skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am French and liberal, my views on economy are considered extreme liberalism in my country, but I when I read things like this I am even more thankful for our education system.

The French scientific higher-education system is weird and misunderstood even in other European countries, so here's a (very simplified) explanation of the road I followed and how much it cost.

After high school, if you have good enough grades (say top 10%) you can enter something called Classes Préparatoires, which is a rather intense scientific (Math + Physics) preparation for competitive exams for the Grandes Écoles. It lasts two years, three if you decide to repeat the second year because you are not satisfied with your results at the exams (repeating the first year is forbidden, if your fail you have to go to a regular University - which is also cheap anyway -, but only 10-20% fail the 1st year).

There is a lot to say about how the way we are taught in Classes Préparatoires should change, but there is something right about them: they are completely free. Oh, and if you (your family) cannot afford rent and/or food, you can get funding from the government for this.

After Classes Préparatoires, if you succeed at the competitive exams, you get into a "Grande École" (Engineering School). Studies usually last three or four years and you get a Diplôme d'Ingénieur at the end (basically what you call MSc in the US).

All the top Grandes Écoles are public and depend on different ministries (Education, Industry or Defense). The cost of studying there is below €1000/year. You can still be subsidized if needed, and you are encouraged (actually it is even mandatory) to make paid internships which pay for your studies. Actually, the two top Engineering Schools (Polytechnique and École Nationale Supérieure) even pay students who study there.

Oh, and you are encouraged to go abroad. You can do an internship in another country or go there to specialize during your 3rd year. In my case I went to a British University to specialize in Distributed Computing. The cost of studying there is much higher but since I was a guest student from another European University I didn't pay (except campus rent). It also works with the US, although I am not sure how: some friends did the same thing at Standford and MIT.

In the end, I got two MSc-s (one in France and one in UK), and my tuition fees for the entire thing amount to about €3000.

There are very few things I think a State should pay for, but top higher education is definitely one of them.
Interesting post.

I'm not fond of declaring her mentally ill based on the offenses she has committed. Clearly, she isn't living an ordinary life, but plenty of ordinary people have used drugs, drank alcohol, trespassed and stole during the course of their lives. Prostitution might be a different case, but prostitution ultimately also is a choice. I can even imagine her shoplifting because she wasn't able to obtain the necessary money through different means: nobody would hire her, and whenever she prostitutes she gets arrested. Also, it appears that she doesn't rip out her veins when she isn't incarcerated - otherwise she would be dead by now. Furthermore it is not uncommon for "normal" people who get arrested to be put on suicide watch. The tendency for self affliction perhaps isn't so uncommon for the imprisoned.

I think that if the government would stop disturbing her in her daily life, a Pareto optimum would be reached. Naturally we have the moral obligation to kindly offer help with her problems - rehab, etc. - but shouldn't have the right to force her into anything as long as she isn't a menace to society.

What I'm trying to say is that the system now is turning her into a menace to society. Stop it!
Good project. Why aren't you using Kickstarter or Indiegogo?
I have a KeePassX db in a git repo I clone on all my hosts plus two backup remotes.

Why would Bluepass be any better than my current setup?
I already have P2P secure synchronization (via git+ssh), full control over my data and everything is based on portable FOSS.
I can't tell what the difference between the Pro and Business package is other than the price. Can you clarify? Cool idea btw.
Yes, it should be labeled 'next', not 'skip.' 'Skip' suggests you go to the end without looking at everything.
I cam here to say this. It's weird to talk about performance without actually showing any performance figures.

I'm all for removing old code, but if you're going to claim performance gains then why not measure those?
Thanks Chris, appreciate the support. [Co-founder]
Computing California Sales Tax
Interior Design Planning Online - Market Research Report
This was very nicely written and resonates with my thoughts. Get off the hamster wheel!
Thanks for the feedback! We're A/B testing a few different options so I guess you got a badly-performing one :)
On the other hand, "text-decoration: blink" (which has also been killed in Firefox) is standard CSS (although the standard does go on to kind-of suggest not implementing it...)

