skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Err I don't think this would stop me. But let me preface this by saying I learn something new about security quite frequently, so if there's a major premise I'm missing, I am both interested in learning about it and not completely surprised.

The main issue here is that your Javascript can potentially be owned by XSS or other approaches. If you own the javascript, you can send plaintext passwords or keys (which should have only been available to the client) back up to some server.

Even with that possibility though, I still think using browser-based crypto creates a more secure environment than the server storing unencrypted files. The author makes a good point in saying that you download javascript on each request, which makes it more susceptible to getting owned than a native-app, but I think a successful attack with this approach will still be an order of magnitude less severe than if an attacker owned a server full of unencrypted data. If the data is unencrypted, an attacker that manages to own the server has access to everyone's data. With it encrypted, the attacker will only get data from users who are using the site while it's owned.

Isn't that still a better option?
It's not about likes and dislikes, both are workeable systems. But they're very different. Some obvious and not so obvious ways:

1. The obvious way - in one you get paid no matter what, and your entire job is to keep the customer happy enough with you that they'll happily continue paying you. With fixed-price, you have a "semi-conflict-of-interests" as others mentioned.

2. These different incentives cause a lot more work up-front for requirement gathering, a lot more work on contracts that are well specified, etc. Btw, that also means billing at much, much higher margins to cover the uncertainty.

3. Not so obvious - doing fixed-price projects requires a lot of focus around managing multiple projects at the same time. When managing X employees on multiple projects, this gets tricky. Why? Because fixed-price projects tend to have lots of waiting: build some infrastructure, wait for design, build and deliver first milestone, wait for feedback, deliver final project, wait for bugs, fix bugs, wait for final confirmation.

So you're basically learning to juggle multiple projects at the same time. And all projects have points where their schedules shift - I've had clients who are completely desperate to get things off the ground, where I would've put 90% chance of their e.g. graphical designs being ready for us, who suddenly had business emergencies that required them to slow down. This happens ALL THE TIME, as does the converse (10 designs arrive at the same time and now you have 10 clients waiting eagerly for updates).

4. Another non-obvious difference - the kind of clients you can take on tend to be very different for these two methods. You'll tend to get more non-technical clients looking to work project-based, and more technical clients looking for time and material, especially when what you are doing is augmenting their own technical staff with expert knowledge.

To summarise, each style of billing or more correctly each type of project you can take on has its own challenges, they're not better/worse, they're just different.
Is this a good time to define Poettering's Law - any simple and useful Unix service will eventually get rewritten into a monstrous uber service that requires a supercomputer just to run, what should be, a simple service.
Malcolm Gladwell's Reponse to the Culturalism Post
Shameless plug: For more stories like these check out http://AfriTech.com
Thanks for the comment. I'm sure there's a much better DSL than the one I proposed, perhaps that takes into account the ability to append to the file.

My theorem though, is that there exists a Space DSL that is 10--100x better than the current BIND syntax. In other words, you can accomplish everything that BIND does, using a syntax that is general/universal. The latter part is what gives you the 10x-100x improvement over BIND. Learning BIND provides you almost no benefit in other domains, and worse, mastering other languages is irrelevant when you encounter BIND. Why am I so confident in this? We've been applying Space in all sorts of domains, and time and again it comes up that it works in any domain, better than the existing specific languages.

The benefit if you know how to use Space--and knowing Space takes less than 20 minutes to master it for a programmer since there are 3 rules, 2 syntax characters (space and newline), and it is impossible to have a syntax error--you then can easily read and write code that works across all sorts of domains--HTML, CSS, Makefiles, BIND, HTTP---et cetera.

I'm a seasoned programmer (15,000 hours experience), and looking at BIND makes me groan.

Now, the DSL I whipped up I'm sure is not the DSL that could replace BIND--I took less than 7 minutes to come up with that one and my knowledge of BIND/DNS is only partially--but I'm highly confident that it is relatively close and with a few tweaks you could create a DSL that is better than the status quo. Which is pretty amazing because this is so level that your work would improve the Internet and DNS in a significant way.
I read his comment's "you" as the indefinite pronoun, not as a personal attack.

> one takes those vitamins because someone, somewhere at some time was pushing them as an amazing cure. A couple studies were done, data was likely cherry picked, and now one pays money to some company to give it to them. That company makes very sure that beneficial studies are done as often as possible.
The article treats the belief in supplements entirely as a case of well-nourished people pursuing quack fixes, ignoring scientifically credible practices such as food fortification using iodine and folic acid, the widely-known connection between vitamin C and scurvy, the use of iron supplements to treat anemia, and the historical experience with real malnutrition. The article makes it sound like a ludicrous idea that snuck into the public consciousness via the senility of Linus Pauling in the late 1960s, but vitamin supplementation makes much more sense as an attempt to continue applying a historically successful formula of improving human health by identifying previously unrecognized dietary deficiencies and correcting them.

