skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few years ago while travelling in a sleeper class(the cheapest seats) on a long route train I met two British women hitch-hiking across India. Needless to say I was horrified and scared for them and gave the customary warnings I give to my sisters. They replied that they have already been told the same things before. One of them asked me, "How does the common citizen view them?" Thinking that they were not scared enough travelling across India, I replied, "Like animals in a zoo. They want to touch you. Some will admire and some will harass". A few minutes later, a young village woman sitting on the floor(probably without ticket) with a child in her arms asked me in Hindi to tell the British women, "They look very pretty". I did. In response I was requested to pass the same message back to the young woman(which I did not, her husband was already on to me). I continued my rant about how dangerous India is for woman to instill some fear in those poor devils. I am not sure I was successful.
The justifications have been flogged to death in the open literature for decades: control of special nuclear materials, attacks on vulnerable infrastructure, espionage, sabotage, etc.
CIA documents acknowledge its role in Iran's 1953 coup
Bounced a few emails around. I was turned down. A few months later I went and put it together myself anyway. The beta test has been well recieved and I am looking for clients.
Not all Internet protocols are HTTP. If you're running a service where long-lived connections are the norm, "simply fronting a bunch of servers with a load balancer" can require a pretty smart load balancer. E.g. IMAP connections often last hours or even days, and are required to maintain a degree of statefulness.
there have been plenty of sexist, patriarchal regimes in European history where behaviors such as the ones described would be considered gross affronts to basic morality by the Christian church

Really? I'm skeptical. Can you point to any historical evidence that this is true?

For example, consider slaveholders in the US. It was always recognized that they could rape their slaves. No one at the time thought that was wrong. Even the church. But perhaps I'm wrong: again, can you point to any recorded historical cases of slave owners who raped their slaves but were chastised by the church? Anything? Even just one case?

I'm pretty skeptical that the church would have opposed a random lord of the manner raping a peasant woman under his dominion either.
UK FOI Request: Policing by Consent
Conversely, all other conditions being equal, employees in an at-will state have more incentives to mislead their management.
But once it's out there, it's connected to him -- in the cache, in people's memory, etc. Changing the name might help a bit, but then this is all speculation since he didn't find out whether his comedy work was a factor.
Bill clearly seems to be Bill Gates, but who is Andy?
I would have expected "Gordon Moore", or... :-)
his first language is Arabic.
What prices are you calculating? You can install and use Microsoft .NET without Visual Studio for free, so the Windows OS is the only price in the server in that case if you use a free database, etc.
Andy Grove was CEO of Intel
I believe he was only allowed access to a state provided lawyer. Whether refusing this was a good/bad move is anybodies guess.

They quite clearly denied him access/conversation to his own choice of lawyer. I can't find a clear list of rights allowed to a person held under the act (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/schedule/7).

It's quite clear from the above who is fully in control and who isn't though - silence will lead to prison and/or a fine.
Why? There's a scroll bar in the OS that does exactly the same thing. At the same time. But accurately.
Gmail zero inbox extension for Chrome
Bootstrap 3 paints 2x as fast compared to Bootstrap 2.3.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1IqzeA3XXg
"...anyone wearing a suit is, to a very high degree of probability, evil, stupid, or both."

Or at a job interview.
http://symposium.100yss.org/ is the actual info and registration.
Visit chrome://extensions/

Check 'Developer mode'

Click 'Load unpacked extension...'
> Of course you can distrust somebody who wears a suit.

I didn't say distrust, I said discriminate against. As in, "I don't like that you wear a suit, so you're fired.".

> I'm merely pointing out this very real fact of today's business world, and how it's plausible that appearance can play a very significant role in business relationships.

You're pointing out that many people are willing to be unethical to make money. This is neither surprising nor interesting.

It is, however, disgusting, and doubly so because the appeasement is the only thing that allows it to persist in the first place. If the person with money had trouble finding vendors who lived up to their arbitrary expectations, the incentive would exist to change those expectations.
> To say, as this correspondent did, that "engineering isn't about first principles", is to argue that it has nothing to do with science

It is not arguing, as you claimed, that the disciplines or "independent of each other and of physics", especially not when, as that correspondent did, an acknowledgement is included in the same sentence which expressly acknowledges the fact (while dismissing its relevance in context) that they all derive from the same physical laws.

