skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ugh. Yeah. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9811856/Sorry%21%2C%20No...

Annoying thing is that loads of companies have a large European presence here (Ireland: low corporate taxes, educated English speaking workforce, EU country, plenty of rain(uh wait, that's not a reason)) but then fail to offer their products!

Amazon (originally wouldn't ship Kindle Fires), Google (no Nexuses (Nexi?)) through Play Store. To name but two companies. With a hack (vpn) you can get Google.co.uk to ship Nexi to Ireland but they go via the UK and apparently they start off being shipped from Dublin[1], not good for the ol' planet!

Really good write-up
[1] http://richardbloomfield.ie/2013/02/google-nexus-4/
I have a 30" desktop monitor (Dell u3011) that I use as my "television". I can now stream a video from my iPad to my 30". My monitor doesn't have speakers. Can I still listen to audio through headphones connected to my iPad? I'm assuming yes.
Still going the iOS-first way? I do not know the figures and stats but I can personally say that I know a lot of people on Android (including me) who would want to use/pay for something like this.

Anyway, Congrats on launching. Hope you can live up to the people's expectations. This space really needs a good service.
Steak is my favorite vegetarian dish.

What do you mean 'vegetarian' doesn't mean what I think it means?
Matt Damon's skull gets sprayed in The Departed? lol
Those five shares I bought to be a part of internet history at the IPO are finally making a comeback
I started with a Nexus One and have purchased 5 android devices altogether. I'd consider myself a Google fanboy, and rely heavily on their service platform.

But the next tablet I get will have to be an iPad or Surface Pro, because I make music and all the tablet-based music software worth talking about is on iOS. Google largely ignored the creative market in developing Android and made no effort to address concerns about latency or similar issues. The only software of note to appear on Android in the last 2 years is Image Line's well-respected Fruity Loops audio/MIDI sequencer, but I'm so jaded that I can't be bothered to install it.

Result? A huge, thriving ecosystem of interoperable audio & MIDI apps on the iPad, with zero incentive to switch back to Android any time in the foreseeable future. Android becomes identified as a consumer-only platform, iOS as a producer platform. The number of musical artists that use an iPad is tiny compared to the overall consumer market, but artists tend to be vocal about the tools they use and are delighted to be seen using them, which I think has about 100x the PR value of any given commercial depicting actors having a good time with their consumer device.
StatusWolf -- configurable operations dashboard
So this piece is publicity for Publiseek?

How is Publiseek different from HARO?
I have a Razer Naga left over from my MMO days. Other than that, just an (older) dell 21" monitor and wired 360 controller.

My next upgrade would be a new, larger monitor, with the old Dell Ultrasharp in portrait mode.
Well, that does it. I was waiting to see if BlackBerry would do something with their tablet line before the next Nexus 7 announcement and nada.

Looks like I'll have to pick one of these up.

(And, I know what the comments are going to be but the Playbook is an underrated device IMO. For the price, it has some decent specs (for it's age) and as a browser/ereader it's great, but the fact that they dropped OS10 after promising it has me peeved.)
Valve: "We are failing" devs with Steam
The numbers do not include contractors, but including the number of contractors in the tally is difficult. Is an engineering working for Lockheed on the F-22 a federal employee? If you take upper-bounds estimates for the number of federal contractors (7-15 million), then he would be considered an employee. But it's not like the federal government wasn't hiring Lockheed to do the same sort of work in 1965.

There are some estimate suggesting that this broader count increased from 12.6 million in 1990 to 14.6 million in 2006: http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2011/jan/06/ge.... This is a 16% increase, but U.S. population grew 20% in that time, and real GDP grew 62% in that time.

