skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would much prefer that we retain basic freedoms such as privacy than give them up for some small increases in safety. While the 9/11 attacks were truly terrible, our absurd responses have cost far more in both money and lives.

During the height of Soviet Union its citizens were very safe, except from their government. Crime rates were dramatically lower than in the United States, yet few Americans advocated moving toward a Soviet-style police state to increase their safety. That is exactly what we have been doing to combat terrorism though.

Suddenly it became okay to detain suspects without trials, eavesdrop without warrants, harass and demean travelers, and implement new Top Secret data collection programs, the likes of which would have been a KGB agent's wet dream. That is in addition to starting two wars which cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars each.

Am I the only one that thinks 10/26 (the date the Patriot Act was signed into law) should be remembered as a far greater tragedy than 9/11.
> Further, what if you prefer 2 or 3 space indentation?

This, alone, is why I always use tabs, no matter what any style guide says. People have different tastes. Using tabs allows any editor to indent according to personal tastes.
Yeah, that comment was a little snarkier than I had intended it to be. My point was more that it had been tried in the US, but in this one case it failed, mostly because of complete incompetence. Not that the tech was bad.
Sounds like someone is reinventing classic IRDA, except this reinvention is even worse than it was.
Ask HN: Lifecycle marketing email technology stack
I've always wondered how customer.io, vero, Intercom do their event-triggered transactional email.

I read somewhere one of the earlier solutions for customer.io consisted of manual hadoop-ing. Personally I would probably use something like Storm for realtime processing based on a set of rules that would be updated every time a user adds or removes a rule (Ruby Treetop based, probably have a web front GUI for the user which then generates the DSL for rules). As well as a data store to store events tying them to userids that can be queried, Redis backed for speed perhaps.
Why do so many style guides mandate spaces for indentation?
The sure fire way to become a lousy programmer is to learn programming without some domain to apply it in. Given that MIT undergrads have a fair amount of math and physics backgrounds, the exercises aren't a bad fit at all (methinks). I always find it energizing when textbooks include problems with an "oh, by the way, this is an unsolved problem in the field" note.

The good professors also appear to be carrying that tradition into the revised course ... and the most public attention goes to the switch from scheme to python.
What is Founders’ Stock, Legally?
I think too much shit is probably part of my problem. I say yes to everything all the time and as a result I'm involved with literally every part of this startup. I've definitely made myself a Godin lynchpin but people are starting to lose faith in this silly wunderkinds ability to execute.

Meditation is a good idea. I tried getting into it, ended up reading up on some weird sex meditation shit and went down the rabbit hole on that one. I really think clearing my brain several times in the day would help me.

It's funny I've seen this list a hundred times but listed out here for some reason it seems to make more sense.

Addy - hate how it kills my creativity and I try to beat it and convince myself it doesn't work
Modafinol - my favorite drug but I tend to stay up for a long time and just procrastinate more. Would definitely be super helpful if I can beat procrastination first
CycloBenz - haven't tried, will order

I have found paracetam to be super helpful but it only works for a week or two before khans to cycle off it. I was on it about 2.5 weeks ago and did in 4 days what I normally have been doing in a month.

I should start to exercise more...
But you and Declan were still wrong. His claims didn't make sense; it was the opposite of Occam's Razor. Indeed their Google searches were monitored, it just wasn't by the NSA/FBI.

Well, we don't know that for sure - they could have tipped off the employer, but that's too much speculation to be productive conversation.

So the original account was true, and it posed the question (or, demanded an explanation), how did the police know? Now we have our answer.

Edit: Wait, you're saying Declan's post was a joke? I didn't follow this one or the threads that closely after the initial read, so maybe I missed something. His reply to my earlier comment gave me the impression that was not a joke.
I can't wait for the full writeup.

This articles is a sort of timeline, and as the web there's progress.
Watch NSA Chief Gen. Alexander’s Speech at Black Hat [2013]
May be it's time to create annotated version of SICP.

My favorite annotated works:

Annotated Turing: http://www.charlespetzold.com/annotatedturing/

Newton's Principia, The Central Argument: http://www.amazon.com/Newtons-Principia-The-Central-Argument...

That reminds me one of the argument Newton made in his Principia. He said something of the essense that he has intentionally written his Principia in non-friendly dry manner because he wanted readers to have certain degree of discipline and patience and also he wanted to eliminate readers who would just naively attack his works with shallow arguments.

But that was than. Today readers have came to expect certain level of accessibility. But still no one should tell authors how they need to write books. If you think SICP is not accessible enough, go annotate it with your insights and expanded arguments filled with analogies and examples.
Yes, but that's not a Google Play phone. The off-contract Nexus 4 on AT&T was over $400. AT&T is greedy.
I'm pretty sure he's referring to 'The mother of all demos' by Ebgelbart, where he demonstrated live collaborative document editing among dozens of ludicrously ahead of its time software features. [1]

That said, I disagree with the larger point the op is making. When you work in a technical field you tend to figure out the tool for a task, grin and near through a finicky setup process and then dismissing improvements that reduce that friction as trivial/unimportant, even though those improvements mean its able to solve the problem for an exponentially larger market.

