skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sometimes it does, due to the (near) total ignorance of what this is all about.

10 years ago I was briefly employed by a contractor for a state government that was working on a system a bit like this, although not hardly so life critical. The original system had been written and customized by the one of the big names like Lockheed or CSC and was pretty good as these things go ... but the state put continued maintenance out for bid and gave it to another company. With no transition, and really counterproductive budgeting.

I.e. around a year previously another guy was hired to do what I did, and let go after a month or two because of money.

What was I hired to do? The most difficult job of software archaeology I've ever attempted, not counting one code base that was impossible (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6092960). The original programmers, probably on site, used SCCS (!) ... until they stopped some months before producing the binaries running on the system.

Other minor details: the system ran on DEC Alpha hardware and their version of UNIX(TM), and of course by then it was a doomed system with no migration path for binaries. The state budgeted the project and made its milestones based on estimates made by another consulting company, and those were not based on reality.

I bailed when it became clear there was no possible way to meet the state's demands, e.g. a point when I realized that if there was a way to recreate the production binaries I wasn't going to be able to find it, and they were assuming the sources were in a lot better shape.
A lot of posts here talk about open source projects or the relative simplicity of implementing something like this at it's core: I agree with the idea though I understand that emergency systems require a high level of reliability similar to mil-spec hardware I imagine. If there was any justification for that price of 88+ mil, that would be it. Looks like that went right out the damn window. All systems have bugs, I think we can all agree on that, but I'd like to know that they followed the most sensical procedure to rolling this out. Did they test it prior to release? How did they test it. Did they bother with unit tests at the lowest level? Did they perform thorough integration tests? Did they consider rolling out incrementally (if possible) the new system so that they wouldn't be completely left out in the rain when it failed? What contingency plans if any did they build into the system upon failure? What was wrong with the old system, and what did the new system promise to deliver?

It's a lot of questions I wish more journalism would answer. On another note. It's interesting to think about open source. As some have mentioned, it's difficult to imagine the feasibility of actually doing an open source version and getting it adopted (though that may be because I don't know how EMS stuff is structured). Though I think all would benefit from a source code release of this system so we could actually crowdsource a better friggin' version because this one clearly isn't doing its job...since May.
We could also suspect that the giant spying apparatus has compromised our government officials with intelligence gathered on anyone in a position to oppose it.
"monthly incoming way down while claims go thru the roof"

Claims wouldn't go through the roof - the availability of "retroactive" insurance wouldn't increase the number of car accidents.
This kind of disruption can happen. When I was in school I worked at a small 8(a) (women or minority owned federal contractor) firm. All the developers and designers were under 30 and we built all kinds of CRUD apps for the federal government. Now I work at a startup and the real main difference is that everything moves much faster.

Not everyone can start an 8(a) firm but we could get legislation passed that creates a more competitive way for any small business to work with the federal government.
I've noticed this too, to some extent. and I don't think its purely because of the President's party. TDS writers and Jon used to work hard to hold politicians feet to the fire no matter their party, and in the past few years I've seen them become increasingly outright liberal.

Sure, that change happened around the same time as Obama, but I argue that the Daily Show of old would have been less coddling to the current administration.
Content marketing done right
I want to be a mayor
is it supposed to be obvious how 'clay' is useful? no problem with everyone forking everything and starting yet another language, and it doesn't have to be useful, it can be done for the experience. but if it's advertised, it would be good to explain why?
Nicely done. I'd style the :focus for the contact form, and flesh put the development page a bit.
I ordered mine very quickly when it said I would get it within 24 hours. However it's now been days and no dice.

They sent me the IP of the server but it's stuck on "installing OS". Quite honestly I really assumed the installing process would be automated.

Has anyone got there server yet? (or are you still waiting?)
Being a shaming douche doesn't help people--it hurts them. Some react in an in-the-end-positive method because they are hurt by people like you--they develop scar tissue to inure themselves against your consciously-adopted sociopathy. Most say "fuck it, I won't deal with these people", throw their hands up, and leave. It's toxic behavior and it is unacceptable because they are more desirable people to have in a community than people who glorify the shaming of people who don't know obscurities.

Be a better person.
I had the same concern - I too was confused when I read 'relocatable'. Some suggestions:

* Movable
* Location-Independent
* Path-Independent
* Path Neutral
> But certainly someone who designed infrastructure for Twitter might have some interesting perspective on how to manage 911 traffic.

