skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No I'm stating that Jr. is an official part of Norman John Harman Jr., my name. It is on my birth certificate, filled out on my tax return, etc. In any case were I'm required to use my real name if I used Norman John Harman Sr. I would be committing fraud. Likewise fraud if I left off the Jr. in an attempt to confuse with or impersonate my father.
> Imagine if something like this actually worked

What about military rations? Ensure? The stuff they feed the people doing hunger strike in Guantanamo?
There's plenty of "prior art"
> So, if we extrapolate towards the future, what you're saying is that the only way to prevent terrorist attacks that kill millions in a single blow is to abandon any and all privacy on a global scale?

No, but what I am saying is that there is very little some suitable middle ground between letting extremists do whatever the hell they want and a total police state.

Notice I've not really been arguing with people who say that more controls are needed on government surveillance, as I agree completely.

I am arguing with people who say things implying that terrorists are dumb or that there is no amount of fatalities that would make even a little bit of law enforcement capability reasonable.

There's a lot of different arguments going on around this, but you'll note that there was not much public outcry about the idea of the police being able to wiretap cell phones, subpoena emails, etc. pursuant to an investigation.

So the issue IMHO is not with government surveillance per se, it with the type of surveillance now available to the NSA, and the oversight that is not currently going along with it.

Back to the point though, the increasingly deadly probability of a single event makes it correspondingly more of a good resource and policy allocation for government to take pains to avoid these events. That doesn't mean unlimited police powers by any stretch; but it does mean we expect people to be detecting and breaking up terror cells before they become deadly.

> Also, al qaeda didn't have any success attacking on US soil prior to 9/11

Don't be silly, the 9/11 attacks were at least the second attack by Al Qaeda on the WTC site.

And either way, what's that matter for this? The U.S. Navy sucked at combat in 1941 and 1942 but by 1944 outclassed the Japanese Navy and aviators even on a 1:1 basis.

The reason AQ sucked at terrorism was because they were crap in general, but they learned over time, gained operational experience, developed training methods and command & control, and built what we in the military call 'corporate knowledge'. All of which leads to a much more effective terrorism 'machine'.
Serious question, what happened to the companies that popped up in the 90s that:

* Helped enterprise clients manage their customer service email accounts

* Helped enterprise clients manage their web pages

Eventually "social media" will just become a normal part of the internet. Just another company taking advantage of the idiocy and fear prevalent in large enterprises. "Hmm, this social media thing sounds big. We need to be involved in social media. Who can we throw buckets of money at to pretend they are helping us with our social media?"
51% of Wikipedians might believe they know who knocked on these people's door, but we happen to know in this case that it was the Suffolk County PD.
>Get to work on cool technology with big scaling and parallel processing over web CRUD frameworks

It's your right to work on whatever you want, but even though I work with technology, I prefer to focus on what I'm building and its implications instead of what cool implementation details go into it.

Working on mass surveilance systems because the tools are technically exciting is akin to using molecular gastronomy to produce a portion of human feces.
Edward Snowden Granted Asylum In Russia - MauriHackers
SigFig | San Francisco | http://sigfig.com

== Sr Software Engineer, Data ==

We're looking for an engineer to lead one of the the world's biggest portfolio tracking platforms! We currently sync $75 billion with over 80 brokerages.

The ideal candidate will have deep experience in web scraping and web service APIs to build out and expand our platform. If you have a knack for scraping websites with challenges such as requiring authenticated sessions and relying heavily on AJAX to render content — and have a strong interest in finance — let's talk.

