skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well I hope this is not the case. I am against the NSA monitoring program. I think powerful commercial interests colluding to purposefully break the rule of law is a huge negative.

Lets disconnect this behavior from the specific instance's moral outrage:

If Exxon, BP, Chevron, Shell simultaneously came out and ignored all EPA restrictions would their CEOs all go to jail, doing enormous damage to the stock market?

This sound like a good thing to anyone?
These probably don't factor in but here are some more details about my background/credentials:

SAT is 2040 (not superscored)

Top 7% of my class

#8 in the nation in web design for BPA.
> Already runs Android apps.

Not well. They're sluggish, and no features past Gingerbread are supported.
Comment rot is like wiki rot -- all too common, and often more confusing. There are a couple good rules of thumb I follow.

1) If you are writing a comment, make sure it is a "why" and not a "what" (why this code exists, not a description of what it is doing). Why comments often survive refactoring, you might entirely redo the login system, but the reason you do it is still so people can log in.

2) If you find yourself documenting the "what" about code -- take a moment, and think really hard about why it is confusing. If it is accidental complexity (your fault), refactor it. If it is fundamental complexity (problem domain is a bitch), don't add the documentation to the function, put that knowledge in the tests. Nothing is as harmful that a bunch of gotchas buried in comments no one will read, and will eventually rot and not even make sense after the code is refactored.
APL isn't obtuse—just unfamiliar to people who aren't familiar with it.

By the dictionary meaning of 'obtuse', in fact, APL is the opposite: a sharp tool and a masterpiece of design.
HTML5 Geolocation implementation
Actually, 10% might be enough, if you believe some of the research on how society-wide changes happen. That doesn't really change the overall conclusion at the moment, but it's nice to stay optimistic...
The article says you could go 30 minutes without breathing after an injection, it might be used for divers at oil rigs.
I'm not a luck scientist, but I would say this:

Lets assume that doing and telling increase luck surface area. We know, through observation, that both good and bad luck exist. Thus, there should exist situations in which telling and/or doing increase bad luck surface area.

All things being equal, the direction in which ones luck surface area will grow (good/bad) when telling/doing, is evenly distributed. In other words, you have even odds of good and bad luck when you tell/do.

Now, lets follow the general social studies assumption that people are risk averse.

You get a more tightly packed theory, albeit, less inspirational - the winning strategy in life is doing nothing and shutting up. :)

Now back to work.
Now Edward Snowden has his game, playable online
I'm sure you are referring to the hyperloop post. I don't think the system is being game here, most people want to know about that piece of news. And if the post is bogus, well a moderator can simply flag it.
Given that that article says that the supposedly-sealed lenses were also vulnerable, do you have advice on how one would successfully enclose a lens to protect it from the dust?
Sounds like the web... So what?
"No one has "control" over the Internet."

Aside from the people who control the hardware, and the NSA/others seem to have control over those people, getting them to install monitoring hardware.

"I also don't like this, "us vs. them" rhetoric"

I am able to be prosecuted for creating "hacking tools" while Endgame Systems has the NSA pay them a million+ a year to access data from those "hacking tools."

'There are even target packs for democratic countries in Europe and other U.S. allies. Maui (product names tend toward alluring warm-weather locales) is a package of 25 zero-day exploits that runs clients $2.5 million a year. The Cayman botnet-analytics package gets you access to a database of Internet addresses, organization names, and worm types for hundreds of millions of infected computers, and costs $1.5 million.[1]'

In this environment of immunity granted to profiteers while my friends and I are prosecuted, it is "us vs. them."

Stop attempting to blow out meaningless opinions like "The NSA is on our side" in response to articles showing the opposite.

[1] http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Endgame_Systems
It seems from the video/screenshot [1] that they are just adding VPN settings (still cool).

[1] https://mediacru.sh/QGOXHRWC9fpZ
Casetext (YC S13): New Angle on Legal Research With Wikipedia-Style Annotations
You should go to schoool. It may sound dumb, but it's a hiring filter at lots of established companies and you'll be defending not having a degree for the rest of your career if you don't.

It doesn't take that much effort to skate through on B-C's, and you can keep doing professional dev on the side.
> You'd also want your MTA to reject mail not sent over TLS. No matter what you do though if the remote server is compromised -- technically or legally -- your future emails are subject to capture.

agree & agree. Overall, the email protocol is fucked either way. :) As of now, I'm looking into, e.g. Pond [1]. Of course convincing people to just go ahead and move to something else is kind of quixotic / sisyphean; though it might be possible for a small circle of acquaintances where encryption is actually critical.

[1]: https://pond.imperialviolet.org/
Why couldn't facebook adopt this dynamism? I expect they do some of this already, in putting more items in our feed from people we're engaged with. Why not incorporate geographic proximity too? It's feasible (if scary) to bump posts of people we've called. The data is on the phone, no?

