skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the thing about the other media transitions is that they weren't happening at this accelerated rate. Records had a good, long run before cassette tapes; which were around for quite a while before they were surpassed by CDs. I got my phone, like, not that long ago.

I'd upgrade in a heartbeat if there were a good, modern smartphone with a physical keyboard though. But hey, you can't have everything in life.
I agree with you, but I was responding to the claim:

"b/c it has nothing to do with an investigation...now blackmail and extortion???"

I read that as something stronger than "we need to take lessons from history." I think the statement goes further than that to claim that the NSA's purported justifications are entirely pretense and the real motivation is blackmail and extortion. That I think requires stronger proof than "someone sometime did something."
Selling on credit is different than offering a loss leader and making it up elsewhere.

If they are "selling you the phone on credit", then it would be obvious to require (a) in bill, separate items for the telecommunications and for the phone payment; (b) in advertising, note the full price of the phone, including the all monthly payments+interest; (c) when the phone is paid in full (24 months?), then stop charging for it... rather than continuing the same bill forever.
Google Hangout is substantially more functional than gtalk. For example, my Class of 2017 group does 10-way hangouts most weeks to get to know each other, something which really wasn't possible with gtalk, which facilitates one-way calls between contacts. Hangouts provides a semi-private room that more people can join, and all sorts of silly things to like watching YouTube together. It's not a conspiracy to prevent you from using encryption. That's just absurd.

If you need XMPP and OTR, run Openfire on a VM. I just deployed this internally at work and we love it.
New and updated features of Windows 8.1 (running list)
Bill Gates says MOOCs beginning of something profound
Stupid Things People Care Way Too Much About
FWIW, the Google Hangout(Talk) has an option to "Turn history off". Whether or not you trust that is a different story.
Are you afraid of the New York State Parks & Rec department? Your logic suggests you should be.

Have you read Caro's _Power Broker_? If not, you should!
Reading "Endless supply of food" and "pool table" is such a turn off now days.

Mention "work life balance", it speaks volumes more for culture.
>The majority of troops on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan were not US Military - predominantly PMCs

Citation please. I don't believe this to be true based on first hand accounts of people who have been to both of those places.
When a user asks you to solve the halting problem, ask them what they want to accomplish by doing it. Almost always there's some way to cheat and get them what they want without doing the impossible.
I'm a DVM, and you're mistaken about antifreeze. It causes kidney failure over a period of several days, leading to a slow, agonizing death while toxins normally filtered out by the kidneys build up in the bloodstream. The dogs with antifreeze toxicity that I attempted to treat were quite obviously suffering.
Neither do most PCs. And even when they do, they're often implemented in software.

Which is part of why the NSA guide to securing a machine recommends that you decide whether or not you actually need the camera and microphone, and if not, you open the case and physically cut the cables.
It's not a filter, but you're losing a lot of information by discarding direction. Without direction, most nodes will likely be part of a giant connected component with small diameter, due to the presence of hubs. See my other comment in this thread.
> Or using third-party OTR plugins (with real encryption)
> by replacing gtalk XMPP with Google Hangout?

Has this actually stopped working for you? On my account, Gtalk still works fine with XMPP, including OTR chats in Pidgin.
Passwords Are Broken, a Temporary Fix
Right, the only point I'm making is that ease of parsing JSON shouldn't count as a factor against RSS since RSS parsing is already more done than parsing any JSON-powered RSS alternative as the object model is already defined and implemented.
What changed when you were 25(ish) if I may ask?
The “level 0” solution is to periodically fetch each feed, parse it, diff it and hopefully find something new.

Um, less solutions to this exist, but they are much simpler than 'PubSubHubbub or RSSCloud'. And don't require any changes to RSS.

You are requesting this thing over HTTP. You (and the server delivering the feed) simply need to use standard HTTP caching headers. etags, last-modified, etc.