This program seems aimed at bringing in some of those kinds of people to government agencies: http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows

I think I've seen a few of them posting on HN, but I can't remember who. They seem to be especially pushing to get things like data.gov working in a modern way.
Ice-breakers get competition in the Arctic shipping boom
He's said explicitly that it's not, although I can't find a primary source for this quote.
> Weird, they were for me.

Were you using volumes? Currently a container's volumes are reset when the container is restarted. That's fixed in master.

> Where do you get the modified id from?

In this case I just copied it from the container's command prompt. It's also available via docker ps -a:

$ docker run base sleep 1
$ docker ps -a
ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS
041d889d7bd8 base:latest sleep 1 5 seconds ago Exit 0
$
Some of the dentist who own multiple practices pay themselves almost a million a year in salary in our area. It's not bad work if you're interested giving up patient time to work on the business side. In our state, only dentist can own dental offices, so it keeps 3rd party corporations from forming.
Why Google does things the way it does
If petrochemical company project was mostly a document imaging project, when did that happen?

I ask because I started playing that game when it was cutting edge, and finished about the time it was "very easy" (early to mid-90s).
Maybe you could partner with just one small government to start. Of all the municipalities in the world, you'd think at-least one would be open to the idea, even if in tandem.

Maybe it could be started by a person who works (or worked) at the dispatch center, and is also a programmer (there must be at-least one of those in the world too).

The point is that NYC laughing/ignoring/fighting you is not a good enough reason not to start. (and who's to say that NYC would do any of those things, given the current state of affairs)
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/224406502188916739
Ask HN: Integrating Hangout, Google Calenda& talk
Hi,

Wondering are there APIs available to integrate Google Hangout, Chat, and calendar to websites? I'm working on a online service where this integration would be really helpful.

Earliest help is much appreciated.

Devehere
Test it somewhere with a private sector need for such a service, like Detroit?
I find it funny that the person using force is calling the other people greedy and self-centered. You are being self-centered by acting like your ideas and needs trump everyone else's to the point of being mandatory. I'm sorry, they don't. If your ideas are good, you will get support. You can put down the guns. If you have kids and think that education is important (I agree), then work for it and get support from those around you. I know it's not easy as pointing guns at people via the State, but I don't think k-12 education is a hard sell.
> The first $1m would be payed back to the entire syndicate

i'm not an expert but i believe the carry is the portion above and beyond the promised return - in this case, the syndicated invested $1m, the promised return (let's call it 10% a year) would then be $1.1m (let's call it a year of waiting).

wouldn't the carry (the "bonus", basically) be 20% of $2.9m?

or maybe these deals lack a promised return and define the carry as anything beyond returned principal?
> I have never heard of a college that doesn't pay for this access for their students...

The vast majority of educational institutions are not in the US and do not have anywhere near the funding to pay rent to the ACM/IEEE. Every dollar they spend on something like pay-wall access would be better spent investing in their students.

> If you want to have access to guild resources, join the guild.

Guilds are cartels. That's why we don't have them anymore except in the more neutered form of trade unions.

But also, the content ACM et all charge for is not their original contribution. Other people write the papers and give them to the ACM for free. Other people review the papers for the ACM for free. The ACM takes in about 60mm each year but only spends 40mm on it's various activities.

At one time something like the ACM was necessary purely for pragmatic reasons. But now we have the Web, and there is no reason someone should be earning a 20mm profit for artificially restricting the flow of knowledge in the discipline. By comparison the total budget of arXive is around 400k. The ACM could make the digital library free not make a dent in funding for any of the actually useful stuff they do.

It's also unconscionable that the ACM attempts to police 3rd parties linking to copies of papers published on author's homepages. This issue specifically is why I canceled my membership (after writing a letter of complaint that received the most self-aggrandizing response you can imagine)

I'm more charitable to the IEEE as they do a lot of standards work, which does benefit from having a centralized bureaucratic organization.
Partially satire. Partially frustration.

Our society has decided as a whole to allow certain people to waste everyone else's time, with no penalties. We need some practical way to implement those penalties.
1 dollar means different things in different countries. In some countries 1 dollar could buy you decent food, for a few days.

There's differences in rent. Living in a slum is illegal in developed countries.
How Americans Get To Work
Errr, people keep citing Twitter; doesn't anyone remember the Fail Whale?
I'm not entirely sure this type of disruption CAN happen because this whole process starts and ends with the Legislature, at least at the State level. I was mired in so much bureaucracy it felt like trying to run in molasses.

We certainly had the technical capabilities to disrupt the process, but the process itself isn't even self-aware enough to know it's the problem..
Absolutely. And they're dysfunctional for many of the same reasons.