I don't disagree with the general sentiment. I think a focus on reducing the size of government is great, and I think it's great that the government is leaner, relative to population and relative to GDP, than it was 20-30 years ago. But throwing your hands-up and saying the inevitable trajectory of government is unbridled growth actually undermines that. If nothing can convince you that government can shrink, and is shrinking, then it makes no sense to continually push to keep a check on the size of government.
The page renders really laggy for me. Seems like it'd benefit from dynamically loading in the images, or at least user more compression on the images. Also, the images have been shrunken to fit the page. They should just be that smaller size to begin with; you could probably get the page down to 8MB with minimal loss.
When Should You Hire a Junior Developer?
That comment is pretty relevant, actually ... I (unfortunately) know actual human beings who feel that the moon landing, along with all current mars missions, were and will continue to be a waste of time and money. I'm completely baffled by it, but the fact remains that there are people that consider it no more valuable than bitcoins themselves.
New master key?
Skype Reverse Engineering : The (long) journey ;)..
Here is a resumé, of my Skype reverse engineering experience, released with the code of some tools i’ve developed throughout this project, plus at the end of this article, some papers containing additional notes about the project.
In SF a cyclist pleads guilty to felony vehicular manslaughter (a first)
Oftentimes, the decisions admins make are determined by the needs of management of fellow employees.

I have on frequent occasions mouthed words along these lines: "It's a bad idea to do it that way, but I can see how it would be much cheaper, efficient or easier to teach employees, so I will tell you the best way to do this bad thing."

You can carefully set up the best security possible, but the instant that a client or bigwig is waiting on something because of it, credentials will be shared and you or other employees may be ordered to share them.

It's just how it is.
Amazon offers the 3 months of Netflix too.
Ask HN: How many days do you wait before following up on a b2b lead?
For those who have b2b leads, how long do you wait before following up on the next meeting?

For myself, I have a set of prospective leads in my business (nutrition labeling), and I always struggle on how many days I should wait before sending a follow-up e-mail or call.
>If that’s im­pos­si­ble, you can still make good ty­pog­ra­phy with sys­tem fonts. But choose wise­ly. And nev­er choose times new roman nor Arial, as those fonts are fa­vored only by the ap­a­thet­ic and slop­py. Not by ty­pog­ra­phers. Not by you.

OK, I appreciate the advice, but why is Arial bad? I mean, I can't even tell the difference!

Reading deeper:

> My aver­sion to Comic Sans—king of the goofy fonts—prob­a­bly comes as no sur­prise. But why Arial? Arial was cre­at­ed as a Helvetica sub­sti­tute. To many, they’re indistinguishable. But to ty­pog­ra­phers...

Right. So what I get from that is, if you care about making sure your content is fashionable to typographers, don't use Arial. Otherwise (i.e. nearly all the time) Arial is fine.
Bill Gates Is Beginning to Dream the Thorium Dream
Another classic @dn0t original. For more awesome-sauce:

- http://www.mobypicture.com/user/djangocon/view/15309104

- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abld18bYEUc

- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx6OFqHi2d0
I ride my bicycle in Boston/Cambridge almost daily. As a cyclist, I am very cautious when it comes to keeping myself safe while on the streets. This is another reminder that we need to worry about the safety of other pedestrians as well.

A sad story but at least the cyclist took responsibility.
can't they do that by proxy? i go to my bank, i show them evidence that i have made $200k or more in the last 2 years, or that i have a million+ net worth. i get the document notarized, i give the company the notarized document by the bank as evidence. my paperwork stays private.
I find "why are we only now getting upset" remarks to be as silly as the "what are you hiding?" ones. The reason there was zero support/interest in that the essay is that it failed to hit close to home to the general population. I had no idea the thing even existed.

And therein lies the interesting thing about the Snowden leaks. They were tailor-made to get people riled up over something that they could mostly understand, and the media actually covered it to some degree (although they could have done more). Just like people get cringey when you throw around the "T" word, a government overreaching like this will piss off liberal and conservative American non-politicians alike.

What the NSA is doing is wrong, and it doesn't matter WHY people are up in arms now versus X number of years later. That's completely irrelevant. We should all be stoked that we're still seeing discussion about this a month+ later.
I do think something needs to be done. I don't think that something is to completely dismantle the NSA - that's as reactionary as the PATRIOT act was with regards to 9/11.