No one is arguing that different engineering disciplines aren't related to each other and to physics; the debate is about the extent to which how those relations (as well as Musk's connection to certain engineering disciplines through SpaceX and Tesla) are relevant in the context of the Hyperloop proposal, the criticism of it, and the treatment of Musk as an authority deserving special deference in regard to that proposal.
This has occured to me too. Is there some extra dimension to all this that we cannot see? However I dont think its necessary to explain events.
Sovereign: build and maintain your own private cloud with Ansible
Or you're a Mac OS or iOS user and the scrollbar will be invisible when you're not scrolling.
Cat shot with Crossbow survives surgery
“Steve Jobs wouldn’t have done that.”
The media has been "captured" with all the other "estates". Many people outside of the tech elite are aware of what's going on. What do you want the public to do? Protest? Riot? Revolt? Vote? Those aren't good choices considering what control the US and the UK government have over every aspect of life. The best thing to do right now is observe and remember. Don't let this depress you, worse things have and will happen in history.
He asked to talk to Glenn, who is a lawyer and they refused. Could he really trust that the lawyer they had queued up for him would be on his side?
From doctor to tech founder at a $10M Sequoia-funded startup
I agree, and I still don't understand why he chose the use of those words.
At my previous company, despite being a .NET shop, our main problem was not the cost--even though SQL Server is outrageous. It was the difficulty in implementing continuous integration and deployment. RDP is not a scalable solution. Implementing Chef on Windows was a major pain. The insanity of having to install VS on the build servers just to get automated builds of web apps. MS, what were you thinking with making VS a dependency for building websites?!

I know TFS offers a lot of the benefits we were looking for, but we were committed to git. (This was before they added git support in TFS) We were also burned by a lot of bad MS versions of things in the past, so were weren't eager to dip our toes into TFS.
Yes: run your own mail server.

This raises the barrier enough so that the NSA/FBI can't just request access to your mail. Instead now they would have to either physically access the mail server, or use extremely offensive techniques (backdoor your computer, take control of your mail server via a software vulnerability, etc).
There is something truly entertaining about the insistence they smash the hard drives.

The number of computer-illiterate C-level assholes I have met all insist on applying analog world logic to their digital decision making. When you try to properly correct them for wasting their time or embarrassing themselves to end up on sites like HN, they lose it. I find it funny how badly such people in positions of government corporate power need to prove to themselves they have any recourse in contexts or fields where they are too stupid to find a proper solution to their own dilemma.
You're absolutely right. You should never tell someone you're firing why you're firing them. They should already know that before they've even walked in the room.
> I mean some of these people are really smart and understand how this spying can be abused. There must be something they know that makes them build or support these programs.

Governments and security agencies want the Social Graph -- in detail, and, if possible, in real-time. This has become one of their top strategic priorities.

There is no legitimate "use" of these programs that would stand in contrast to what you call their "abuse".
The Revolution Will Not Be Vice
Sorry for what happened to you, but in reality what you do off the clock does indeed matter. Companies have an image to maintain, not least startups which are trying to woo more venture capital, and you can bet that the VC's staff will be researching each and every employee. And if it's not VC, it's a potential purchaser or a broker that's going to take you public.

It sounds like your CEO was probably a jerk, but in his mind he may have had his company's welfare as top priority.

Now as for sacrificing one's soul for a paycheck, well, that's a personal choice. Maybe you should be up front with your next employer about your stand-up stuff and see how they respond. Once it's out in the open, you will at least know where they stand.

Best of luck.
> So what about SpaceX and Tesla? To me those indicate that Musk must be a pretty decent engineer, and perhaps more importantly, must be excellent at leading real hardcore engineers in complex domains.

Well, then, how do you explain the following?

1- Thermal expansion and contraction issues diametrically
opposed to what happens in the real world

2- Proposing that an entire 300 or 400 mile tube be a single
welded solid tube with no turns or incremental expansion
gaps. Really? In the real world? Along the 5 freeway?

3- Grotesquely underestimating seismic effects

4- Estimating a cost at least one order of magnitude
lower than what it will actually be in the real world

5- Not taking a drive down the Golden State highway before proposing
that columns be installed every 100 feet to support the tubes.
No, really, go on Google Maps and take the drive yourself.

Start here:
http://goo.gl/maps/zPPKa

I think these guys thought it would be a cool and possibly marketing-worthy thing to put out something like this. They put a little time into it here and there and, per the paper, a short amount of full time effort. They were probably so focused on the tube transport physics that they neglected to connect to the real world.