Also, the ending of the article destroys its credibility. The author is no less an intellectual hack than the people he writes about.
I only looked quickly, but I didn't see anything about encryption on the site. Are you sure it's encrypted out of the box?
> Since the US doesn't annex territories for itself and keep them as colonies as part of some Commonwealth Realm.

Nope. Neve happens. (Cough >Hawai'i<, cough)
Damn lies and statistics - it's very difficult to compare countries on Infant Mortality because they have different definitions of alive.

From wikipedia:

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines a live birth as any born human being who demonstrates independent signs of life, including breathing, voluntary muscle movement, or heartbeat. Many countries, however, including certain European states and Japan, only count as live births cases where an infant breathes at birth, which makes their reported IMR numbers somewhat lower and raises their rates of perinatal mortality.[24] In Germany and Australia, requirements for live birth are even higher.[25][26]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality

Not to say there aren't problems with the US healthcare system, but we need to stop these comparisons that are just not relevant.
Can you elaborate on why it's not ethical to eat insects?
No worries, you were right on the money. I've linked those RFCs as further reading in the wrap-up section.
Edit: It has been (correctly) pointed out downthread that I have helped hijacking a very personal post for political point scoring - which I think is fair. However we lack a decent history function in HN so I leave it here otherwise the thread will read strangely.

Thank you - as a Brit I read this too. I cycled through emotions - fear and sympathy for the diagnosis, hope as some of our best professionals consider new options, and then.

WTF describes it best.

Americas attitude toward health care is odd from our perspective - not mismatched socks odd but like a Collegue suddenly announcing that aliens are real, they look very talk and thin and one is living in his attic

That kind of odd

(I am glad that the OP has recovered, heartened by every success medicine has against this disease. Just ... It's odd how nearly this was a different story)

May you have a long and happy life.
Any link to the original thread?
Maybe blacks and women just don't like computer programming. Why do we have to "socially engineer" them to do so?
You're right, I don't have a complete working knowledge of DNS, BIND, Zone, et cetera. Hence, the details of my DSL are going to be off.

But I'm very confident in my hypothesis that the status quo is unnecessarily complex, all encodings could be reduced to Space DSLs, and doing so would lead to drastic unforeseen benefits.

All it takes is someone with knowledge of the details to implement it. I'd do it myself, but am currently doing the same in other domains (right now on HTML, HTTP, CSS).
The source you've just cited is a 2008 antivax piece, one of several for which Sharyl Attkisson was excoriated by science journalists and medical experts.
Maybe not entirely. By overdosing on artificial "vitamins", you drain your body out of the elements needed to process these. The rabbit hole goes a few miles deep. http://www.whale.to/a/shea1.html
R spells for data wizards
Humans raise meats for no other reason that they're tastier than vegetables. If we're going to eat meat, we might as well choose the most efficient source of meat, such as insects, at least until meat-in-a-vat becomes reality.
Not seeing the tonal disagreement in P1 - that looks like a fairly legit dissection of the assumptions in an argument to me. What phrasing made you feel it was tonal?
Open new 'OfferHN' posts in a new tab for me, so I notice them.
OK, let's get one thing straight: vitamins and supplements ARE USEFUL.

The article seems to focus on them as cures - which they are not. Saying that a vitamin is a cure for anything is like saying a loaf of bread is a cure.

Vitamins are fuel - the more intense activities you do, the more you use them.

IF you have a good diet, you don't need multivitamins/supplements. But if you have a homogenous diet (eat the same thing every day and nothing else), then vitamins and supplements are much more useful than harmful.

Moreover, no matter what diet you have, if you do bodybuilding or intensive physical or mental exertion, vitamins and minerals from supplements are almost a must.

It's like using normal fuel vs jet fuel - no matter how good your bioreactor (stomach) is, it just cannot extract all the vitamins and minerals you need for that kind of exertion.

Most bodybuilders know that a dose of pure protein powder is much more effective for muscle building than any amount of meat or cheese. Same goes for glutamine and other supplements, and of course vitamins.

The article also focuses on megadoses - well, no s#@t, a megadose of anything is bad for you. 3 grams of vitamin C per day is batshit insane in my book - 500-1000mg is more than enough.

But don't just take what I said at face value. Like Einstein said, don't trust everything you read on the Internet - check with several different sources, read some research abstracts before making up your mind and storing ANY information as true in your brain.
Kind of funny that Bill Gates would have reverted his position on patents. (But maybe Gigaom is misquoting there, maybe he is referring to "intellectual property" in general.)
I'd be interested in taking a look at the project. Can you connect with me to offer some more insight? My info is in my profile. Thanks!
I use eclipse, which is buggy as anything (I actually run a debian VM just to run it on Linux, instead of OSX, so that the features actually work) for Python (with C/C++ extensions) and I'd love to see a competing project.