= Responsibilities =
* Develop and expand our technology for importing data from brokerages and other data providers
* Build systems and monitors to ensure the imported data is reliable and accurate
* Lead other engineers who are fanatical about web scraping challenges

= Ideal Qualifications =
* Relentless resourcefulness (of course!)
* 5+ years experience in software development, and in particular web scraping technologies
* Expert in developing (PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, or C++)
* Extensive experience building scalable, reliable distributed services
* Knowledge of Amazon Web Services, NoSQL, or Statistics is a plus
* Interest in investing a huge plus

Please contact jay@sigfig.com with your LinkedIn profile or resume.
Show HN: Snapchat plus filters, stickers, and ratings
My first post to HN, hope this doesn't get flagged as spam :/

I've been working on an iOS Snapchat-clone after leaving my corporate IT job a few months ago. Some of the functionality is a bit rough around the edges.

After seeing Marco Arment's post about the 'App Store Problem' (http://www.marco.org/2013/07/31/the-app-store-problem-is-not-price), I figured why not reach out and see what it's actually like to have a successful app.

My app, Aww, Snap!, is just a fun side project at the moment and provided a creative outlet for a silly, 'how do I explain this to my parents?' app :)

I built it on top of Parse and used a lot of open source components--notably, GPUImage by Brad Larson. Certainly want to give credit where credit is due. I realize it's easy to slam a re-make of another popular app, so I'm prepared for the 'why would you do that?!!?!' comments...

Right now, I see somewhere +/-100 downloads a day with minimal marketing. Any thoughts on how to monetize (just to make my money back) besides in-app purchases? Turns out, IAPs are more difficult to implement than I first realize. Parse does make it much easier, but I ran afoul of some bizarre Apple rules at first. Or maybe put this idea on the shelf and move on to something else?

The app:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/clipchat/id642217864?mt=8#
--or--
http://getawwsnap.com/appstore
Bill Gates offers $5000 for Facebook sharing? It's just not that funny
Watch for their pivot when they find out they're giving everybody scurvy!
Uruguay moves to legalize marijuana
That's a very neat concept, cheers. I can imagine that that would have been very convenient for the commute I had this last spring - bicycle to the train station, take the train to campus, and then bicycle through the campus.
It's possible that the public does understand the issue and disagrees with you. I'm reminded a little of the rabid followers of Ron Paul... they couldn't understand why the general public ignored their candidate when they were so beyond certain that he was not only the best choice, but self-evidently the only choice for the continuation of the American experiment. Their supporters called on each other to pester their friends and family and hijack every poll and discussion on the Internet, which is very similar to what I'm seeing called on in many threads here and on reddit.

It could also be that a small majority do agree with you, but simply don't care. I'm sure you can think of some policies of the federal government you don't like, but you just don't spend any time trying to fight, other than the occasional Internet comment (you have gone beyond the occasional Internet comment on this issue, right?)

When the public doesn't agree with you, or just doesn't care that much about your issue, it doesn't mean they are lazy uninformed idiots. That is a sophomoric way of looking at the world, it's not true, and it's not useful to think that way.
It worried me to read that most of the customers are men (young at that too, along with all the founders), since the other half of the population of Earth have differing nutritional needs. I'm kind of afraid that not enough testers are women or from different walks of life than your average hacker, too.

I used to be iron deficiency anemic for the longest time and general multivitamins didn't even come close to addressing the iron deficiency. It's no longer a problem but I still tend to buy products like vitamins only for women now as a result.
Hi Ken, it looks great!

Unfortunately, for unrecognised card types it makes it impossible to proceed. I have just tried a maestro card number (beginning 6759) and am unable to enter any of the additional details (expiry, etc).

It may be worth adding a generic fallback for cards that are not recognised to account for unexpected edge cases.

Keep up the good work!
I feel if you added the modifier "government" or "government sanctioned", it would get the point across more.
Your comment is precisely why people write the next twitter for facebook instead of curing cancer or solving hunger.
This was the primary weak point in the implementation. Expecting users to recognize that they can click on the static-looking fields on the card (or relying on them to use tab to move between fields) does not pass the grandma test. It'd be great if you detected when a field had been fully filled out and moved to the next one automatically.
Hey.