I don't see why a new service has to be created for this, when Facebook already has a tweakable algorithm.
Facebook already does this by showing you only a part of your friend's information on the newsfeed, based in part at least on interaction type and regularity. Google does this via circles. I believe twitter is not curated in that fashion but twitter has a slightly different model due to it's type of asymmetry.
I really appreciate your reasonable argument, but if the past few weeks have been any indication, there isn't any room for that here. HN has gone from interesting tech discussions to extremist, us-vs-them political rhetoric, and anyone who takes a different stance is jumped on and downvoted — as you can tell from your post having more replies than the entire rest of the thread.

Of course, you won't see the story about a federal judge ruling NYPD's stop-and-frisk was illegal[0], despite it being a much graver offense to individual rights, because it doesn't affect rich, white techies. But an email service you never used shut down and cited "NSA did it!" as its reason? Put that shit all over the front page!

[0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/nyregion/stop-and-frisk-pr...
"All you do is automate X"? But automating means you can do things at a much larger scale. Before if you'd want to track cars on a given road, you'd need to pay a few people to write down plates. Now you can keep track of every car in every street 24/7 almost without fail.

Automating is a big deal, it's not something that makes no difference.
Pretty sure he meant CoffeeScript. It doesn't remove mutability, but it does do away with default-global variables.
No, what worries me is that a person who learns to moderate their desires, to focus their energies, seems to be more successful in the long run, more able to handle life. A person who simply relies on a constantly increasing income tends to be more wasteful, more prone to shocks.

I am guessing the same applies to societies and to species.

Maybe I am wrong and at scale different rules apply. Maybe I am being prudish.

I am certainly not arguing that its ok for the luxury of some of the world to be bought at the expense of the rest.
What do I do if I can't make anything cool? I mean, I can write code, but it seems like I'm incapable of an original thought.
Yes but that's not the problem being reported.
An alternative to the "casual" gaming field is the "serious" gaming field, specifically simulations and training. The pay is usually comparable to what you would get elsewhere. You didn't say how much experience you have, but they would be more likely to hire you in a non-junior role as well.
"I, for one, welcome our new soybean overlords."?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean#Nitrogen-fixing_ability
Ok, I'll throw out an "iPhone is better" counterpoint and not to say that you are wrong, but perhaps to say that "is better" at this point is subjective between the two excellent platforms.

My wife and I just had twins and my father in law couldn't make it to see them for a couple days, but we both have iPhones so we just used FaceTime and he got to see his grandchildren the day they were born.

My father in law is a pastor and isn't the most technically literate person in the world, but since FaceTime is easy to use and there is no app to install, it was a seamless experience.

In that moment, iPhone was better.
Single quotes have another use. Which is to mark off quotations inside of quotations.

Technically speaking you use single quotes there, but not apostrophes. However I mention it because the quotation mark that you used is a single quote.
Facebook does make this dynamic and based on engagement. If you look at photos of someone or send them a message their relative frequency in you feed goes up...
I think you'll quickly find another benefit of journalling: It forces you to justify your decisions. Even if you only write for yourself, many ideas "sound smart" in your head, but don't seem all that bright when they've been put in writing and you re-read them.

You also get invaluable documentation of justifications for what you do.

And the effect multiplies when you decide to publish it.

I keep sporadically working on a series about writing a compiler in Ruby, which morphed into writing a Ruby compiler in Ruby, and it's a slow going slog (I just ended a two year "break"), and writing about it quickly started changing my approach. It's like when your maths teacher insist you show your working rather than just giving the results - you can't skip steps just because you know (or think you know) how to go straight from A to B any more. Of course when writing a journal, nobody is forcing you to not take shortcuts, but I find I am more likely to be disciplined about verifying assumptions an testing changes anyway.
Strange. I recently switched to Android after 4-5 years on iOS. I miss iOS' "logicalness" and singularity - there was one place for a setting and it was logically placed. In Android, there seems to be sometimes as many as five places to change the same setting, and often you have cascading settings that are overridden by just one app while it is running.

It's quite frustrating, just to pick one, to figure out where to go when you want to change your wallpaper. Settings -> Display -> Wallpaper. Weird - maybe it's just me but "Display" is not associated with "Wallpaper" in my head. "Display" means things like screen resolution, which device I want the display beamed to, etc. Android is riddled with "not quite wrong but takes a second to remember" things like this.

I told my wife yesterday, "I didn't think it was possible that someone, in 2013, would develop a phone that was worse at event notifications than the iPhone but they've done it with Android!"