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/text.html#lining-striking-props
Hi, Co-founder here. The Pro plan allows you up to 5 apps and 20,000 app plays per month. The Business plan allows you up to 20 apps and 100,000 app plays per month. More info can be found here: https://app.io/#pricing
I am intrigued by this. Could you (or anyone) give me a 'explain this to me like I'm a 5 year old' synopsis why you think this is going to revolutionise video game development?
Use FFI to use some C SSL library?

http://static.rust-lang.org/doc/tutorial-ffi.html
A few things:

* Bluepass does push synchronization. So you wouldn't need to manually sync.

* It would work on smartphones / tables too.

* Are the remote git repos under your physical control? If not then your setup is vulnerable to a dictionary attack on your password / passphrase.

* The Bluepass database is set up such that it can resolve conflicts due to concurrent updates (actually it's an append-only graph of parent->child nodes with a algorithm that selects the most likely lineage in case of conflict).

[Edit: some clarifications]
I've done some very preliminary (and bumbling) work with that at https://github.com/ldunn/kern/

It's rudimentary, but it does compile and it does run, and I'm not aware of any particular obstacles to a more featureful kernel.
The reason why he destroyed it now is so that he doesn't face obstruction of justice charges later. He realized they were coming, one way or another.

A lot of lawyers advise that the only and best time to destroy evidence is before it becomes evidence.
Some people engage in self-destructive behaviour because their early life was destroyed by abuse. These behaviours can be things like taking drugs, risky sex, self-harm, and so on. Obviously not everyone doing these things has had awful experiences in early life.

For these people it's not acceptable to just let them get on with it. They're not happy, they're not fulfilling their potential, they are not well.
He's not hellbanned, I can see him.
Because challenging it from a solitary confinement cell might not sound that appealing.
If you're looking for more feedback: I got a homepage that was very clear, and immediately intrigued me. I clicked "Try now." That took me to a signup form at which point I immediately closed the window.

You should try to make some kind of demo available for the user without having to do anything except click once.
I was actually showing someone in Australia the site earlier today and it was snappy.
Seems HN has caused some slowness :(
[iOS] Integrating Core Data with Dropbox using the Dropbox Datastore API.
Ah, thanks, I found it under the API -> device page. You should put that on the front page somewhere, that it runs on iPhone & iPad. I may be a bit slow but since the demo was iPhone and since it is streaming, I supposed iPad was out of the loop.
Kickstarter is US/UK/Canada only. Being Dutch and resident in Italy it would not work.

I hadn't really looked at Indiegogo before I was too far along doing my own site. In the end it was relatively simple. I'll open source it at some point.
This is why I stopped voting for any politicians years ago. It's just enabling.
You should add a target="_blank" to your article and HN links so they get opened in safari instead of the app context.

It would also be nice if you would store the current app state in localStorage, because the app is reset when you switch to another app and you have to navigate/ scroll back to the article/comment where you left. (Damn you apple for your broken html5 app approach! shakes fist)
From the boss's point of view, you must seem like a great team!
Imagine you write an app for a customer and want quick feedback without him having to install it on his device (if he even has one). Really helpful if you do freelancing for non-technical customers or big enterprises.
Apple’s Tim Cook, tech execs meet with Barack Obama to talk surveillance
He was 16 minutes ago, hence my post.
Hex, Lies and Startups
Binpress A marketplace for Open-Source code
Sorry, is there actually a story here? Summary: random IT guy quits for the same reason most people leave their jobs("I’d become bored of doing the same thing day in, day out").
Put this in your CSS:

blink {
animation: fade-in-out 1s steps(1,end) infinite alternate;
}
Hard to say whether 16.6MM is a lot of money without knowing their burn, which I assume has to be quite substantial (just on bandwidth/hosting).
Someone has the domain name I want What do I do?
Well… you know… we have all been there. I want too dozens of domain names which belong to someone else. Just like you, I think those domain names would really boost my business. The truth is we are too many who covet too many already occupied domain names. So what are our options?
Human Brain vs Fujitsu K experiment
Agree, I also didn't see the point. I guess people upvote "Today I quit my job at [famous company]" because they feel it is an act of braveness?
Hi, Co-founder here. Thanks for the honesty. We have found that people are drawn to our service for one or two big reasons. The first is the ability to quickly share a test build of an app amongst the team for feedback and iteration. No downloads, no installs - just a URL.

