skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With Windows Azure SQL Databases, it by default has no ability to be accessed from the public Internet. It is trivial (i.e. 10 seconds work) to add an IP address and a specified port to allow access though.

Sure, it's a hole in the firewall but it's limited to a specific IP address, on a non-standard port, protected by a strong password.
I wonder if you could add some tactile feedback with some precision fans? A grid of fans below your hand and in front of it could provide a gradient of subtle pressure. Or maybe a fan on some sensitive servos that track each fingertip?
When I started using email in the 1990s, I was advised that plain-text email was no more private than sending a postcard: most likely, nobody besides the intended recipient would bother to read it, but a number of people in theory could read it. The idea of blithely sending private information over unencrypted email never made sense to me.

But on the other hand, neither did I expect to learn that the U.S. government is collecting, analyzing, reading our email. Even though I might have assumed they could do that, it's alarming to discover that they are doing that.
People can always find ways to convince themselves that whatever they're doing fits their personal ideological beliefs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_%28making_excus...

It's not hard. Self-interest and/or the desire to avoid trouble are powerful motivators. Ideology is much less so. If the two conflict, we find ways to bend the ideology to fit, even if to an outside observer it looks like we've turned it completely inside out.

It gets even easier when the outside forces that are compelling us to go along give us pre-written rationalizations for doing so. "You're serving your country." "You're stopping terrorists from hurting innocent people." All we have to do then is just decide to not think about the rationalization we've chosen too hard.
Ask HN: Are there any reliable European Lavabit private email services?
I was wondering if there are any Lavabit alternatives with servers in Europe. Preferably in a country like Germany and Sweden where privacy is a big deal.
You Can Do Anything: Must Every Kids' Movie Reinforce the Cult of Self-Esteem?
NY Times website is down.
> the F-117 also wasn't a multirole fighter, was built in low quantities [...] It's a one-trick pony designed to sneak in, drop a precision bomb, and get out.

These are all good things, though. It's a focused airframe absolutely excellent at what it does. Much like the A10 really.

> and was relatively quickly retired

Beg pardon? The F-117 reached operational capability in 1983 and was retired in 2008 (the original plan was 2011, it was retired earlier to free money to buy F22s). And they've flown as recently as 2010 around Nellis.
So do I just email all my questions directly to Thompson and Pike, then?

In this case, language maturity means the quantity of reference material available to help troubleshoot problems as the arise.
With or without the palantiri, people see what they want to see. But it is a pretty good name for a data mining company.
I de-dup based on both title and URL such that changing one won't cause me to see it again unless the other is changed at the same time; it seems to help.
Stringing together commands is the primary reason I write most of my scripts in bash; because my commands are generally written in multiple different languages. Also, the fact that the shell is a REPL, means scripts can be prototyped or even assembled from shell history fairly easily, then refactored into something better resembling usability.

Re performance, I usually run Cygwin on Windows. Starting up too many processes is not a mistake I tend to make, because forking in Cygwin is hopelessly slow. Similarly, spaces in paths are common, and I've learned to be fairly religious about quoting, to the point of using print0, xargs -0 etc.

My scripts regularly deal with millions of files, and pipes that transfer tens of gigabytes. I rely on being able to string together sort and uniq to do set operations over multi-gigabyte files with constant memory usage; such scripts are not trivially rewritten in languages like Python without using non-standard libraries. When performance becomes an issue, the solution is a lot more heavyweight in terms of development time.
No, Google did not say that there is no privacy in Gmail:
http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/08/14/no-google-did-not-sa...

> Earlier on Tuesday, Google was quoted by Consumer Watchdog, RT.com (Russia Today) and Gizmodo as having argued in a legal motion that customers have “no legitimate expectation of privacy”, but the quote has been taken out of context.
Petition To Keep Microsoft TechNet Program Gets 9,000-Plus Signers
would it be too annoying to add another parameter for a click, like a sound of voice signal?

the other alternative I'd see would be to have a virtual representation, and to be able to "click" on it, but it isn't really for a near future...
A Mirror Based Event Cloaking Device
This is, obviously, obvious. Have to wonder why the plaintiffs thought they did not have to pay for this service. TANSTAAFL.

I've talked to plenty of businesses that are subject to privacy rules or laws (because they handle confidential personnel or health information) that preclude them from using Google for email or data storage. I argued that this data was probably safer on a Google server than on a server in their office being taken care of by a outsourced sysadmin. They completely understood these issues before I explained them, and they were not more computer-savvy than your ordinary citizen.
> But that doesn't mean that whenever you encounter the boundaries of science you get to call people derisive names and ridicule them.