I've worked both, and government is the big leagues. I've seen private organizations squander a few hundred million bucks here or there on disasters, but government projects can easily break into the billions or tens of billions of bucks -- and drag on for years. There's just much more money available, many more players who all want some random benefit from the project, and random rules to stick to. But you're right: this is a function of large numbers of really smart people all trying as hard as they can to do the best job possible. That's the craziest part about it. It's a systemic problem, not one that you fix by just somehow getting smarter people involved or buying a new project management tool.
Hmm, no, I wasn't using volumes. I was doing "docker ps", but didn't notice (or didn't know to use) an id, so I just did "docker run Ubuntu etc".
Why Most Marketers Suck
Building a Forum with Clojure, Datomic, Angular, and Ansible
The best practice for storing sensitive data: don't. You have to design your system presuming that someone has hacked your server - if the encryption key is stored there, they can find it.

- As you're aware, password hashes are a way to avoid storing sensitive data (though they should still be treated as sensitive). You're using a strong hash function and a salt, right?

- Re-use the principle of password hashes for API keys to simply avoid having to store hyper-sensitive data: generate a long (say 512-bit) secure random number (using OpenSSL) as the user's secret API key. Then hash the key as if it were a password and store only the hash. Now if someone steals your API key database they can't use it to authenticate as your users.

Note: for API keys a strong hash such as bcrypt will probably be too slow and resource-intensive. However, because API keys are (long) random data, unlike passwords, you can use a faster hash function like SHA-1.

- As for credit card data: don't. You probably can't afford the PCI audits and dedicated hardware and the same principle applies: just don't store sensitive data. Instead, many payment gateways offer 'tokens' for recurring payments in which you pass the payment information to their API without storing it (or use their hosted page in iframe, if acceptable to you) and they return a token which can be used to charge against that card in the future. Not all payment gateways offer this, and some charge (too much) so take a look at https://spreedly.com/ which offers a middle-man gateway service which adds tokens and other API feature to pretty much all of the payment gateways.

As you can see, in both cases it's possible to simply avoid storing the most sensitive data.
I was about to ask if they were in the w3c. As much as I like some of bootstrap aesthetics and structure, I wouldn't want to let the default html css go.
I think one problem with this is that it doesn't behave like a set which I believe acts_as_taggable_on on does. It doesn't allow a user to tag an object with the same tag more than once.

It seems that the Postgres array method would (without other backend code to prevent it) immediately allow a user to tag with the same tag over and over.

So for users who are more comfortable using an out of the box solution (even if they are using Postgres) they may have better luck with acts_as_taggable_on.

Either way, this is pretty cool!
+1. Evil is great. I think it's made Emacs my favourite implementation of Vi yet.
> Perhaps the real question is not how to save Barnes and Noble, but rather why anyone wants to save them at all.

I really enjoy stopping by once in a while and checking out what computer books are on the shelf. Sure, I can "see" them on Amazon, but with minimal effort I can flip through the pages and read bits and pieces. I am obviously guilty of going home and buying it on Amazon, because the markup is just too much to ignore. I'll miss them, but I agree that they're unsaveable in their current form.
Go and Clay seem to have very different intentions.

Go is about concurrency. Clay is about generics.

Go is garbage collected; Clay is not. This allows Clay to be more suitable in environments where GC non-determinism/performance is unacceptable.
Chomsky takes the anti-American, or anti-government side of any and all debates and writes whiny essays full of sarcastic jabs that preach to a choir of the faithful. He makes no attempt to consider the side of government(or whoever he as casting as the villain at the moment of his self righteous spiel). It's as much of a tragedy to take him seriously as it is to take radical right think tank garbage seriously.
Heh, no problem here are 2 more bang tricks. !<charachters> runs the last command you ran that starts with the characters you type.

!gre # will run the last command starting with gre (so probably grep)

If you type history, then !<number to the left of the history command>, the shell will execute that command.

$ history # shows command history
$ !200 # executes command 200
And twitter was buggier than the 911 software for the first two years of it's existence.
Holy hyperbole. Definitely seems like this worker is frustrated beyond sense or has an agenda with saying things like:

They give rookie operators two months training, and after that just throw ’em in. They’re not ready.

Two months training is not enough training? This is implausible. At its core, they're answering the phone, determining the reason for a call and typing information from the call into a computer. They're not driving out to a site and performing cardiac bypass on people having a heart attack.