For reference, I've only been on Android for about six weeks at this point. I did two weeks with the HTC One, returned that (camera was not to my liking), and went w/ the S4. I like the display size on the S4. I imagine that, if nothing else changes, in two years I will switch back to an iPhone provided that the screen size is the same or bigger.

To me, iOS is better. I miss it.
Heaven And Hell In Startups
I faced a similar situation not long ago and wrote about it. I hope you can get something out of it :

http://idiallo.com/blog/2013/04/do-you-really-need-a-college...
It's 2013. Do we still need these kinds of posts? Pick the phone/platform that suits you better. Apple, Samsung and Google are already spending hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising. You don't need to help them.
Couldn't agree more. Low quality is not the problem. App stores and their "discoverability" is the real problem.
I don't even think of Twitter as a social network anymore (probably never did actually). To me it's a hodgepodge of really nichey news, occasional customer service interactions, random personal asides that I don't care about but are mostly harmless, with the occasional personal interaction sprinkled through out.
I've been very successful as a programmer without having gone to college. However, the first few jobs were tough to get. Going to college will make your first jobs easier.
> I think powerful commercial interests colluding to purposefully break the rule of law is a huge negative.

It happens all the time, though, if you look at the financial, banking, insurance and oil industry - even without the slightest (moral) excuse. And nobody goes to jail, just some ridiculous fines to pay.

This time, there is a very serious moral imperative.
Quick story that I promise is actually relevant.

When I was watching Kevin Systrom speak about Instagram at the Castro Theater with Kevin Rose back in May, I distinctly remember one particular question. KR was reading a question from the audience to the two cofounders of Insta:

Kevin Rose (Reading a question from the audience): "Hollerback is being called the New Instagram, have either of you used Hollerback?"

KR looks around and says, "Hey guys, maybe I'm getting too old for this, but I've never heard of this. Have either of you heard of Hollerback?"

Kevin Systrom pipes up, totally confused, "No, I honestly can't say that I have."

KR turns to the audience and says "Does anyone use Hollerback?" Complete silence from the audience, crickets even; not one hand goes up.

KR looks out on the audience and says "Is that the CEO of Hollerback up there asking this question?"

"Yes..." A timid voice is heard to say from the audience.

And that my friends is modern guerrilla marketing and how I've heard of Hollerback when they haven't launched yet. Frankly, I thought it was deplorable at the time but in retrospect it did leave an impact on me (whether it was positive or absurdly negative though, I can't tell). I do find it interesting that reading this article made me recall that anecdote so clearly. Branding in action I suppose...
Where will Nokia go? To Android, owned by Google who also owns Motorola?

If MS did buy Nokia, they would make a guarantee to Nokia, just as Google did.
But who is offering to teach me something I don’t know.

If I had to guess, I would also say that Blank does something like what I learned to do: look for people who are already proactively engaged in something. I wrote a similar essay called "How to get your professors' attention, along with coaching and mentoring" (http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-pro...) that described how I began to filter requests by looking at whether the people making the request had some skin in the game, or have done something to show investment and the ability to be helped.

Most people appear to learn how to do this through trial and error, but it's also useful to codify them.
Aside from the details that show the NSA having employees in companies install monitoring hardware worldwide? Or those that assist in providing data in return for some themselves?

None of that counts to you because "there's just no reason to believe such a thing." You are essentially saying you don't believe anything you may have read in the past few years counts as control.

What IS control then, other than the ability to control others, which the US/NSA has attempting to keep on top of since the shift in data traffic trends in the 1990s.
Amazon and Blackberry are the ideal fit. Amazon needs to gain independence from Android, they have the marketplace and the muscle to take advantage of all things Blackberry has in it's favour.

Remember they have already been in discussions in the past: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2077067/Amazo...

Neither MSFT nor Samsung really make sense as purchasers IMHO.
What on earth are you talking about? The whole purpose of the NSA monitoring program is to provide actionable leads to enable intervention by law enforcement. You can think this is 'bad', you can think this is 'good', you can think it is highly effective, you can think it is ineffective...

but arguing that the NSA program has never lead to anyone being 'snatched up off the streets', is WILDLY disconnected from reality. The whole purpose of the program is to snatch terrorists up off the streets, the whole purpose of it being classified is to enable it to function without explicitly giving terrorists a good understanding of our ways and means...

how on earth is assuming a program is used for at least what the government claims it is used for a conspiratorial fantasy?
There is also no reason to believe it's not true, no?
All of the early early reviews are confirming our suspicions. For example this one from the verge: "Lag is a major concern — apps took multiple seconds to load, to change toggles, and to make UI transitions"[1]
Or this one from CNET: "unresponsive screen makes typing a laborious process requiring painstaking precision. Every action from swiping to tapping onscreen controls takes a beat until you see results, so using the phone for a prolonged period steals minutes of your time... Lag carries into the camera, which is slow to launch, snap, and reset."[2]

This is why I'm looking forward to the Edge w/ its Ubuntu OS. It doesn't try to hide its Android heritage, even gives you the option to boot to AOSP. Also has a modern gesture based UI unlike Firefox's dated iOS rip off. And most importantly, on resource limited mobile device gives developers the option to write native apps.

