselves.
I've been using this for Python development for a few months now and it's by far the best completion solution I've found in vim and I've tried most. Jedi by itself is great but the actual interface to it was always lacking and YCM's fuzzy matching makes it breeze.
Really, you think the average American thinks more highly of his country than the average Frenchman? Have you ever spoken to a Frenchman?
When the UI is too fast
CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou’s Open Letter to Edward Snowden
If you want to transmit illegal data the best option is to take the route where the chance of intersection is minimal. And then Internet is not an option.

That's also why I think surveillance programs won't catch the real bad guys. Take a look at how long it took to get Osama.
I think you may be conflating your own sadism with something normative and just. Despite your assertions elsewhere that the whole world is just waiting for an opportunity to turn the United States into a graveyard, most people around the world do not not, in fact, hate the United States so vehemently that 9/11 made them cheer. Most people around the world reacted the way human beings with empathy do, with horror and sadness. I would even bet most Brazilians didn't hold parties celebrating the bloodshed.

Your point of view isn't normal. Please stop acting as if it is, and please stop acting as if that level of enmity represents something good and noble about the people of Brazil. You make your country look like a bunch of psychopaths.
The FISA ████ court on Twitter
Well the reliance on exit nodes isn't really what separates Tor from I2P; the latter requires exit nodes for accessing publicly-facing servers as well. Neither requires them for accessing servers that are internal to their network. This is sometimes confused because Tor puts more emphasis on outproxying, and I2P on inproxying, but both networks are capable of both activities.
It is not clear from the article how the empathy level of all participants was assessed before the beginning of the experiment. From what I read, it could have been random luck that people with more empathy were selected to follow the meditation training. What I am missing there ?
What does "traitor on par with the [C]old [W]ar" mean? Do you know what "on par" means?
I think by "change how you use identity" I mean a lifestyle change not a minor procedure change.

As per your example, most people with no identity issues tend to walk into the car dealer and buy a car with a loan and the dealer runs a credit check on them before they even get to test drive (happened to me...). I agree, walking in with a duffel bag of cash is not going to work.

On the other hand, why not buy a "decent" project car for cash from a private citizen, then spend cash at car shops upgrading it to a quite nice hot rod?

Or the meta question of, why buy a car? If a decent fake ID is so expensive, and the cost of detection is so high, why not just pay a cabbie or live in NYC and not own a car?

The startup lesson here, if any, is optimize the big picture, then once that is done, work on optimizing the little picture stuff.

If the cost, both financial and risk, of having a car while remaining private is very high, then don't have a car.

On the other hand, as far as I know, fake profiles on facebook are no big deal, just put enough up not to be suspiciously empty. One important datapoint is I'm not operating under a fake ID, and I had a FB account years and years ago back when it was new and just opened to the public, it was a total waste of time, so after awhile I deleted it, and absolutely no one cares. Its right up there with being one of those guys who doesn't own a TV and tells everyone about it all the time. So a guy operating under a fake identity has at least one anecdote that at least one guy with a real identity found not having a FB account to be completely totally unimportant to modern living.

People who discuss living outside the identity system never seem to mention our explosively growing illegal population. This stuff has all been figured out, if you're willing to learn spanish and be friendly. If a hispanic looking dude can get away with calling himself an illegal, and everything turns out OK, then I can probably call myself a German illegal, or whatever. Germans have pretty good records and might cooperate with the locals... How about my becoming a south african illegal? That would probably work.
An ongoing support contract for x many man-days a month is pretty typical.
Alternatively you ring the door bell a few times!
I switched from an Apple TV gen 2 and even the hackability with firecore didn't make up for all the issues I had. I knew within 5 minutes of using my Roku 3 that I had made the right decision (plus I sold the atv on ebay for a hefty markup so it actually paid to make the mistake).
How Religion Destroys Programmers
From the mid 90's to ~2001 for windows development your alternative was complex windows frameworks like MFC, which took hundreds of lines of boilerplate code to get a simple app going. VB by comparison had a reasonable amount of speed, no boilerplate and could still call C/C++ libraries.
Ask HN: How does A/B Testing improve your Dev Process (Short Survey)
How do you use A/B-Testing in your dev process? Could you do me a favour and fill our 5 minute survey?