The whole thing seemed targeted toward eliciting an emotional response rather than a rational one.
Like most titles that end with a question mark - "no". Why would you use some kind of acoustic wave system over tried and true maglev?
I just started a project yesterday using Transit. It's really nice work with.
In our case, we didn't want to send it all back, and we had our own style to enact on the server side. Sending back the HTML is perfectly fine (albeit a little larger) but as this is JSON, you could easily send back the style to the server if you so wanted.
Eben Moglen and Bdale Garbee speaking at FOSDEM 2013 [video]
Side note: does this mean xkcd's "Time" is un-internet?
Comparing twitter to a 911 call center is like comparing a monochrome display to a 4k display

911 call centers have to interface with many different computer systems (for example the National Criminal Information center, department of motor vehicles, FBI CJIS, in house databases, court records systems, mapping, computer aided dispatch, weather information, etc.

Many of these systems (the NCIC, and CJIS have very strict requirements on what can and can not connect to their systems, and on top of that who can use a terminal that connects to their systems).

Its not an easy task. However comparing it to twitter is just ... wow
Where can we start the discussion to start building a better version of this?
Whatever it ends up being, this is exciting!
i just fail whaled last week for 4 hours straight.
U.S. spends around 40% more GDP per year on healthcare ...

"evidence" or speculation?
s/Unix/Linux/

When you say "Unix" did you mean to say "Linux"?

"Real OSes"

Can you name an example or two? I'm aware of some old non-UNIX OSes that are still around but which over time have become largely ignored. I'm curious the "Real OSes" you were thinking of.

"How many can play around with a language like that at home?"

As many as have the desire and time to do so. Learners are limited to 32bit and no long running jobs in excess of 1 hour, but this does not stop anyone from learning the language. There's also an open source alternative of the intepreter based on an earlier version of the language.
I'm not sure when it started, but I was hearing about it from around 1990 I think, and the project got axed around '95. I assume eventually they did get something done, either with a new contractor or in-house.

I actually had a part-time job scanning large technical diagrams through a sheet-fed scanner in the late '90s, for a different company (a NASA contractor). It was technically not what I was hired for; the main reason they needed to bring in someone part-time is that they needed additional staff to help "debug" a space toilet. So my main job was using it, and recording some basic data (pH, etc.) in a logbook whenever I did. Since I was sitting around for a few hours a day in between toilet debugging, scanning technical diagrams seemed to be the main other thing that needed doing. Seemed like a pretty ad-hoc process, but I don't know what that one was like on the backend.
Ask HN: how to remove top n number of pixel from a video.
I have bunch of video of screen capture. I would like to remove some portion of the video from top. How can I do it in a batch, is there a software to do this out there. Thanks for all the replies.
Carpooling is tough when everyone doesn't leave right at 5pm. I'm curious if this has been studied, but I wonder if hours are both longer and more variable now than in the past.
hehehe. Good one.
"People who quote Churchill seldom have given serious consideration to other forms of government"

"The Devil was the first Whig"
Keep them coming, imagine the manyears you're recovering!
I love it! Keep up the good work (if the author sees this thread)
Without an example of specific instances where Chomsky does this, and reasons why he was wrong, this is pure ad hominem.
Bootstrap, Foundation and every other general purpose frameworks are good. Pretty good for non-designers, actually. However, if you're a designer these framework are more of a harsh load of excess baggage that drags down the design. I have used Bootstrap for quite a few designs and so also with foundation and many other multitude of frameworks. I even did tried my hands on starting off my own grid framework.

However, of late, I've been doing it this way (rather WIP) -

* Setup a base starting skeleton code (HTML/CSS).

* Include the most important ones such as - normalize, typography and/or a grid.

Start with that and then depending on the size and complexity of the project, add frameworks under "vendor", where bootstrap or foundation or any other framework goes. One thing to be aware is to extract the "configs" and "globals" from the framework you want to use and take it to your "base" starting point.

So,

- BASE (your starting lean code)

- A Vendor framework (Bootstrap, Foundation or just a grid framework like Mueller Grid or just a typography framework like Typeplate)

- Finally, your UI Codes.

Additionally, you an add the following (never goes to production)

- DEBUG Styles

- Shame or design-time-only styles.

This helps in staying lean with your codes to start a project and at the same time, ready to add in the heavy-weights if need be. The remainder is of course the User Interface that you need to design.

Note:

- A CSS pre-processor such as Sass or Less really help in this workflow.

- Following a methodology like BEM[1] or OOCSS[2] can really make life easy.

- The SMACSS[3] Book is a good one to look at.

1. http://bem.info/

2. http://oocss.org/

3. http://smacss.com/

UPDATE: Here is my current organization (WIP) - https://www.dropbox.com/s/3airw24jdn3snsh/Screen%20Shot%2020...