At some level I don't fault them for putting this out. They are obviously far more focused on building cars and rockets and that's exactly how it should be. If what came out was a fully engineered project it would have meant that they took valuable time away from Tesla and SpaceX to apply on this thing. That could border on being a breach of fiduciary duty.

At this point I am going to mark this off as science fiction simply because I am now convinced it cannot be built outside of a super-expensive short range test installation.
Hey guys

Sorry for the radio silence. I was intending on keeping the blog updated with anecdotes from the experiment, but ended up not doing so. I've received a few emails from people mentioning that I'm throwing away the opportunity of turning the initial spike of interest into a long-standing readership/audience but the truth is that was never what I was after; I was genuinely keen on finding some cool new projects to work on.

The experiment is going so-so. If you remember I green-lighted 5 projects.

- 1 was aborted before start through mutual agreement after further market research

- 2 were aborted because the devs did not manage to complete the MVP. Lack of motivation mainly. If I've learnt anything so far it's that lack of follow-through is still a major issue, and the promise of a little money and a partner to work with does not squash the problem as much as I thought it would. I suspect not being physically in the same space has a lot to do with it.

That leaves 2, one of which is live and the other is about a month away still (slow progress)

So it's unclear whether this structure works. Going to depend on the last 2. Even then, the sample size has been quite small so the results will not be conclusive. Guess will need to try a second round at some point!

hmexx
We host Cloud Cellar on Windows Azure and have had positive experience doing so. PS: The BizSpark program is really good for .NET developers - use it!
Ask HN - Advice for my iOS app, Thomas - Analog Movie Camera
Sorry if I ask again but I'm looking for opinion or advice on how to improve my iOS app:

http://www.alfonsobozzelli.com/thomas/

NOTE:Actually it crash on iOS7 but an update is waiting for approval.

Here is 10 promo codes, if you take one a comment is appreciated.

http://tokn.co/tvzj6n8t

http://tokn.co/ve3nj9tc

http://tokn.co/ncnqw67x

http://tokn.co/0qadru9w

http://tokn.co/5b47cuy2

http://tokn.co/qjm9fnz9

http://tokn.co/4sdbn82v

http://tokn.co/32f786qp

http://tokn.co/dx5gtuuk

http://tokn.co/sme675wj
But it is a valuable way of handling criticism. Most of us are easily cowed by critics (internal and external.) I applaud any way that helps me "deal" with criticism.
This is from a magazine founded by William F Buckley, Jr. Quite possibly the conservative antithesis to Noam Chomsky. The only people in favor of these programs are those who gain power from them through the imbalance of information they provide.
Ps: written on iPhone. Apologies about formatting/typos
Which is why people HATE to hire in France: it's so hard to undo a bad hiring decision that no one will take a chance on a candidate who only "might" work out.

The right solution, in my opinion, is allow fire-at-will like we do in California, and have thorough unemployment benefits so that it's not worth making a fuss over.
Terminus - VT100 emulator + inline HTML
Apple makes money by selling hardware and software, whereas Google and Twitter make money selling ads, which incentivizes them not to encrypt our data so that it can more easily be used to target users. Or at least that's what this post seems to imply: http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/11/two-honest-google-employ....

I'm not convinced that this story is necessarily reliable, but it's better than the reverse:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57577887-38/apples-imessag....

And in Apple's statement on privacy:
https://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-privacy/.

"For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form."

As John Gruber says, "That last sentence separates Apple from many other companies." (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/06/17/apple-privacy)
Hi, I'm a sysadmin.

90% was always a bogus value, but that's not the main problem that I see.

Intelligence agencies are in the business of gathering, recording, analyzing and cross referencing information, and then producing reports -- all while maintaining compartmentalization to a degree that would be insane in most other contexts.

You should never outsource your value proposition. What's the key differentiator between the NSA and, say Arbor or Stratfor? Ignore the lack of need to be profitable. The main difference is that the NSA needs to make security its religion. To do that, the principle of least privilege applies. The concept of Need To Know applies. And whenever possible, decisions need to be implemented by two or more people who can't/won't conspire with each other.

Sysadmins set those systems up and run them. Sysadmins understand security as it actually is -- bits without Colour, c.f. yesterday's discussion -- and can turn the Colourful requirements documents into reasonable facsimiles of working systems.