A classic example is rsync and dropbox. It's less pronounced here, but the more advanced web code editors get, the longer someone interested in the topic can mess around and try things out without setting up a local dev environment (multiple hours of totally unfun work if you're a novice), the more likely they are to stay interested and push through and get over that hump when the time comes.

[1]The video(100% worth watching)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
Wikipedia:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
I got the following output when trying to upload a file.[1] I used no password. I had it set to one download. I was planning on pasting it on Facebook chat and seeing if their spider killed the download. Sadly my test didn't make it.

[1]http://pastebin.com/c9DNtk0g
especially as YC has already conditioned the founders to accept low valuations even though they are now in a much more exclusive pool.

Actually YC startups are conditioned (by the market) to expect higher valuations post-YC than they would attract had they not been through YC.

However YC encourages founders to care more about the value offered by investor than the valuation. At the same time, PG points out that the smartest investors double down on the best companies, no matter the valuation.

The main benefit of this fund for both the investors and the founders is that they'll be talking the same language and will be able to get deals closed quickly.
In Australia, there is am organisation called Good Company (http://www.goodcompany.com.au/) which coordinates charity organisations requiring assistance with professional people willing to donate skills.

I'm sure there must be similar organisations around the world - they are probably your best bet if you're looking to contribute your talents/time to assist a charity/non-profit.
Ask HN: Bootcamps
Is it worth paying for these 9k or 20k bootcamps just to learn how to program?
Another minor improvement (if possible) would be to load the bank's logo, when that can be determined by logo.

Great product, I'd use it if I had a shopping cart!
Learn to Code by Building 7 Websites in 7 Weeks
I am glad someone else noticed. Third party validation is most powerful... when it's real. God knows we wouldn't want to distract people from buying our product by reading about its usefulness in the New York Times.
Google SPDY vs WebSocket Protocol
Really, they searched his home from outside? They're getting very good at spy technology if even the PD has that particular device.
Not in my view. When you finally learn you'll look back and have regrets.

Learn by building. Do a few tutorials, and build something. Build one thing a week for 3 months and you'll be better off than most people on these bootcamps.

Checkout codetuts.co and pathguide.co

Good Luck
In which case you charge for rubbish collection on a combination of weight/volume and make it a premium for unsorted refuse. That gives people a choice. Pay the premium if they want someone else to do it, or take extra care themselves and save a bit of money.

I think in Paris (?) they have some underground storage for recycling on street corners. Someone was telling me about that when I was there.

In New Zealand (and some other places), garbage is put out in plastic bags - only official bags are picked up - and you pay per bag used.

Incentives to minimise hard-to-recycle waste could be a good thing.
Apparently I parsed that differently. I took it as the FBI saying that everyone who believes in / advocates for, individual sovereignty, is a "sovereign citizen extremist" and therefore a "domestic terrorist".
Well said. At least there are a few islands of sanity on HN.
That's what you think your hiring process is designed to do. Instead it's screening for particular pieces of trivia instead of knowledge and competency. It's only going to get worse as vanilla Java becomes more and more relegated to maintenance of old codebases. It's not a language most CS programs use to teach at this point.

You can test whether someone can turn requirements into working code without testing for specific bits of trivia. Simply saying "solve this in the language you're most comfortable with" does away with that flaw in your process, while still allowing you to see whether they can code, whether they write tests, whether they think of edge/corner cases, whether they handle errors or malformed inputs, how they think about problem solving, etc.

There are plenty of companies that hire developers without finding out they hired people who can't code only after investing in them. They don't do it by adding language trivia to the interviews. If it's too difficult for you, you can outsource that part: https://www.interviewstreet.com/recruit2/
Feds Arrive In Force After Someone Googles Pressure Cookers | Uncrunched
So ... you dropped by to take a pot-shot at WordPress? Request-based cron imitations have been around for a while particularly for software targeting cheap LAMP hosts (Drupal has an implementation, for instance).
Small bug report: This works very poorly (not useable) in Chrome Version 21.0.1180.90, which is the last one available on macosx 10.5. You probably want to fall back to form fields on untested browsers.
Bennu: Gaming Society for the Good of Green
Don't be so hard on yourself: You're probably a type C: http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
I'm not quite sure what problem is this solving. What exactly does dataflow programming allow me to do that is not possible with non-data flow programming? It appears that the single components are still text, and data flow is only used to hook up these components. So how is this different than say an IDE with definition and reference lookup?