Could you fix your linebreaks and canonicalize those shortened URLs, please? This isn't Twitter. :)
Yep, appears they've fixed that and removed the TWSS line.
Perhaps the worst loss is the loss of opportunity. I will graduate in august and will go on to work for a startup. This is something I would never have done if I was in debt, opting instead for a better paid jobs with benefits.

I'm from Belgium, and my whole tuition (5 years, master's degree) cost me less than 1k euros per year. Education in Belgium is usually considered to be as good as in the US - or even better, depending on who you ask ;) (Funny fact, if you do an exchange with a transfer or credits, a few points are automatically shed off all grades obtained in the US.)
Grunt Quickstart: Set up Grunt with JSHint
Tester #3420 here, reporting in:

Your message for disabled Javascript is really, really weird.

> Either you have Javascript disabled, or you're using an unsupported browser, amigo! That's why you're seeing this old-school credit card input form instead of a fancy new Skeuocard. On the other hand, at least you know it gracefully degrades...
> Never tell me the odds! Enable it anyway.

Write like this instead:

> You can still use this form if you have Javascript disabled or an unsupported browser. For a better experience, enable Javascript or upgrade your browser.

- You can have invalid inputs in the month field. "20" or "00" are not months.

- You can put invalid inputs in the year field.

- Tab order is wrong. Go from top left to bottom right.
> by the time I'm entering my credit card details, I'm already "converted".

No, when you finish entering your credit card information, you're "converted."

I have been ready to purchase but abandoned orders because I was doing multiple things. By the time I remembered to go back, I didn't feel as strong a compulsion to purchase the product. In some of these cases, if checking out were easier, I would've been done and I wouldn't have felt strongly enough to cancel the order.

Shitty forms cost you money even when it's the last form you have your users fill out.
This is strange, because you definitely are able to. The better vodka's quality, the smoother and less smelly it is. Another thing is that your "top-shelf vodka" could be sourced from the same barrel, but use different brand.

My best experience so far was with moonshine actually. It was properly distilled and treated and was an absolute delight to drink.
This is a fascinating approach to solving one of the greatest problems charities face: negative public perception of "overhead". People react extremely negatively when a charity has any significant percentage of donations going to overhead, which makes it very difficult for charities to invest in themselves to improve efficiency and promote growth. By donating "efficiency", Toyota is doing the equivalent of donating money to charities but in a way that allows them to use it for overhead without it actually being labeled as such. Brilliant!
How to Manufacture Desire: An Intro to the Desire Engine
Show HN: SuperPower - speaker deck and app for introducing programming to kids
năm is number 5 in Vietnamese, not Nan
It made perfect sense to me and I would far rather use this. So there are bugs, who cares? It's an alpha, of course there are going to be bugs.
I don’t quite get the last bit. Why is "centering on the treatment of generic operations on interrelated types" inadequate?

Go to the link, and find what it was a footnote on. You'll be reading through a section that is attempting to make operations like addition work in a reasonable way across different numeric types for an abstract math package which needs to support integers, rationals, floating point, complex analogs of all of the above, polynomials over all of the above, and lots of other fun stuff..

Do they talk about the tree-like structure of inheritance which might be useless in scenarios where the relations can be better modelled by an arbitrary graph?

Look at http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-18.html... for a set of different geometric types that is challenging to model with inheritance.

Also, why would studying OO first be narrowing my ability to learn different paradigm?

Because your mind naturally goes through prepared channels. If you've got OO available to you, then you naturally solve the simple versions of problems with OO. Then when you get to the subtleties of the complex version that your form of OO doesn't work well for, it is hard to see that OO isn't a good fit, rather than being trapped into thinking that you just chose a poor initial model.
Just thought I'd mention that your link leads nowhere; you have an extra 'n.' It should be http://getawwsnap.com/appstore
Your being a big white guy visibly unaffected by soy is strictly anecdotal evidence - perhaps you aren't affected by it.