No need to fetch the XML and parse it and diff it.
Spire: REST Interface for mongodb
Faith and Works at Apple
The complaint is that there used to be an option to make history off by default, which no longer exists. Every chat must have its history manually disabled.
I, simultaneously,

(1) Agree that the powers technology has implicitly granted the DoJ are a cause for concern; and

(2) am comforted, not alarmed, by a drumbeat of stories about government employees getting busted for looking at records they shouldn't be looking at.
Real Sci-Fi Technologies About to Change the World
Senior Ruby on Rails Engineer - PagerDuty, San Francisco
Apportable looks extremely interesting for our company. Can you give us an indication of how far we can get right now with a UIKit based app (no game, no OpenGL) and Apportable? I couldn't find any documentation about this on the web.

I assume and hope your upcoming announcement is regarding non-game apps. :)
> Who Says C is Simple?

I do.

C is like chess. There are few simple rules (compared say to C++ spec). But knowing the rules doesn't mean you'll end up beating Kasparov. It still takes skill and practice to be a good C programmer.

So, the language itself, is pretty simple compared to other popular programming languages as far as it has a simple syntax. I can teach someone the rules of chess pretty quickly, It doesn't mean I'll create a chess grand-master in a day or two.
Show HN: GoMR, a toy MapReduce framework using Goroutines
1) There is some "lock-in" even without lock-in - some phone subsidies work even if people can leave because they don't leave that much anyways; think of it as advertising expense for customer acquisition.

2) There are economies of scale (order size) and synergies (sell phones at the same office you already have for contract sales) that can mean that $RANDOM_TELECOMPANY has significantly lower costs than $RANDOM_PHONE_RETAILER and can simply outcompete them on price.
This is the way to do it. I went to a college that had a Game Design program and no one (that I was affiliated with) modded any games! It completely took me away since modding Tribes, CS and making maps/models/textures for existing games seemed like a perfect way to get 'real world' experience.

They kids I did see in that program mostly stayed in the lounge playing an xbox.
I'm 15. Probably discovered it because of /r/programming in Reddit, can't remember exactly.

I came for the technical discussion, not for the startup scene.
A quite elaborate engagement proposal, done by and for Web nerds
This app is great. One thing I would suggest is adding performance indicators for the chart period you are currently viewing.
XMPP is still supported for now in Gtalk. But Google is moving away from XMPP.
> How can we refute the NSA's policies when they change definitions of words?

Incorporate by reference an introduction to formal logic into the NSA Policy Manual and Employee Handbook? :-)
Hold on ... the advice is to decide whether you want to earn or learn. After a certain age, lets say 32 to pick a random number, the marginal benefit of learning is less than earning.
I'm guessing you never supported an environment where laptops had hardware switches for the WiFi card. I can't even begin to quantify the amount of support time that wastes.

If a users asks for something to happen (like a Skype call) it should just happen. To end-users, having multiple points at which the functionality they want can be switched off is just frustrating, and it costs manufacturers call center time and customer satisfaction.

The paranoid can tape over cameras and cut mic cables if they feel it's really necessary.

You really might want to consider whether "slavery" is the appropriate word for switches implemented in software.
Hey Blizzard, Diablo III on PC still sucks
The book "The Definition of Standard ML" is ~150 pages for a language that is simple (IMO) and rich. Bonus, the definition is not written in prose, but with typing rules and operational semantics.
Or consider this list of the _lamest_ edit wars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars

Everything from edit wars over fictional waterfowl to the correct size of the Death Star in Star Wars. Read at your own risk.
To its credit though when it works, even with modest options, it can work well. I joined Sun Micro the monday after they went public and those options, while small compared to other employees that were already employed, effectively quadrupled the economic value I got out of my first four years at the company.
The thing that screwed RSS was not it being XML: I've seen the exact same issues happen any time someone has a text field in any file format. (Hell, I'm guilty of this.) They are more related to poor stewardship of a shared protocol than due to the usage of any particular transport encoding.