The second is the ability to market your app to your clients or fans via your website or through Facebook, to get instant engagement (vs a banner/screenshot) to drive downloads. We've found it to be highly effective and the average app play is about 1:30. Hope that helps!
Hi there, Co-Founder/Designer here. Thanks for that feedback. The iPhone right in the center of the page is an actual demo of an app using our service. You can interact with that straight away as you land on the page. In this case I will take that feedback on board and work to make that much clearer in the future with new designs. Much appreciated!
Definitely. I'd recommend his book Meta Math: The Quest for Omega [1]. He posted the full text of the book on arXiv [2].

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Meta-Maths-Gregory-J-Chaitin/dp/184...
[2] http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0404335
Hi, Designer/Co-founder here. That's great feedback, thank you. I will rework the design to include iPad and make it more obvious we support both. :)
I've been in a similar position for the last 3 years (of a 9 year stint at current company), and your story does resonate with me. I am bored at what I do all day long and have lost the passion for doing any sort of programming in my free time. I've considered leaving a few times, but I always take a look at what sort of openings are out there before I hand in my notice, and the answer is: "there are none".

There has been one programming position advertised in the city I live in in the last 3 years. That company has since closed - as I suspected it would (the entire team of 10 was Polish guys and gals and as it turns out they just wanted a presence in the country and farm out all the work back to Poland). Programmers in the US are totally spoiled right now, as there is a huge demand for them, but its not the same elsewhere. A number of other software businesses have also shut down or retreated back to their base.

Life may be too short to be bored, but its also too short to become penniless and homeless in a few months after quitting because you couldn't hack it anymore in a dead end job.
I always got the sense that Aldi paid very well at every stage, just that it was a tough job with long hours.
In Sam Walton's autobiography, he mentions just that kind of store as the sort of place that can compete with Walmart:

* They can specialize more than Walmart can, and be real experts in what they are selling, which Walmart is never really going to do.

* They can focus on quality and not compete on price.

* They can get to know their customers and their town in a way that Walmart can't.

Amazon is pretty similar to Walmart from that point of view and the same approach would likely work.

Interesting book, BTW, I reviewed it here:

http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.it/2013/07/sam-walton-ma...
<sparkle> is implemented with just an animated gif background. Still, great stuff!
Stackoverflow Down1
Hm, i wonder why Silent Circle just went ahead and shutdown their relativly young and unknown mailservice without any clear reason other than to use the opportunity to do get some publicity for their other secure services.

Lavabit was alot bigger than Silent Circle and this announcement seems a bit suspicious to me. I might me totally wrong, but going ahead and shutting down the service on the same day a popular competitor does without any clear reason while at the same time embracing their other still running services seems a bit strange to me.
I'm not sure how to guesstimate salary costs but $13MM/178 = $73,000 per year per employee. Paying $73,000 per year means that you are paying salary, payroll taxes, and any benefits. The actual salary, for example, might be $55,000 with ~$10,000 tacked on for payroll taxes and another ~$8000 in various benefits/costs.

An average salary of $55,000 seems a bit low but not by too much. I'd guess that $13m is right around their employee cost. If that's true, the rest of their cash must be funneled towards tech and advertising.
Hi, co-founder/designer here. The iPhone on our home page is actually a live demo of Prismadrop (using App.io). Appreciate the feedback - I will work to make it clearer in the future so everyone is aware it's a live demo.
Remote Debug Junit Tests Run From Ant
this is exactly what I've been looking for.
I was thinking of using a small truecrypt container with btsync but it wouldn't work well due to container size being always the same, sync being possible only after unmounting the TC container and so on.
Really great work!