The plain reality here is that we don't yet know the full effects of a diet high in soy has on the body, so I'd err on the side of letting studies come out with something more conclusive. In any case, shouldn't we be consuming within moderation anyways?
I found the oppose to be true. The more the different things you exposed to, the more you can borrow to reflect on the new material. Exposed to a different paradigm like OOP only helps.
UX Designer SF, Senior Start up. Totally 10 engineers. Great to have would be to be able to have some css,html coding skills and ability to take product to production. Great environment working on one of the top apps on google play. Need to be someone who can ramp up quickly and take control of the design process. Your work will be seen by over 300,000 users every day. Contact Robert at robert.bocknek@gmail.com
Author lists often end with "et al" which is Latin for "and others."
Ask HN: How should a 7th grade girl learn to program iPod/iPhone apps?
Back in my day, I learned how to program with HyperCard on the Mac. It allowed making GUIs right away, had plenty of books, and was a self-contained environment (not the mess that is HTML/CSS/JS).

Now, a family friend's 12 year old daughter is curious about making iPod/iPhone apps and I'm wondering what is the right language/platform/environment for this era. Suggestions?

Some people recommended Greenfoot and Invent with Python, but I'm looking for something that can produce results on a device she's already using. (Because I remember trying to learn programming in an alien environment and I found it really discouraging when I was a kid. In my day, that was trying to learn console text-mode programming when I was a Mac GUI user. Present-day Me thinks it makes sense to learn the basics in text-mode on a PC first, but Kid Me is not convinced.)
I intentionally left it out in order to avoid political quibbling.
How did I know it would be the Steve Jobs article
The hardware may have improved, but the meatware has not. We don't use narrow, fixed-width columns because of technical limitations, but because they are easier for human beings to read.
Doh, thanks for the heads up!
Facebook Fans Are Definitely Not Worth $174.
Hey, Soylent is solving a real problem, it isn't feces...
That message seems to be intended for developers looking at this example site, thus the casualness. If you were to use this on your own site there would be no error message at all.
It could actually enhance eating!

For work-at-homers:

1) Drink soylent for breakfast

2) Drink soylent at lunch, work through your normal lunch hour

3) Use the extra time and money you saved to eat a delicious dinner at your favorite restaurant

You could literally eat out nicely every day if you used your lunch money for it. When I'm working, it sucks to stop in the middle of it to make lunch. Instead of stopping my train of though, I can just sip on some soylent and keep going. Then unwind for dinner a bit earlier since I saved some time at lunch.
These codenames are great for speculating... FOXTRAIL, TREASUREMAP, WhichHunt, HOBGOBLIN, GLOBALVIEW
The really strong guy at the gym has probably figured out the importance of rest. If you just watched him dead lift a ton of weight, odds are very good that he didn't dead lift the day before, even if he was at the gym working on something else. He also probably takes an entire week of active rest after every 6-8 weeks of heavy lifting. He's working his ass off, but he's also being smart about it.
Ask HN: Can I visit your startup or pay you a beer in SF?
Hi fellow HNers,
My name is Giuseppe (Joe) and I am going to spend part of a US trip in San Francisco from the 13th to the 18th of August.

I am a university researcher and engineer in Italy at Lab#ID (http://www.liuc.it/cmgenerale/default.asp?ssito=128&codice=108), a laboratory that does technology trasfer on RFId technologies applied to manufacturing and services. (If you have questions about NFC or RFId in general I might be able to help you!)

While working in the lab and pursuing my phd on scraping big data and (trying to) find the "so what?" out of it, I am setting up a startup which is still in its earliest stages.

It's my third time visiting SF and this time I would love to end up sharing thoughts with somebody, perhaps visiting the place where you work, or even just find cool people to engage with in SF. I, like you, breathe startup oxygen and desire to see how other people (especially in SF) are currently getting things going.

You can reach me at @Joe_Catalfamo or gcatalfamo at gmail.