I actually scanned down the list of features looking for Python, and was depressed to see PHP there instead. :/
Yep. This is an important point.

I can still follow this guide to create my online-NAS box and use it across devices.
Thanks! I'm trying to get my website (http://mappedinsiliconvalley.com/) out there into the Silicon Valley community. What do you think?
A NFC ring does seem like an interesting project, with some useful applications. I may back the project.

However, the project is only aiming to raise £30,000. Not saying it isn't a significant amount of money but with backers like Matt Mullenweg (according to a comment here), surely they can bankroll that themselves? I know starting up production is expensive and the MOQ is prohibitive. £30k is not that much money to start manufacturing, distribution, testing and so forth. The kickstarter seems to me to be essentially just validating that there is a market for a NFC ring.

The "what are we raising funds for" section also states different things, the video says MOQ is 100k (x2), while the text says 10k. It seems to me that if it is the former of the two, £30,000 is not going to get them very far. And, the company spent $8000[1] on an advert[2]. $8000 (~£5.2k) is quite a significant portion of those £30,000 they want. Lastly, shipping in September 2013 kind of suggests that they are about to start production/already started production.

Either they are expecting to raise way more than £30,000 or it is just an additional way to advertise the product and build hype. Nothing wrong with that per se, and the backers do get the ring at a discount, but I am personally not that willing to back them just for them to get extra publicity.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/1ip44s/spent_8...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqvQ0pZhEBY
The first paragraph correctly points out that the "seven previous studies" are not applicable to the general public, despite the fact that the article attempts to do so. That is not responding to tone, that is responding to content.

The second paragraph rightfully questions the integrity of the author based on past deceptive statements made in a similar capacity. It also points out a legitimate conflict of interest. Neither of these are ad hominem.
You don't actually have to share those details publicly if you don't want, to be fair. :/

Edit: for comparison and openness's sake, my profile: https://plus.google.com/116103902550362700148/about

I have few qualms about sharing that, given that I know exactly what I've shared from there.
Health care is good enough, when your employed and relatively healthy.
I suspect this is due to the wide availability of very inexpensive entertainment: game consoles, cheap flatpanels, internet, and smartphones. Who wants to cause mischief whenever you can sit on the couch, surf the web, play call of duty on a 50" screen, and eat a pizza that cost $5? The US should have dropped xboxes on Iraq instead of bombs, and infiltrated the country with Walmarts, Starbucks, and McDonalds. The youth would have come around quick, our capitalist overlords would have made $$$ while saving lives and expanded their loving grip on humanity. Just saying.
Speaking as someone who takes a few rather carefully chosen supplements, it's possible that some people take dietary supplements in that way, but I don't. So saying that "one" does those things doesn't ring true for me, either.
Could the higher incidence of cancers be that the supplements were actually helping the cancer cells grow and be healthier than they otherwise would be?
There some competing trends in the *nix world today.

On the one hand, there are some huge, monolithic packages like Xorg that have split in to many smaller, more independent packages.

On the other hand, we have something like systemd absorbing ever more functionality, becoming more monolithic with feature bloat.

I am personally more in favor of having many small, simple tools that each do one function well and can be easily integrated together, and understood independently of each other, rather than going the monolithic route.

To me, systemd is one gigantic step backwards from this vision, even if it has some (or even many) good ideas.
This is an excessively long blog post that basically states: do stream processing when your data set doesn't fit into memory.

with open('in.txt') as input, open('out.txt') as out:
for line in input.readlines():
out.write(foo(line))

Python users are used to importing everything all at once, while in C everything is done in small chunks whenever possible.

Python 3 is also moving into this direction by replacing many default functions with their iterator equivalents (map, range, etc).

You might think that this means forcing everything into one big context manager, but that's not necessarily true. For example:

from itertools import imap

def read_file(filename):
with open(filename, 'r') as f:
reader = csv.reader(f)
for line in reader:
yield line

def write_file(filename, data):
with open(filename, 'w') as f:
writer = csv.writer(f)
map(writer.writerow, data)

write_file(
filename='out.txt',
data=imap(foo, read_file('in.txt')))
How to be prolific: Guidelines for getting it done from Joss Whedon
The core problem is exploiting inelastic demand in charging 30k for something that could be provided at 2k.
You coin the law, and you can put your name on it. Let's see if it holds up.
For me it's the simple issue about knowing which gender pronoun to use. It seems rude to call someone's child "it."
Wow. This is the worst thing that could happen.

Creating a Google+ account is such a travesty.