The NSA should never outsource computing expertise, be it development or systems administration. If they were to eliminate 90% of their contract sysadmins - by bringing them in-house - the problem would be with the remaining 10%. But reduce their operational workforce like that and claim automation can do it?

That's so much bull.
stuff you need to pay for? There is surely a case for including some production logging in rails as default?
The problem with loading bars is that they lie. They promise a linear view of a 0-100% process that does not proceed linearly. Instead, they sputter and freeze, and most frustratingly often seem to get stuck at around 95%. Believe me, telling your user that the page is 95% loaded and then freezing for several more seconds is much more infuriating than a simple spinner.

This behavior goes way back to software like Real Player (buffering...), Windows Installer (which would actually hit 100% and then reset to zero for another round), and is seen today on YouTube, Netflix, and the browser's own feedback bar.

Can you predict the next few seconds of network bandwidth? Do you know the relative times of content downloading versus parsing json and browser rendering for various clients? All these play into the feedback you're promising, and you don't really know.
Mmm. Or rather, it's all fun to them being as they make the rules and can never ultimately lose the game. They seem to forget that for the rest of us it's not quite so discretionary.
I'm not quite sure the editor of one of the most important newspapers of record right now is into "paraphrasing"
It's always great if you can tell the employee what they need to do to improve. Do that while they still have a job. Work with them on it more than once.

Just don't do that at firing time.
nice additions. For OSX I had to modify the local wordlist part of the auto complete function to read:

local wordlist=$(ls $MARKPATH)
If I'm going to India for 5 weeks with my gf, do you think we'd honestly have anything to worry about? I would assume having the guy alongside would tame things down a bit right?
I can't get excited or depressed about these numbers, because at this order of magnitude and with as little as we know about the workflows and storage mechanisms involved, there is no meaningful difference between 0.000004% and 0.00004%, or indeed 4%, considering how vague the definitions are of whether something is being inspected, whether it can be or is stored, etc.

That said, the more data (numbers, policies, or what have you) the better. Get it all out there, fact-check the hell out of it. If you want to do a puzzle, first you have to pour out the pieces.
There are, I believe (IANAL) quite specific rules around the use of 'adverse inference'[1], which is the way in which your lack of answers can be used.

On reading through the CPS guidance linked, the sheer complexity and number of potentially critical missteps someone unaware of the details could make is enlightening.

Say Nothing. Get a Lawyer. (Cue "Never talk to the police" youtube link... I wonder if there is a comprehensive UK equivalent?)

[1] http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/a_to_c/adverse_inferences/
Scrollbars aren't but they still show on a scroll event (unless I'm mistaken - I'm only using 10.8).
It's also really slow, can't seem to keep track of my read items, and has been down an awful lot the past month. I had high hopes, but it's close to the point where I'm starting to look for something else. Again.
You can even use VS for free, as long as it's the Express version, which is capable enough for a lot of use cases.
I'm not worried yet. But when people start saying, "What would Steve do?", then I'll be worried.
A lot happens in the book and it explores a large number of interesting ideas. Sure it is long, but every part fits well together. As a result the universe feels more fleshed out and cohesive than the Culture books, and this is something I look for in sci-fi.

I've read every Culture book twice, and don't really have any desire to read them again, at least not for quite a while. The Algebrist I've read four times now and each re-reading finds something new.

What would you cut?
This made me think of a quote from a movie. Actually it was just the trailer I saw, years ago. Took some digging but here you go, it's from The Libertine:

"...you must acquire the trick of ignoring those who do not like you. In my experience, those who do not like you fall into two categories: The stupid and the envious. The stupid will like you in five years time. The envious, never."
Accelerating the journey to death
Everything can be negotiable. But it's important to know exactly what your pull is in the negotiations. I recently negotiated a recruiter out of their standard contract for freelancers, and had them accept my proposal for a contract.

This only happened for two reasons: there was some bad stuff in that contract that I really didn't want to agree to, and if they didn't sign a contract with me, I could go directly to their client. They had no power over me, and we both knew it.
Isn't the point of dynamically loading content to reduce the perceived waiting time though? I wonder if focus on cleanly showing the user the page is rendering might be better placed on getting content to load faster instead.
> that makes them keep doing what they're doing.

For many of them, the paycheck is probably motivation enough. IT subcontracting from governments and security agencies can be quite lucrative.