Not an issue except to the oversensitive. Consider the words of NIMH director Insel as he recently announced that the DSM (psychiatry and psychology's "bible") is to be abandoned:

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...

Quote: "The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity ... Patients with mental disorders deserve better."

To a psychiatrist or psychologist, in particular those responsible for the content of the DSM, calling it invalid and unscientific might be taken as personal criticism. But that's unavoidable if we're going to move away from unscientific practices.

> See my other comment — I used to have the same smug approach, until I found out on myself that there are things that medicine doesn't understand.

That isn't a legitimate comparison. In medicine, if something isn't understood, a researcher says, "We don't understand this." In psychiatry and psychology, the response is, "Take some Zyprexa and call me in the morning."

Personally, I look forward to the day when "NOS: Not Otherwise Specified" will no longer be looked on as a legitimate diagnosis meriting treatment.
The 25 Best U.S. Cities for Tech Startups
The background missing is that the company was private before, changed owners a couple times, and was only taken public in the 90's. The CEO and the chairman of the company held a controlling interest, even while it was public, until, in 2011, they were persuaded to sell some. After that, they left (or were forced to?), and new management was installed.

I worked for them during this transition after they acquired an iPad app I made (http://etudeapp.com).
That was significantly informative. Thanks for the context. I actually was about to delete my submission as you mention it's been posted previously and while I personally didn't realize that, I'd prefer not to contribute to the decline of HN. Anyway, I missed the deletion window, but hopefully more will see your comment to provide context.
IMAP + Thunderbird fits his requirements, as far as I can see (although I'm not sure what he means by non-"flat" UI).
Indeed. $22 million in 8 days would be some kind of miracle.

I really wanted this thing too.
This is a disgraceful smear. The phrase "expectation of privacy" occurs exactly once in the cited filing, and that's in a quote from another case. It is used to argue that if someone (not necessarily a Gmail user) sends email to a Gmail user, that sender ought to expect Gmail to process the email. What exactly Gmail does with the email is between the recipient and Google.
I've read a few articles noting the tension between private bus services and public space. I don't live in Silicon Valley, but it sounds like these private buses are really taking advantage of public space and I think the city needs to step in, write up some rules for fair use and generate revenue from this private system.
Thanks for posting this. I was looking for the quote in the document [0] and was surprised to see no such quote by Google but rather a reference to a past case.

[0] http://www.scribd.com/doc/160134104/Google-Motion-to-Dismiss...
Free advice: you almost never want $. Almost always what you want is $@, usually in the form "$@". It doesn't matter for this example, but $ is usually a code smell.
That's not true. Freight consumers care a lot about speed. Think of it like a triangle and each corner is cost, reliability, and time. Each one pulls on the other as a decision process in the supply chain.
"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."

-Benjamin Franklin
I'd argue that most of the truly successful military aircraft in the US inventory started out as single-purpose aircraft. The F-4 and F-15 were pure fighters. The F-117 and A-10 were pure attack aircraft.

The political process drives the insanity of trying to serve multiple purposes with thousands of design engineers strategically located in as many Congressional districts as possible.

I think drones should be used for every application that they are appropriate for -- why put people on the line when computers can do the work? But just like the JSF project attempted to serve many masters, assuming drones are the optimal decision for all military aircraft requirements is dumb.

The Chinese and Russians are building high performance aircraft for less than $1 Trillion. There's a reason for that. We can too.
Though it was helped along by infiltrators and provocateurs.
Living in San Francisco and being exposed mostly to the startup scene can make you easily forget about the enormous amount of companies running on a Windows stack

Living outside San Francisco and working for a company with 19,000 employees that has hundreds of SQL Servers spanning over a petabyte of storage, it's funny to read things like this.
This article is not the first on the subject, and it probably won't be the last.

I should just save them and forwarded them to the Google recruiters that contact me 1-2 times a year. Not going to work in the bay area. I like living in a place where my neighbors do not work in tech. I like SF, but what made the city truly extraordinary is gone.
Glad to see that Space is going to be a commercial business instead of private governments doing everything. This gives me hope that Space will be a place that consumers can enjoy.