The USA has some of their most brilliant crypto/security/intel guys working at the NSA. What happens with them when they are no longer getting paid? They go private I suppose. Is that in the best interest of the country? Or would it make more sense to reign in the NSA and declare the spying illegal, or some other less radical approach that keeps the good guys around and gives them something better to do than record every phone call and text we make?
the simulator I want is one that completely models the CPU and generates detailed traces

I'd like one also. Lacking that, have you found any tools close enough to this to be useful? Intel's IACA is better than pen and paper, but rarely replaces it. Is there an AMD equivalent? Are PTLsim or MARSSx86 useful? (sorry for presuming x86 if not what you work on)
For my company, this is exactly what's happening. Like Facebook, we found HTML5 to be insufficient for our app, so our resources have shifted to iOS and Android development. Native gives much better and consistent performance and UX, and the idea of write once-run anywhere on the web is still a pipedream. Cross-browser compatibility is still terrible.

The problem with HTML5 is it was designed by committee for displaying documents not dynamic apps. While JS has come a long way to closing the gap with native performance, it's the other HLML5 tech that's holding the web back. CSS is ill-suited to be hardware acceleration and DOM is a performance sucking hack that kills the UX on mobile platforms.
That makes no sense at all. You've just said that every LLVM frontend has to produce code that every LLVM frontend won't produce! If you mean something different, then could you please be clearer, as I really don't understand what you're talking about.

[EDIT: caf's post made it clearer. I know what you meant now]
Daala, a next-gen viedo codec under development, Intro Part 2
Well, it wasn't an Appstore game, but rather a desktop one. It was also pretty high-tech under the hood, and the scope of the game was quite large. Also, we didn't really have any experience making games, and our team was tiny (2 coders, 2 asset makers).
According to Amash, the bill doesn't actually defund anything, but instead aims to end blanket surveillance of Americans by requiring that any records being requested via Section 215 are for 'a person under investigation.'

See this FAQ from Amash's office: http://amash.house.gov/sites/amash.house.gov/files/072413Ama...
Ask HN: Where I find investors that understand mobile?
Hello HN!

I am co-owner of Kidoteca, we make apps for children.

While looking for investors, we noticed a certain pattern, they all are impressed by how fast our free users are growing, and our total amount of free downloads, they also like that we already have some revenue...

But they all also dislike that we do not reached break even, and that we are nowhere near the "Top10" numbers.

We explain to them that we need massive amounts of marketing money (everything else we are already covered and can run this way for a year or two even), because mobile you either are really very popular, or you are not popular at all, thanks to how the mobile stores work.

But most of them instead prefer to wait us to break even, except they don't understand that if we ever break even, we won't need them anymore (because when you reach a break even in mobile with several people working, you outright skyrocket in revenues).

Where I find investors that understand this? I am quite tired wasting time with investors that want to invest but then give up because we don't have break even yet or don't have a high iTunes/GPlay store ranking.
It's not any more misleading than counting a guy assembling Humvees or a doctor working on an NIH grant as being employed by the government, and then throwing around figures like 5-7 million additional contractor employees.

Moreover, even according to your link the "true size" of government is shrinking relative to the population. Your source estimates the "true size" of government at 12.6 million in 1990 and 14.6 million in 2005. That's a 16% increase, during a period when U.S. population grew 20% (from 250 million to 300 million), and real GDP grew 63%. And that's a number that reflects the peak of the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, and will decrease as we exit those wars.

Finally, at the end of the day, those contractors are paid out of discretionary expenditures, which are on a long-term downward trend as a percentage of GDP. Your source says: "All of the increase in contract employees is due to increased spending at the Department of Defense." This is the chart of defense spending as a percentage of GDP: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/US_defens...
Love the logo.
That was the FBI talking, not the NSA (I'm the author of the article). Everything we've learned about the NSA in the last decade thanks to whistleblowers points to widespread passive surveillance. If anything, NSA is extremely hypercautious about revealing its surveillance methods and techniques, which active attacks could do.