This will also be great for us android users to see what all the hype about certain apps is all about.
So I'm good to go. A pretty big challenge for me, but I will handle it at some weekend for sure! :)
Can only agree. Now this just reads like: has Apple in the title to generate more views, but has nothing to do with it whatsoever.

I also kinda frowned upon the sentence "have been living with a depression for the last 7 years". Of course I cannot know for sure, but I know these days there's too much people using 'depression' to describe the typical not-so-happy feeling any sane human has from time to time about himself or the world. And that comes nowhere close to a _true_ depression.
Just try this on my Android phone, it shows the desktop web page... If it gives the webpage that suits for Android phones, I think this would be more useful.
What about pages that are intended to look like historic pages, because they are e.g. paying tribute to them, or mirroring how far a programmer has come from when he first started using the Internet.

I think there's enough cruft on today's bloated Internet that the blink tag is hardly a significant step in a right direction.
I'm currently using a truecrypt tiny volume inside Dropbox, works but it is not really ideal. Conflicts resolution and a very long password to remember for the volume, that's the only way I can protect the data when it is synched on the Dropbox servers.
Not sure if he's joking or not. In other circumstances I would immediately take it as a joking but this guy has been seriously complaining about removing crappy features that should have been killed decades ago:
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/06/i-have-ported-xscreensaver-t...

In the above he was complaining about the removal of glBegin/glEnd from OpenGL ES (and depracating it in OpenGL 3.0+). It was a convenience feature that might have made sense back in 1992 when OpenGL was introduced but with the advent of consumer graphics hardware in the late 90's, glBegin/glEnd was essentially the reason for a 100x performance drop.

(if you're wondering whether I'm joking or not: yes I am, except for the 100x perf drop)
Your noise can be non-white. Your noise can favour some of your peers, some time of day, messages can be elaborately routed around in circles. You can even make clients download new message distribution patterns each day. Genetically enchanced patterns.
Any plans to support Yubikey for authentication? That alone would earn my backing.
Building a Business Outside the App Store
If you wanna build a sustainable long-term, keep the core outside the App Store.
It seems we have different definitions of what type inference, higher order functions and Turing completeness means. :-) Regarding coroutines in Java: I don't know if libraries using native continuation mechanisms or bytecode manipulations prove that Java (the language) has continuation support. :-) I don't have anything against Scala. In my very first message I even said that I see the odds for Scala winning higher than the odds for Clojure winning - because I already see some enterprise adoption of Scala. Although I see the probability of Scala winning quite low. As you noticed with Java 8 Java is already borrowing a lot of useful things from Scala. I am sure conservative corporate decision makers will see less and less reasons to switch to Scala as time passes by. Also I don't think that Java sucks. I was just making a point from personal productivity experience. Your experience might differ from that.

If I have a function:
def upcase(s: String): String...
The compiler with its static type system can tell me if e. g. I am trying to call the upcase function with an Int argument. But in my experience something like that just does not happen very often. Most programmers are not so stupid that they try to fit a square peg in a round hole. ;-)

A unit test can check if the returned string is really the upcase version of the input parameter. Plus if the programmer would really assume that he could upcase an Int it would just as well give the feedback that his assumption was wrong-like the compiler.
Oh, wow. Yeah, toss out the "interactive app demo" text. Just make a flashing "click here". Glad to help!
Someone posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5771276 a few months ago. I'm not sure we could call that a kernel, but it's a first step.
This is orders of magnitude more expensive than Lavabit was, and simply disallows you sending non-PGP email (i.e. email to anyone other than 2 or 3 very geeky friends.)

I don't think I can pay $100/year to host my email if I can't actually host all my personal email there[1].