Cheers!
Joe
Far, far from the "Word-killer" more like a glorified "Notes"
I, for one, not so much worried about him killing himself (that would be unfortunate, but that's his call), as him misleading people on the mass scale into harming themselves. It shouldn't be a consumer product, not that soon and not without any meaningful trials.
So it's a simple concept that takes no time to learn, and they haven't yet learned it before showing up for an interview. Doesn't that tell me something right there?

Should I expect them to be knowledgeable of complicated concepts if they are not knowledgeable of simple concepts?

I'm sorry, I know I'm being obtuse here. I just didn't think that being able to code `throw new Exception();` in an interview for a Java developer position was too much to ask. I guess I'm wrong.
I didn't say one should never use offline mail. I'm just disputing that it's a sensible default, rather than a backup.
Thomas, the sane HN readers have stopped venturing into the NSA threads. You've made a valiant effort, and its charitable of you to keep the truthers distracted from attacking other threads, but it's time to leave them behind.
You should have dropped out.
The point of the exercises is that the book is trying to demonstrate a WAY of thinking. No amount of passively watching words pass by while you nod sagely at how obvious it all is is going to make your brain actually try to think that way.

My experience is that once I actually understood the section, the exercises were usually not that hard. However it was very easy to read a section and only think that I understood it.
History Timeline for Chrome
Soylent isn't curing cancer or solving hunger. They're selling meal replacement drinks, which is a large, established market.
I agree with many that this is very well done. I would like to see some usability tests to see if there would be as much confusion as I expect.

Without great experiments like these, there would be no progression. Kudos to Ken.
The main problem, and many designers make that mistake, is that you're modeling a physical thing inside an app for no good reason.

Other than the nice visuals it doesn't help anything.

As a designer, you should think of how to make the process of entering the CC more efficient and less distracting, so your conversions don't go down the drain.

A simple clean design with standard input fields will outdo your pretty design any day of the week.

p.s. Does your design even work if JS is disabled?
Think about it this way - capitalism is a positive feedback system, and thus unstable.
>Usually, you want a legs principle to get to the root of why something is bad, not address bad situations ad hoc. Why are software patents bad? Sequential innovation, as mentioned in the article? If so, that should be the basis for the exclusion, not whether something is software or not.

The trouble with that is it's such an unclean line and there is so much money on the table that it doesn't solve the underlying problem of patent litigation proliferating in the software industry. To get rid of the trolls you have to get rid of the ambiguity as to whether what they're doing is allowed.

"No software patents" is useful because it's clean. If your product is a piece of software, it allows you to immediately answer the question of "does it infringe any patents" with "no" and then get on with developing the product, instead of dealing with skittish investors who won't risk a pile of money against the probability that an army of trolls will jump out from under the bridge as soon as they start to recover their investment.
I like the general concept, but I think it relies on specific behavior to the point of being confusing.

* As others have mentioned, there's no advertising of accepted cards

* None of the empty inputs look like inputs until you tab into them. They also cease looking like inputs when you tab out. Correcting data that is not objectively invalid (e.g. expiration in the future, but wrong month) is kind of unintuitive. Someone who clicks into form fields will likely be entirely stumped by this form.

* It doesn't seem to work on mobile. On my iPhone the series of inputs were positively irritating to interact with, somehow each one only took three characters instead of four, and the lack of a tab meant I had little direction on where to go when the first four digit input disappeared.

* The CVV is clumsily poorly handled. You can actually tell in that you're breaking away from skeuomorphism to get the user to that input. It might be a better idea to show the "back" next to the card when you do the initial breakout.
It could drop conversion if it fails massively, but I'm going to be pretty aggressive about intercepting and triaging bugs. The progressive enhancement side of things protects users from really bad failures, too

I'm glad you think it's beautiful. That's all I can really ever hope to hear as a designer and engineer.
They should have premixed Soylent vending machines, and put them in business districts in cities. I bet workaholics would love to spend $5 to work through lunch without feeling hungry.