I can envision the NSA wanting to undertake active attacks in rare situations, but we don't know whether it has the technical ability to do so under its relationship with AT&T/Verizon/etc. Also even AT&T/VZ/etc. that have historically opened their networks to the NSA for passive surveillance -- in violation of the law -- may have second thoughts if the attacks are active. I suppose you could posit the installation of devices at the target's ISP, but, again, we have no evidence this is something NSA does.
> If we speculate wildly, why not an "asm.js restricted operating mode"?

Because we already had Jazelle, and it sucked, and we learned our lesson. A Jazelle that operates on ASCII-encoded bytecode with traps for unsupported JS constructs? No thanks. :)

> Not saying that's a good idea, but I'm not sure why a NaCl one would be either. Both PNaCl and asm.js should reach pretty much native speed anyhow.

Pretty much native and actually native are very different things.

I've had to sit down and hand-optimize critical paths that would not have been viable otherwise, and would have meant discarding a feature, or introducing a significant impact on usability -- and that's on platforms where similar investments in runtime library optimization were already made by the platform vendor, too.

If we're going to throw away performance, it has to be for a good reason. As someone who doesn't spend all day on platform development (as interesting as it might be), my focus is in providing the best possible user experience.

I'd love to do that on the web, but the web needs to punting throwing away solid technology decisions because of the bad technology decisions made in the early 90s when none of us knew what the hell we were doing.

> Btw, the L is not capitalized in NaCl.

Whoops. Thanks. Now I will look less stupid in front of software engineers AND my chemistry buddies. :)
Gumroad open sourced jQuery.bank
Hey minimaxir, you're right that they're not. Founders are short on time and need to focus. So I'm illustrating a point that you can reliably get publicity within the time limit that you allocate for this activity. It doesn't need to be a hit or miss :)
How should we store passwords? IAM is clearly a big industry for big companies, but lots of people have the problem. There has to be a simple solution?
Amazing! So they simply turn ads on for mobile and it makes over $200 million in a quarter. Jaw dropping!
A new web tool could help measure subjective impressions of urban environments
You're asking for far more control than what Google has access to, at least on mobile devices. Apple can do it for iOS because they make it.
What's really wrong with BlackBerry (2010)
You seem to not understand the potential benefits of widely adopted censorship-resistant (decentralized) currency.
Try living in Argentina where the government is inflating your currency, while prohibiting you from moving your assets to USD. Try living in China where the government will seize your bank account if you are a business deemed too successful and if they deem they need a share of your profits. Etc.
> they could just get the courts to subpoena Google for the data

I think that's one of the motivations right there. Even if FISA generally gives the government what it wants, it's still a process that the government appears to regard as a hassle to be eliminated.

I think the second reason is that google is a sophisticated enough company that they could perhaps infer things from the data request patterns that the requesting agencies would prefer secret.
Compare what he is saying here about this bill, vs the gun laws attempting to be introduced after the Sandy Hook shooting.
I'm sure some of the smartest people in the world would have no trouble finding other better uses of their time. Being afraid of what these guys would do if they went private is a boogeyman type argument, just like this scary "terrorism" stuff the politicians love.
Oh, thanks! I imagine CM is pretty much stock, no? It might even have PDroid patches, I'll have to look. I wonder how stable it is.
Am I the only that's skeptical of any news story that is based off one anonymous person's statement?
Show HN: Bootstrap Modal extension: 'strict close'
Agreed, CSS/DOM/JS need to be replaced, before the web can truly be an application platform.
I'll buy a Chromecast, but I'm still keeping my Google TV. Still like browsing and access to all the Android apps on my 50 inch flatscreen.
You can spoof Chrome to be another browser and AFAIK extensions installed is not broadcast to third parties.
Just purchased, thanks. :)