The first issue is that you have a field, and that field is rendered in a text box, and is defined to be text; at some point you go "man, I wish I could add a hyperlink to my text", and so you now want to put some HTML in there. However, the field is just text, so what do you do?

Let's say this was JSON, and this text is a string; do you put HTML in the string? This is somewhat equivalent to putting escaped HTML into the text node of the XML document. Alternatively, you could replace the string with an object (vaguely equivalent to putting HTML elements in the RSS).

The result of some people choosing the first option (which seems more reasonable at first glance than the second option, as it provides a better experience for existing readers and better fits the existing protocol) is having to look at a string and guess whether it should be parsed as HTML or not.

The second problem is that as people make changes in the second direction, if they are not carefully organized and centralized in a specification, you end up with haphazard and incompatible changes: someone decides to add a "type" field with a mime type, someone else adds a different element.

Having a ton of people generate the format, and having the thing parsed by some liberal canonical language, leads to too much flexibility in fields like dates: someone puts a weird date format into their date field, and it is parsed correctly, and then tons of other people do it, and you're screwed.

This also isn't helped by going with JSON: the field is just more likely to end up being "anything that a JavaScript Date object is willing to convert from a string to a date", which assuredly supports irritating corner cases that are not supported by the Date parsers from other random languages.

With RSS, it was really "the peoples' protocol", with the specifications only encoding random changes that had become popular over time. What we were left with was a total mess: I can't find it now, but someone once wrote a proof that you couldn't actually parse RSS due to conflicting standards.
Buying a Better Lottery Ticket: Mobile App Marketing Advice from Rob Walling
Well, they are. Google "red light spray" or something similar. I think it may be illegal in some jurisdictions.
C'mon, not delivered by quad-copter?
Live in fear. Obey!
Damn you to hell. I _was_ listening to some good fiction during my jogs via audible, but now I feel bad for not using that time to invest in myself learning from others!
I'm not espousing this opinion, it's an (admittedly cynical) commentary on the use of the word terrorist in the media.
The Raspberry Pi’s Hardware Random Number Generator
They do indeed fly them. I grew up in west-central Ohio and every year about 1.5 weeks before the Indianapolis 500 we'd see the blimp fly over, headed west towards Indianapolis.
That seems like potentially an impoverishing sort of attitude?
> Do you think Larry Page can be bought?

Absolutely. His price is letting him remain a billionaire. I'm of the opinion that most billionaires would sell their own mothers to organ harvesters if failure to do so would result in them becoming poor.
Fears and cautions should not be tied to organizations themselves, but rather to actions. The NSA is not the FBI, yet memories of Hoover should give pause to anyone considering the NSA.

Tying fear and caution to organizations prevents you from learning much of anything from history as the offending organizations are almost all abolished, abandoned, or reorganized. Should experimentalists working in medicine and the humanities not learn from the Tuskegee Experiment because Public Health Service is a different organization today and the Tuskegee Institute no longer exists in a meaningful way?
Berkeley scientists have 'smart dust' on the brain
"Midwest/rural areas less than large metros and "hip locations" (due mainly to smaller pools of potential employees)."

Unfortunately that has not been my experience at all. Aside from personal experience, I read constantly on HN about how you can walk in off the street and get a job in SV and NYC if you have any skills at all.

To say that's not the experience here would be an understatement. You pretty much have to know someone. One advantage of being in this game since '81 is I know a lot of people. A BSCS from a decent school will get you a job in midwest/rural, its just going to be entry level helpdesk resetting email passwords, or pulling cat5 cable. Probably about half of grads are underemployed, I see them at work all the time.

Not to say there's no advantages; if you can get one of the "good jobs" the standard of living is spectacular in midwest/rural compared to the coasts, and there's better recreation (well, depends on your personal likes/dislikes, etc). Culture is better, generally.