[1] (of course, I still have a gmail account for spam, "personal" here means "from an actual person".)
Quite believable. The Angular Way™ is unintuitive to the uninitiated.
If you'd simplify it as fascism being about control instead of, say, conscience and justice, then it certainly seems to continue to be headed in that direction: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/08/nsa-will-rep...
I use keepass database that I store in a truecrypt volume which is then stored in dropbox which solves the first two items listed. With two separate 20+ char pass phrases the last issue is not one that I currently worry about.

This is not saying that this project isn't interesting, I've just found a solution that has solved these issues for me for the last several years.
Fastmail uses perfect forward secrecy with https/TLS connections
An insight into bipolar disorder
I've never been to a dead mall, but I think I know what the feeling would be like. I remember some years ago going to a Kmart (I don't remember why). I think besides one person running the cash register, and a janitor, I was the only person there. The shelves were fully stocked, it was pristine, and eerily silent.

It was like I was in a research lab's clean room or something.
Stackoverflow is down. All programming has stopped.
Indeed, many incompleteness results (the most famous being the Halting Problem)
are known as "infinite employment theorems". For example, we can always make a
compiler perform more optimisations as follows:

1) Every diverging (non-terminating, non-co-terminating) program can be
optimised to the following:

10 GOTO 10

2) The Halting Problem tells us that no compiler can spot every diverging
program.

3) Hence there is room for more optimisation, by spotting more diverging
programs.

4) Hence there is always more work to do for compiler developers.
Hi, Designer/Co-founder here. Ed (our CEO) is currently working on a branch called feature/mobile-optimizations...so expect big things in the coming weeks. :)
I actually tried both, as I remember
I use 1Password with Dropbox. Can someone tell me whether I'm at risk, and should donate to this project?
Ah, I was try to read emails and get Ruby to process them.
or because it will generate page views?
As is ServerFault
out of SEO perspective there are a bunch of TLDs which are handled qual to com, net and org - so just be creative and get some nice domain on TLDs which are not that overpriced yet.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1347922?hl=en
In other news, HN traffic soars. Programmers twiddling their thumbs.
Exactly. By default Bluepass uses a long password as well to protect the local database. However, you can opt to choose a shorter password, or no password at all. In this case you are still protected by:

* The physical security of your device. Unless someone gets access to your device, you are safe.

* The fact that the sync traffic goes over your local network only.

* Even if someone managed to sniff your local traffic, all synchronization requests are encrypted by each node's unique 2048-bit RSA key. No dictionary attack is possible - you'd have to break RSA.
still down. Fri Aug 9 17:14:24 SGT 2013
As is all (?) of stackexchange.
And she's back...
One of the most liberating things I ever did was quit my job and go travel for a couple years. I'd do it again, but I'd like to keep my home on the Peninsula.

Thiel should pay people to quit their jobs. The creative energy would be incredible.
Good point, sorry about that... I'll get it fixed later today :)
Wrong. There's a lot of speculation about what happened at Crypto AG, but none of it suggests the country was complicit in it.
I would imagine that for example in Ukraine US may request stuff, but then the low level chief of the Police in the town where you reside would give you a hint in exchange for money. That's how it rolls there. What US is going to do about that? Bribe the Ukrainian police to bring you to their Embassy? ;-)
I'm playing with my social stuffs right now XD
and now, is it still down?
Maybe we need some kind of distributed knowledge network for things like wikipedia, stackoverflow, and what not?
It's up for me here...
Shanghai Attractions: Yu Garden or Yuyuan Garden
Yu Garden or Yuyuan Garden (Pinyin: Yu Yuan) is considered as one of the most famous and finesse Chinese Gardens. With over 500 years old, Yu Garden is an attraction in Shanghai to enjoy the traditional Chinese gardens.
His books are entertaining, but "great"? Speaking as someone who suffered through Speaker and Xenocide and couldn't get past the first chapter or so of the first Thomas Covenant book, I beg to differ.
stackoverflow and servfault are back. superuser is not.
On the contrary.

I imagine 6ren went to extra lengths to use a semicolon instead of a simple comma, as semicolons are used to emphasize independent clauses.
The risk appetite of entrepreneurs in SV, India and Africa