I've used Pure Data (which they mention) a little bit and here is an example of a somewhat advanced program. http://i.imgur.com/NRtG8Ai.jpg [1].
For Pure Data, dataflow somewhat makes sense (considering the problem domain) but if I had to pick between debugging the schema above and debugging text code, I think that I'd choose the latter.

[1] Image is from here http://www.spazioclang.org/eventi/live-electronics-con-pure-...

EDIT: Lol, here's an example of another PD program I found. http://i.imgur.com/Flwviol.jpg Now imagine that you inherit a legacy codebase that looks like that.
From a teacher's perspective this looks excellent. I start teaching my students programming using Scratch. Continuing on to a more advanced visual programming interface would be great. It reminds me a little of the visual scripting interface inside Cinema4dD- Xpresso.
Actually might make sense; Marissa was behind the purchase of Zagat at Google.
It's worked in Australia IMO. Everyone takes recycling a lot more seriously than 10+ years ago when it was first on the radar. It's natural now and is done without thinking.
Just channel the procrastination into something you like. I highly recommend reading the Structured Procrastination essay: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/
From the kickstarter page:

> If you’re a programmer, deep down, you know code is bad, it rots,
> and with each new line your software accrues complexity debt.
> New code means more bugs, more refactoring and more time needed
> to bring someone else up to speed.

Yeah, and moving little interconnected boxes around a project workspace will solve that? It's not like visual programming is something revolutionary new and different - it's just another representation of the same old thing. So the chances that it will solve the current problems with large code bases are the same as a green car being faster than a yellow car only because of the color.
The Quantum Zeno Effect actually does stop the world
Wait, you're saying I left India for this!
If you are looking to host your own server and are not too tied to XMPP, you can use Kamailio as a SIP + XCAP chat VoIP/Video and IM server with TLS encryption and Use Jitsi as a softphone/chat client. Here's a tutorial to get you started http://kb.asipto.com/kamailio:skype-like-service-in-less-tha...

You can always try to implement the same with freeswitch or if XMPP is a must you can use something like OpenFire (http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/)
C has a sort of declaration-by-example syntax. You're declaring that *someVar has type NSString. (IMHO, thinking of it this way also makes more complex declarations like function-pointer types, types with qualifiers, etc., easier to read.)
Try http://www.reddit.com/r/nofap
Is Moore's Law Dead? Does It Matter?
This is ridiculous. Zagat was not bought for its terrible app. It was bought so google would have an excellent amount of curated data on locations and restaurants.

Google pages and google maps had zagat ratings 1 month after Zagat was bought. All that data was free 1 Month after google bought zagat. Just open up google maps, boom zagat ratings.

The zagat guide was always hard to read through. The zagat app was always crap. All zagat had was their data, and thats what google has successfully leveraged. This article is a rant that shouldn't have been given a forum.

Unlike this comment.
Yeah all wordpress links here get immediately blocked as article submissions, I do not understand why.

Maybe some wordpress.com blogs were being used for spam but wordpress.com != wordpress.org
Well, this is a book written by MIT professors in support of an MIT course. Students will be concurrently taking classes in these other subjects. Which makes it a great undergrad text for an engineering school, and probably pretty tough if you don't have the math and physics background.
I don't think it's actually possible to change anything, and even if it is, the time and effort required make it not worth it. I'm not sure if there's any evidence that any of those things have any effect at all on the average voter, let alone politicians.

This is the prime moment. Society is currently used to privacy and it's just been revealed that the government has been invading it at an unprecedented level. And nothing happened. Imagine what it will be like when the news dies out and this becomes the norm.

The government rarely if ever releases powers once it gets them. Even if it did, all it takes is one minor crisis to bring it all back in the name of fighting the enemy.
There's a tiny little smiley in the bottom left corner.
I hate absurdly long variable names like this:

static const NSTimeInterval NYTArticleViewControllerNavigationFadeAnimationDuration = 0.3;

I feel like if your naming convention forces you to have variable names over 50 letters long, there is a problem.
Declan's point wasn't that he knew the firecracker picture to be the cause of the visit, but only that there was at least one narrative more plausible than the blog post's original narrative of "they're dragnetting Google for pressure cooker searches". That's all.

Pretty sure I was the opposite of wrong.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "learn to program". Are you just script hacking, and trying to get something working for a personal project? Are you delivering code that people have to depend on? Are you trying to sell your skills?

I am doing App Academy, and I think it will be very worth it. It gives you a great network of people in the industry, solid skills and accepted practices, and most likely a job (if you want). It's tough to do all of this on your own in the same amount of time.
Sencha uses web workers for ajax calls to move it away from the UI thread, for its Fastbook web app http://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-l...
Looks like an interesting way to enforce the pattern of testable, reusable components for developers that tend to end up with spaghetti code. However, I think it's a little dubious to say that designers without coding experience will suddenly become empowered to contribute to the code base (or write their own applications) in any meaningful way.