[1]http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/24/4024530/ztes-open-is-the-f....

[2]http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/geeksphone-keon/4505-645....
College serves three or four purposes:

1. Teaches you how to get things done in a structured environment
2. Teaches you how to think more abstractly
3. Teaches you social expectations of a professiona/intellectual environment
4. Gives you an 'achievement' with a brand that allows you to say "I did this."

Some college is good. I think you can achieve most of the above without finishing college. You can achieve all of the above without going to college.
As a Blackberry Z10 owner (who has also owned several generations of iPhones and Nokia's Lumia 920) I think BlackBerry needs to stick it out. The Z10 has a great OS. The touchscreen gestures are ingenious. The Hub (where the email and notifications are) is a fresh innovation.

The device in general is well thought out.

Also important to note that the Z10 has privacy and encryption features no other phone I know of has.

Blackberry has something good, and while Google and Microsoft continue to hemorrhage users because of trust violations, BlackBerry can win back market share. It can happen!
I think its fine and a good project. I was once using Lisp on my Apple IIc.

Generally a Lisp Machine is also really a piece of hardware designed to run Lisp. The CPU of a Symbolics for example is a (mostly) stack machine which knows all kinds of Lisp data types and Lisp function calling conventions. The memory then also contains Lisp data (with tags for data types and GC which are used by the CPU directly). Additionally the Lisp that runs on top of it is providing OS services: device control, I/O, keyboard, disks, tapes, expansion cards, graphics, sound, network, scheduling, ...

Getting a Lisp on an Apple II to the level of the built-in Apple Basic with access to keyboard, graphics, etc. should be fun. I'm looking forward to read more of your adventures!
I love this game. It starts out simple, but as your country's relations with other countries change, the rules for letting people in and the amount of security in place changes.
Good advice, but

"This past month I set a goal to write 20,000 words"

Setting writing goals in terms of number of words looks terribly wrong to me.
A lot of designers have this issue. The hardest person to develop/design for is yourself since you're your worst critic.

Ask yourself "What if?" Take something you're interested in and modify it slightly versus trying to think of a whole new original concept. What if I made a to do list specifically for teachers? What if I created a workout app only for developers? etc.

This could help spark your imagination into something more grandiose.
True.

The "Us-vs-Them" rhetoric directly feeds our pack-animal drive for tribalism, from which nothing good ever emerged.

However, it does make for some amusing rabble-rousing.

Now that the rabble has been roused, so to speak, we need to move the debate onto a more mature phase:

1. We need to work out how to live our lives in a state of total surveillance - when our lives are transparent not only to the NSA but also to innumerable other state & non-state security services.

2. We need to work out how to maintain the balance of power between the individual and the state.

3. We need to work out how to maintain business & personal relationships in an era of total transparency.

4. We need to work out how to maintain our freedom and independence of thought when the objects of our attention, our knowledge and our feelings can be observed and (potentially) controlled in detail.
It's hardly wild speculation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Use of NSA info in the manner described above is scope creep because they aren't terrorists, or foreign.
Plaid is the New Flat
There are many lines that one could draw to divide this whole mess into two sides. Who's the 'us' and who's the 'them'?

I can think of quite a few lines to divide up the power-centers and sociological groups, and the intelligence community/military-industrial complex is almost always on the wrong side.

How about Congress vs. the Executive? The people in congress, our elected representatives, have been asking serious questions about these programs behind closed doors, and they have been lied to. They have been lied to by the representatives of the intelligence community (IC) in open court. Representatives of the IC continue to lie and dissemble on national TV, getting softball questions from sycophantic 'journalists'.

How about the IC vs. the Internet community as represented by open standards bodies and the rest of the international internet? The IC has been involved in numerous plots to undermine the basic security of the Internet both by engineering military-class viruses and trojans (Stuxnet), and inserting their hardwired and software backdoors in critical infrastructure - all unilateral decisions done w/o consultation of any of the open governing bodies of the Internet.

I could go on. These are critically important actions and concepts being debated here. The IC has given absolutely no indication that they are willing to compromise or work with the rest of the world, and almost every positive step towards openness has required civil disobedience.

How is this not an 'us vs. them' battle on almost every front one could draw?
The Cost Of Creating A New Drug Now $5 Billion, Pushing Big Pharma To Change
Great review! I've been playing with the new Nexus 7 for last two weeks and it's the best tablet I've used so far. Android is killing it.

Looking forward to Moto X becoming available at Play store.