That said I think that Elon Musk is doing a lot to make things like Space and Electric cars more accessible to the average person. Even though the costs of Tesla cars are high now for the average Joe to afford, they will hopefully be down in the near future. I hope that the same will happen with Space-X.
Great! I'm not surprised to see that it comes from Africa, there are really huge opportunities there in term of SMS-only application.
Or at least, we've managed to push the unclean parts of it into places far away where we don't have to personally see it -- assembly lines in China, coltan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan) mines in the Congo, etc. It's not like the old days of, say, the garment business, where the abuse was happening right in New York City for everyone to see (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fir...). It's been shuffled off to places where customers and cameras can't go.

This makes it easier to pretend to ourselves that what we do is not tied up with the human costs in those places. It's easy to not think about something you never see.
Israeli military intelligence unit drives country's hi-tech boom
I'm curious to what you think the other options are?

Gentrification doesn't mean pushing all residents and culture out of a place - but it typically flows to areas with the least resistance (and location/ proximity).

So if you have an economically desolate area, and gentrification is at one end of the scale with 'detroitification' at the other - what is in the middle?
Doesn't it result in a lit of heat from the friction? Or is that only a problem at much higher speeds?
this may be going too far; as far as I know, Google has always been frank about their processing of the e-mails. Heck, who here hasn't been reminded by gmail that you said you 'attached' something, but you don't have attachments?

There's always a tradeoff, and in case of gmail, we trade off waivering content-based automatic process with convenience. If you wouldn't like to trade anything with privacy, go find something else. There's a reason why Lavabit attracted a decent amount of users.

Having said that, the google privacy policy[1] tells of exactly what sort of information they collect, and to what ends they use. The problem I have with the whole NSA debacle concerning Google is with this exact phrase:

> We will ask for your consent before using information for a purpose other than those that are set out in this Privacy Policy.[1]

I'm fine with waivering some rights, albeit limited, for an exchange with my enormously convenient service. If you do stuff which we never agreed in the first place, and which you had told me to ask for my consent, behind my back, I'm not fine with it.

[1] http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/
I wrote a library for Go that makes functional programming with channels-as-streams very comfortable, for me[1]. There is a problem with needing to box and unbox variables from the 'empty interface{}' type all the time but it's a minor wart IMO.

It's a really small library that was made in response to my own intuition (similar to yours) that the Go standard library wasn't really embracing a functional style. I haven't used it in any major projects but for small one-off things it's proved pretty useful. It basically works like pipes on the command line.

1: https://github.com/eblume/proto
There's a school of thought in software dev that a developer is a developer is a developer, and should be able to do all the things a developer should do.

That said, you hire "backend-focused" developers, "front-end" developers, etc., but to me that still means they should be able to do whatever tasks are necessary (Go, JS) to get their job done.
I think this not only looks like a great app but also really hope to see more startups focusing on the needs in developing countries.

How did you end up going there and building this? Was it sort of a by-product of working with an NGO or did you specifically go to Rwanda to do a mobile startup in a developing country?
Yes, lets put up a divider between the relatively wealthy tech people and the poor, so that the third parties (property owners, government) stay unharmed.

Tech people also don't want to pay 40% of their net income to some rent seeker for a studio appartment. This level of prices will ultimately be toxic to the economy.
Prius owners are famous for this as well. It's very annoying when you in a hurry and someone is 'hyper-miling'.
Interesting. I'm not familiar with the library. I'm familiar with the general programming model of parsing a document into a number of tokens and then encoding document structure into offsets between tokens.

It wouldn't have worked for Gumbo's purposes because

1. Gumbo captures a lot more information than can fit in a 64 bit token. For example, Gumbo decodes entity references; this requires that text be available in a fresh buffer because each individual character might be something different than the source text.

2. One of Gumbo's goals was to make it easy to write bindings in other languages. Most languages can bind to C structs easily, but binding to C function calls often requires a much more verbose preamble to setup args, return types, conversions, etc. (I was actually thinking of LLVM when I designed Gumbo's API, since the project it was initially for at the time was looking at LLVM as an embedded JIT. Binding to a struct that's C-formatted just requires defining a new type, but binding to a function call requires codegenning a lot of argument setup.)
For the umpteenth time to the umpteenth submission, this is not true, Google never said that: sections of this legal motion have been deliberately taken out of context to mislead readers.

If anything that quote is about non-Gmail users and even then it’s in response to a certain aspect of the complaint.

The lawyer cited a 1979 precedent (as lawyers wont to do) to counter a specific allegation:

“a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over tothird parties.” Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 743-44 (1979).