Thank you very much.
Miyamoto Admits Nintendo Underestimated The Switch To HD
Powerful tips for your pitch
Here is the survey link:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/99P22WM
> "Tim Bray's is the very American ..."

Tim Bray is Canadian.
How to package a product
>Personally, I'd rather see the State undertake real infrastructure work on clear and honest terms

Yes, I agree with this.

"Waste" is the misallocation of resources whereby you don't get as much benefit from choosing A and you would from choosing B. I would certainly rather see money and resources spent on civil engineering projects, like HS2, broadband rollout, CERN, new Motorways than old military technology.

However, tying to sell this to the public is where it gets hard, selling a sporting event seems a lot easier than selling a Nuclear power plant.

>but do you really want to live in a country where everyone is directly or indirectly hired by the military?

This hardly describes the UK, we have an average defence budget that is being cut more and more almost on a daily basis. It's tiny compared to the US.

>considering most of the "spying infrastructure" (and military as well, these days) is still bought from abroad

I'm assuming from your comment you're from the UK, in which case we are that 'abroad'. Defence and cyber engineering is one of our few exports, for better or worse.
Often it will be for work that is estimated to be delivered in one year, which may be full time or not. Or the project might be delivered in under 1 year the contract includes support for a longer period.
> If you're just hiring random freelancers who advertise
> on job boards there are quite a few fly-by-nights.

Please stop making up a scenario that is different from the one outlined in the article. It's causing you to come across as argumentative.
Good point, but even when the client is a company you're usually only interfacing with one or two people, either of whom can be high maintenance.

Bottom line is customers suck. You're either a people person who enjoys the challenge of turning customer frowns into smiles, or arrange your business to minimize direct contact with customers.
The #GlobalPOV Project: "Are Slums the Global Urban Future?" [video]
What if the encrypted data streams that flow over decentralized p2p networks like RetroShare (http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/) would hold up and not be "decryptable" for the time we need to "undo" the mass-surveillance apparatus?

I mean, encryption could still be the one tool needed just to get activism going enough to beat the bastards (I mean, without being sabotaged, disinformed, killed, arrested, etc.).

Snowden's statement regarding encryption was: "Encryption works. Unfortunately, endpoint security is still weak."
Your assumption here is that the reporter did not press Systrom for "real" answers. Did you consider that perhaps these were the answers he gave when pressed for more?
I also thought this was for Apple TV. Even though it isn't, it's theoretically possible to write apps that you control through your Apple TV by taking over one of the existing apps that you don't use. MLB is one of a few good candidates. Many of Apple TV's "apps" are actually javascript apps, though unfortunately they aren't just running a WebView.

When you load the MLB app, it requests javascript and assets from mlb.com and operates on some sort of XML document rather than an HTML DOM. At my office we use 3rd-gen Apple TVs for AirPlay presentations, and I did some experiments with making a custom app that showed a rotating list of clients. We used a Raspberry Pi that functioned as both webserver and DNS, then pointed the Apple TVs' DNS at the Pi to reroute all requests going to mlb.com.
It goes to 22% in 20 years for just SS/Medicare. But don't forget Medicaid, of which a significant portion goes to the elderly and is likely to increase, and can also be funded by additional state taxes. Californians especially are f*ed. I'm not throwing out a vetted number, but given all the evidence 30% doesn't seem unrealistic.
Resumable exceptions for Clojure
I don't know about order... they've all done some amazing stuff. FWIW, there's some interesting historical / biographical information on some of these folks in two books, both by Steven Levy:

Artificial Life

and

Hackers: Heroes Of The Computer Revolution

That said, the stuff Claude Shannon did basically established the field of Information Theory[1], which underpins huge swathes of our modern digital world. You could do worse than reading up on him.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
SPOILER:

Use the gas on the tree outside the house with the woman, climb up it, tickle her with the feather and take the shiny thing she's holding to win the game.
The Self-Pipe Trick Explained