Every once in a while, I take a 90 minute, 100 MPH commuter train into downtown Chicago and remind myself why I don't want to live in a big city. Or go to a conference on the coasts, or visit Europe again. I don't live in a big city; that's why I can easily afford that kind of lifestyle.
This article reads as "This is not company culture, this other thing is". But goes into very little detail about why. The only description of what culture generally is, is this:

> It’s about values and mindset.

What if your mission statement is "We value a fun work environemnt", or "We value our employees"? Is that /not/ an acceptable culture value? If you don't think it is, then the rest of my post won't be of interest to you, but I'd be interested to know why "we value winning" is, but "we value a fun workplace" isn't.

If it is, then how would you convey it to prospective employees? Do you just tell them that and hope they understand what that means?

I think a much more compelling (dare I say, meaningful?) way to convey those kinds of values is to say how they're implemented. If you say you value constant learning/professional development, people have to take it on faith that you are on the cutting edge, or that you give them freedom. A more meaningful thing to say, I think, would be to give specific examples. The extends to human values, like "we value a fun, casual workplace--we have a video game room, no dress code, and flexible hours".

So, to make an analogy: I think that ping pong tables are to "we value a playful office environment" as "we don't have team leaders" is to OP's inspiration section.
> "We are not collecting [geolocation] data," Inglis said, "under this program." (emphasis added)

The very first question that comes to mind when I read that quote is:

Well, then, under what other program are you collecting geolocation data.

The answer implies the possibility that they are in fact collecting geo. data, just not as part of this program, so the answer is technically truthful, while also being fully deceptive.
It's not 9% profit. It's 9% per year.

That can be double or even triple the cost depending on the timeline of payback
Is Diane Feinstein not my congressman? Isn't the Senate part of Congress? Aren't Senators Congressmen too?
App albums remind me of the trend in the late 90s to build a lame Win32 .exe wrapper around a website and ship it out on CD-ROMs. It made some sense as a response to slow internet connections, but in retrospect it was an obviously time-limited, user-limiting idea. App albums are similarly just a response to limited standard "interactive experience" capabilities. They'll go away in time.

The most use a Mac user could get out of one of these today is opening the HTML files directly in a browser, if the files can be accessed. Same deal with accessing any actual music/images/video/text in an app album on an "unsupported" phone (which, keep in mind, could be a new iPhone or Android a couple years from now).
Yes. I live in the UK. If my 25 days holiday dropped to 12, I would consider that an absolutely massive drop in quality of life and I would take a large paycut to prevent it.
I totally agree. The second response came from a person who is pissed off. The first response came from an emotionless hollow corporate robot.
Did you even read the article? It mentions "Zhukov liked it and asked for its color to resemble vodka so that he would not be seen drinking Coca-Cola in public". So I don't understand why you spin this into some distorted view of "Westerners'"
How does your product differ from RightScale, Scalr, or OpDemand?
Like Microsoft Terminator:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/te...
I don't think anybody disagrees with the broad point you're making; this subthread is talking about how likely it is that the FBI is blackmailing people and trying (clumsily) to convince people to kill themselves based on the actions of Hoover's FBI.
> was that you will no longer have to worry about losing anything. Chats are kept, and everything you share, like photos, is put in folders and stored.

Let us help you by monitoring you better and recording everything you do. For your convenience and protection of course.

You know, I didn't like them. Now I despise them. They said that with a straight face. They could have just you know, not say anything, or say Facebook is doing all this stuff we can't fall behind we need this data on your because we want to target ads better or we have to comply with government regulations. That's fine. I understand that. But telling people how this is for their convenience is really demeaning.
NASA Develops Novel Carbon Nanotube Growth Through Science Exchange (YC S11)
When talking about preventing children from being raped I'd prefer to concentrate on the vast numbers of children who are raped by a family member; then by someone they know (at a school or a club), than on the much fewer numbers of children raped by strangers.