The whole case is built on trying to make physical mail (snail mail) analogies applicable to email, and Google’s lawyer is counter-arguing accordingly. They are accusing Google of "reading" emails when it's computers "parsing" text, that particular part of the motion is in response to the argument that non-Gmail users class action is valid since they didn't agree to the TOS, Google counters the mail providers’ "automated processes" are analogous to assistants that are allowed to open mail for their employers (the recipient). The "third parties" here aren't necessarily Google but the recipients of your email who happen to be using Gmail. As since you've turned over your information voluntarily to the email recipient they can apply “automatic processing” to it.

Link to relevant page: http://www.scribd.com/doc/160041493/Google-Motion-061313#pag....

The case is about Gmail "scanning" emails to target ads, Google is arguing (rightly so) that machines parsing emails is not equivalent to "reading" it, and that "automated processes" are necessary for spam filtering, full-text search, etc.

The entire motion, read it and make you own conclusions: http://www.scribd.com/doc/160041493/Google-Motion-061313

Shame on the guardian for publishing this (although it's their dubious tech section), the author evidently haven't read the motion, consulted a lawyer or bother to ask Google for comment.
OMG, is this actually supposed to be single-stage-to-orbit?

Ah, Wikipedia says it's two-stage-to-orbit. That's still impressive, but a ship that can reach orbit in a single piece without having to jettison anything is the Holy Grail of spaceflight.

And watching that blazing titan set down on the landing pad as gently as a butterfly is awe-inspiring in any case.
There would be some benefits. For example, if it became trivial to detect that a person was a user of illegal drugs, we'd very quickly change our drug laws to something more congruent with reality. Instead, we are in a situation where our drug laws are only tolerated because they're completely financially unrealistic to enforce the way they're written. That leads to selective enforcement, which gives authorities way too much discretionary power.
That does assume that the hardware can be reused without significant refurbishing. The extensive maintenance needed due to damage incurred each flight was one reason the reusable shuttle ended up with a much higher per-launch cost than the expendable Soyuz. One can surely do much better than the shuttle, but cheap expendable systems are not that easy to beat with a reusable vehicle.
That's not what they're saying at all; they're saying, as agreed to in the TOS, they will require "read, copy, and modify" permissions to messages. They need to read to provide world-class, spam filtering, virus protection, etc. They need to copy to distribute messages across redundant storage, so you don't lose your messages and they are readily available around the world on any device. They need to modify to display your messages in a sexy fashion. Among other reasons to require these permissions. You are very welcome to not agree to the TOS, and it's unlikely they are going to make exceptions to be able to turn off these features and need for the subsequent permissions, because most people won't give a crap about a non-human "reading" their messages, and everyone +/-1% will do a worse job at securing their own email service.
To be fair, the DEA is going after drug crimes using secret information supplied by the NSA, and lying about it.
I am a "full stack" developer. I know the ins and outs of both my front and back end stacks (Groovy in my case), and I have a pretty good sense of the patterns required in this case.

However, one of the more frustrating pieces of this is that I never dive deep into one paradigm. I'm continually having to work bilingually. When I was working with node.js, I didn't feel nearly as much bilingual stress (even though I've written backends in python, ruby, java, groovy, and scala!)

As such, my single person one-off and side projects will be in node.js. It's about cognitive overhead in the moment. I agree that it's a mediocre solution for larger teams and enterprise is not its sweet spot, but it's great for projects in the small.
I think people really underestimate how much Silicon Valley owes to the world-class universities we have here. Without them, we wouldn't dominate tech and biotech. Stanford pumps out CS/MBA/BioTech, Berkeley pumps out CS/MBA/BioTech, UCSF pumps out BioTech. Their influence can not be understated nor easily replicated to other cities even if they have a ton of VC money.
If this is your requirement, may I suggest:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java
I think you misunderstood me. The two roles (designer and frontend developer) are becoming more disparate and specialized. In the future, designers may not be coding full-fledged websites. Your ideas make sense to you now because you are both coding and designing. But, I believe there will come a time in your career where you will have to choose to specialize in one or the other. If you spend more time in design, you will find that your frontend peers will zoom past you (and vice versa).
And yet, the riots and looting sprees happen not in San Francisco, but in European countries like the UK, France, and Sweden.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Stockholm_riots

Sweden. Not exactly a bastion of savage Randian individualism.

Not to say that generous welfare states are of no value, but the available data suggest they are far from a panacea
Now THAT is cognitive dissonance. Bravo, sir (although I'm pretty sure you did that by accident).