Looking at one of the sample pictures on the Kick Starter page I see AnchorY out connected to SpringY anchor and Touch start connected to DragX open. I literally have no idea what this is doing. I probably would have connected Touch start to DragX in, though apparently that would be wrong. So as a non-coder I need to understand what every component does (which probably is not explained in layman's terms), what inputs are, what outputs are, what the specific component inputs and outputs are, and what those actually do (again in layman's terms please!).

More importantly, I need to be able to think like a coder and know how to break large problems down into small components and be able to figure out how to then wire those together to get the desired outcome. And as soon as I hit a bug or it doesn't do what I want, I'm guessing I'm just out of luck because everything is a black box to me.

I remember some usability studies that we did at Microsoft that was testing a simplified flow control UI to do basic programming. We brought in people that claimed to have at least scripting experience if not coding experience. We should them a constrained UI that had some operations (ping a server, start a server, stop a server) and basic flow control (if, for, etc). We asked them to reboot a server as a warm up question - since no 'reboot' operation was provided they just need to combine a stop server with a start server. We lost 75% of the participants at that step. It was pretty eye opening to see first hand that not everyone can think like a developer, it has nothing to do with providing a nicer UI or pretty visuals. Problem decomposition and recomposition are learned skills.

I really like the approach and think it can be very effective at improving the overall experience for developers. But to say this is somehow suddenly going to allow somebody with no coding or developer experience to "skip the tens of thousands of hours becoming fluent in syntax and start visually hacking on your application now" just reeks of marketing bs.
People were getting ahead of themselves in this story.

It never made any sense that if this was occurring one hundred times a day that it would not have been mentioned somewhere else before now given the current focus on privacy and the NSA.
It turns out that it was the employer that alerted the police, nothing to do with the NSA. Not sure what that means about Google's security if a mere employer can intercept Google searches.
Yeah, I was just about to say this. Apparently she was the one who championed it's purchase, and now that she's gone, Zagat is apparently the redheaded stepchild of the Google family.
I concluded that they are trying to open source what https://www.mashape.com does behind the scenes, visually. Connecting the different parts of the SOAd web, in the sense of docker and containers. It's true- why can't newly released services just work like legos? Say you want to support a new payment system, or a new analytics, it's just drag and drop with this, hopefully; right?
You bring up very valid points. I checked out App Academy seems like one of the best bootcamps around I applied and even wrote near perfect Ruby code for their challenge test but got denied. Wish there was a way I could get into App Academy I would be willing to pay.
> I make $130k as a 21 year old and I probably put in 3 hours of real work a day.

do you really think your subconscious is capable of changing when this is the scenario it is presented with?

you say you're "pretty smart", i would say "you're just smart enough to get away with it."

start a company. force yourself into uncomfortable situations.
I can relate to this. You sound like you just learn things incredibly fast so you can get by doing much less than other people. Why not just accept it? You're the type of person who is more like a sprinter than a marathoner intellectually. You don't see Usian Bolt trying to run marathons.

Of course, the bad part is that the working system forces everyone into the same bucket. You're probably only going to find happiness by getting outside of that system and building your own business where you can set your own work schedule.
In Australia, virtually no one travels to the "recycling center themselves" - we have three bins (green waste, recyclables [paper/card/plastics/tins/etc], general). General waste is picked up from the kerb each week, while the other two are picked up on alternate weeks. Even accounting for the more frequent pick-ups of general waste, I still produce more recycling (wine bottles, etc) or green waste (weeding, pruning, etc) than general rubbish.
Ex-ER, Not Secret Spying, Triggered Police Inquiry of 'Pressure Cooker' Search
I don't see anywhere that he asserted that Declan's theory about the Facebook post was correct. In fact, I see the opposite[1], demonstrating exactly the kind of questioning everyone should have been doing today.

I also find it more than a little disingenuous that you included the "Well, we don't know that for sure - they could have tipped off the employer" line in there. Especially after attempting to invoke Occam's Razor. Yes, the NSA could have tipped off the employer to review an employee's searches and hope that they would then report it to the police. Of course, the police could have also seen the fireworks on Facebook, reported it to the NSA, who then planted the searches on the computer for the employer to find. We don't know for sure, after all!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6143485
What works for me: Watch other people work.

I tend to get motivated by those crappy History/Discovery shows (especially the horrible Gold Rush Alaska). Binge watching that show helped me to get through a project that got too big and too boring.
Hah, I did almost the same thing recently!
Precision and rounding was not that important though so i just went with log2 to get the exponent, normalize and cast to int to get the mantissa.
Then I realized I could do it properly by just using a typed array :)