"Stranger danger" created an atmosphere of fear, but did little to prevent sexual abuse of children.
You Won't Believe How Much Netflix Crops Your Movies
Colorado Town Mulls Letting Residents Shoot Down Drones
I'm disappointed in Scientology.
It's not so much "everyone is a suspect". It's "everyone is recorded"; investigating any suspect becomes not a matter of data collection, but of data collation. A hadoop job.
>"Comcast harbors and supports terrorism."

Got it.
Perhaps this is a new application for the pi? A dedicated entropy appliance could be useful
Yep. (Although I think you mean "more common" or "less uncommon"). It is what can happen to sales people especially when bonuses/performance reviews are based on sales not profit.
They were planning to do a lot more than spy, too. They were planning to kill both Daniel Ellsberg (if they couldn't discredit him first, e.g. by giving him LSD to make him nonsensical just before making a public appearance) and the journalist Jack Anderson.
You get cutthroat competition both on price and availability.

If any operator is ignoring poor service in some countryside region, competition will put up a few towers, make a local advertising campaign, and people can switch immediately.

Midsize companies (a few hundred employees) have enough negotiating power to ask for perfect coverage in a freshly built office building in the middle of nowhere, as they can trivially switch all their business phones overnight to a different operator otherwise.

And the cost, well, in my place are teenager plans for ~$5/mth that cover unlimited minutes/sms. I'm paying ~$10/mth to get data as well (speedcapped after 2gb, unlimited is a bit more).
Most likely, the cold truth about mobile development is that the guys selling middleware, trainings and even certifications are doing much more money than most app developers.

It is the usual story about selling shovels in any gold race.
The real insight here is that the dominant bit is not how many options you get (though that's important), it's how good the company is.

As an employee, you need to look at early-stage startups where you're being compensated with equity the same way that an investor would. If you can cut out the bottom 50% of startups, that's basically "doubling" the value of your equity.
I've been hacking at features for my startup for a couple months now. As I progress, I get increasingly nervous about the process of turning the product into a business. I'm not so worried about the community or functionality because I am talking to people and getting great feedback. It's encouraging to hear that the stuff I'm nervous about ("corporate structures, interviewing lawyers...") is exactly the stuff that I shouldn't be focusing on, but it leads me to a tricky question... If I don't, who will?
I'll try to do a /proper/ benchmark (Different cases, different types of templates, and such). Because the tests were with a simple template that had all the shared features. When I do, I'll add it to the README.

It's not that complicated, swaping between the two. they're basically the same if you don't use breaking printable blocks. So you just change:

tm = _.template(string);
tm(context);

to

tm = new Thulium({template : string}).parseSync().renderSync(context);

It's different in that you do the initialization, parsing and rendering in different steps. TBH, with smallish templates, I found Thulium to be about 10µs faster. Which in most cases, is negligible. So if you're already using underscore, you probably shouldn't change everything. But if you need extra features like wrapping the output of a function in form tags or something like that, you can do it really easily with thulium. (Porting some of our helpers from EJS to Thulium meant a reduction of many lines of code and complexity.)
85% of what people do is habit. So when they have a large set like this "habit" starts excluding people very quickly as they are just driving to common places. So if you are tracking somebody you dont know fleeing, they stick out in the numbers quickly... If you are tracking somebody you do know you can guess where they might be. Kidnappers and bank robbers aren't that smart when looking for hiding places, and you probably already have them tracked going there.

To a certain extent, all it really does is SUGGEST you belong or don't belong in any given location. There might be a murder in an alley, but data shows you go to a comic book store blocks away every week so you probably aren't involved. Generally the data is going to clear more people than it makes guilty.

Of course I'm a huge fan of Numb3rs and Criminal Minds that show this kind of stuff being used properly by honest people... Emphasis on HONEST people.
Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake (2009)
sounds good ! Looking fw to test it!