What's with all the Amazon reviews already? They should have locked reviews for a few days to prevent trolls.
Also this: http://calepin.co/
Facebook is not going away. They can turn on as many revenue streams as they want, and people will not leave.
The examples for these kinds of frameworks always show you data binding for scalar values. That's easy. What's the story for more complex updates?
Semantic and visual merge
Introducing a new way of displaying structural differences and merge conflicts with our semantic merge tool. Do you like it?
Year, Make, and Model.
Test drive the all new 2013 Nexus 7!
The next logical step in the progression would be to secretly sponsor Communists to suppress the NSA and their sympathizers. In a decade or two if the Commies get out of control, we'll be able to complete the cycle of history by funding al-Qaeda to fight them.
Could someone explain to me why we need a special NVM interface vs just using a filesystem on the same medium?

I worked at an embedded system shop for 3 years and this was one of the things that irked me when I worked on code outside of what my team usually worked on. We had a filesystem, accessible with all of the standard C file API... but there was still a lot of stuff being put into this mystical NVM (usually user controlled settings) that then made things like hard resets hairy because even as a developer I wasn't sure what would be wiped when I flashed different software onto the device.

This may have just been bad practice, or a result of carrying over the idea of NVM after filesystems became available. But I don't know why anyone would try to propagate that practice these days.
It's less awkward on a laptop keyboard than on a desktop, but it feels pretty natural at this point (I've been using it for 7 or 8 years now). Don't you have to use your thumbs to hit alt/meta anyway?
"Facebook's earnings excluding items came in at 19 cents per share versus 12 cents per share a year earlier."

What were the excluded items?

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/excludingitems.asp
What gets done is what gets done
Theres a third party product, AirParrot, that gives you AirPlay mirroring from your Mac or PC.
If you had instead invested that money in a ETF that follows the S&P 500, you could have $2.109 in profits today. (Assuming $190 initial investment and S&P growth of 1.11% since May 20th)
Looks like pricing is different -- also let's not forget PictureLife
Hi Egreg, I'm going to go ahead and say that yes it is. In the sense that every piece of content you share online with your name on it is publicity.

That includes that instagram photo of a great day at the beach, that blog post you wrote about reaching your 50th paid user, or a retweet of a hacker news article about lisp.

In each case you're saying look, that's me, that's what I do, and that's what I stand for.

It's called content marketing. And everyone is doing it if they're aware of it or not.
Michael Hayden on the Effects of Snowden's Whistleblowing
I made my first stock investment yesterday when I bought 20 shares! I must be a savant.
The usual explanation is "four freedoms" and giving users freedom.

No, that's what all Free Software does. The GPL is an hack to extend them as widely as possible, by giving Free Software an advantage over proprietary code.

Leveraging network effects to create a communist shared ownership of the means of production is the honest explanation of the GPL, and that has nothing to do with 'freedom', and everything to do with network-enforced Marxist ideals.

There's no ownership here, only State granted monopolies. Property is an institution for allocating scarce resources; copyright is a government granted privilege designed to "promote Progress". The GPL is a way of defusing the crony system that takes away people's control of their own property - their machines. You're seeing Marxism where it doesn't exist.

On a related note, it's interesting to think that the USSR eliminated private property, yet they established and kept copyright - with fairly extensive terms, in fact.

I have no problem with copyright

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" ;)

(By the way, I'm honestly sorry you're being downvoted. I find the attitudes of these cowards who downvoted based on disagreement rather disgusting.)
I still use the left alt for M-x, etc but, admittedly, you probably use alt more than I do.
The web is still mainly vertical with limited horizontal space used. This is for readability, since it's hard to keep track of very long lines. Shorter screens were chosen because they are a lot cheaper to make than squarer ones. But when Google made their aspirational $1,300 web browsing computer, the Chrome Pixel, it had a 3:2 aspect ratio because that's a much better experience.