It's such a waste of time and effort that could be better spent ranting on Hacker News.

You should avoid everything Google.

In principle, avoid any site that displays Google ads. By visiting ads, you're enabling Google to do all these evil things.
>Vegetables are a better source of protein and healthy fats, and they're more efficient

not necessarily, otherwise there wouldn't be carnivores/predators. And vegetables may be not very well available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4H8JHoSrSs

>Insects are just animals that inefficiently convert calories into animal protein.

somebody converting calories into animal protein saves a carnivore a need to have longer/bigger/heavier gastrointestinal tract than it otherwise has to have. Thus carnivore can have more efficient body for movement (and thinking - apes started to become humans ones they started to scavenge and eat meat about 2 million years ago, though it is not meat eating alone or primarily, the primary trigger was scavenging and later hunting activities that caused our ancestors to pick a stone and stick as a weapon )

Note: personally moving toward vegetarianism (mostly for ethical reasons), not there yet, as of now have completely dropped beef, lamb, pork and am eating more vegetables and fish.
Wow ... this is so off the mark, it is hard to come up with a coherent response. Scientists don't operate in a vacuum - if everyone around you publishes two strong papers a year and you don't ... well, you aren't going to last very long. How do you judge quality? I've had friends who are far smarter than me, worked on more important problems, yet failed out of academia just because idiotic reviewers didn't appreciate their work. Science has fads, and scientists as a whole act worse than high schoolers. The publish early and often mentality that is prevalent today is the same as how aspiring high schoolers compete for spots in the Ivy League. Seriously ... 16-17 year olds writing books? founding international charity organizations? All this is great stuff but really ... what is the motivation behind it if not to have a great college essay? If a high school student were to merely focus on his course work, study diligently and try to have a balanced life, would that kid get into an Ivy League school? That is the bar that academics must deal with. The difference is that if you don't get into an Ivy League university, life isn't over. You go some place else and keep up the good work. When you fail out of academia, it is far more challenging to integrate into the regular work force. Some of my friends who are thinking about getting out of CS research are mortified ... the technology landscape seems very alien to someone who did their undergrads during the late 90s-early 00s. sigh.
Dude, I don't think you can convince him with facts.
To echo Raganwald, I too don't understand a blanket unwillingness to even seriously consider the single-payer model. Like you'd be a socialist or a communist for even considering having private doctors and hospitals paid by the government instead of the patient.

From what I understand, drugs are much cheaper in Canada. Almost all medical procedures are cheaper here. I met a couple from Texas who flew up here for something, and they said it was cheaper for them buy plane tickets, stay here in a hotel for two weeks, and all other travel expenses, and get the procedure done here than to do it at home (uninsured). They still saved thousands of dollars after all that. That's craziness.

Maybe there's no perfect system. But the United States spends the most on health care per citizen, and has the lowest percent of government support. [1] You should at least consider what others are successfully doing to get the costs down and increase the quality of care for the uninsured and poor.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_compared#Internatio...
you should try google plus..
try communities and follow some googlers :)
I don't know if you can call that similar enough - the ORB incorporates way more active technology than this NFC ring...
It's really great to see these fundraising platforms being used to make a difference in peoples lives in addition to building more tangible products.
Honestly, the reason I'm looking more into startup statistics is because I'm very skeptical of dmor's analyses that are posted to HN. So I took a look at CrunchBase's data to see how robust it truly is. ;)
On cancer outcomes, the US outranks many (most?) of the countries that beat it on life expectancy. And, as pointed out downthread, life expectancy is a dodgy stat; it's heavily weighted by infant mortality, which isn't uniformly measured, and by accidental and violent deaths which, while tragic and perhaps symptomatic of other US problems, don't implicate our health care system.
I find neutral clothing is not necessary because parents with older children are always handing down clothes of all colors. I would guess that having differently colored clothes means more are produced overall, but I think it is an acceptable price to pay for variety.
An anti-western propaganda film
Your position seems most inconsistent to me. FAT is a prime example of a technology that is essential for interoperability (yet trivial compared to modern alternatives). Good luck exchanging files using a USB thumb drive formatted with EXT4. Or getting the pictures from your camera SD card without supporting FAT32. FAT16/32 are the only filesystems that work seamlessly in Windows, OS X and Linux.

It's not about filing patents. Patents are routinely filed for defensive purpose and it's hard to blame the companies that do it, especially in light of the abuse by e.g. Microsoft. It's what companies do with the patents. Like getting Motorola phones banned in Germany due to FAT16 patent infringement [1].

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/motorola-android-devices-banned-in-germ...
not sure how that happened, its a cakephp site and I assumed the framework provided some protection against sql injection. its good its hacked now so I know to fix it
If you run a 100,000 user website, why acquire a degree in the first place?