skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't matter how much traffic you get if none of those clicks are from people who are ready to buy your product.

The Kindle format is a killer for me: I see it and I want to click away and never come back. Let me guess a few reasons why.

The price is obviously a signal of low quality.

Kindles are a pain to work with when I'm sitting at a computer (which nearly 100% of Wordpress-plugin authors will be doing). I have to click the link. I have to dig out my book reader. I have to avoid getting distracted by various novels. Just sell me a PDF like everyone else does. Check out Gumroad or getdpd.com. (I've never used these, but folks in the 30x500 group speak highly of them.)

(Yes, I know there are people who read Kindle books on their PCs, using the web client or the PC client or whatever. Do you want to limit your market to these people? All of us have PDF readers on every device, and use them.)

Amazon is the wrong neighborhood for you. It's full of professionally-edited and marketed books with real covers that make yours look silly and yet sell for a dirt-cheap $9.99 (they make it up in volume), which anchors your price to a low value. And Amazon is also stuffed with absolutely lousy vanity-published dreck, which makes me leery of buying anything on there that doesn't look like a professionally-marketed book.

On Amazon people literally judge books by their covers, just like we do in a physical bookstore, because the cover is generally the most prominent, best-designed thing on the Amazon sales page. You could pay for a professionally-designed cover, but that is the wrong move: You do not want to compete in that market. Just go sell in a venue where nobody cares about the cover because they're too focused on the goal. A venue like: Your website about Wordpress plugins.

There is no magic trick to selling a book on Wordpress plugins. You set up a website. I presumably don't need to tell you what tool you could use for that. On the website, you put up many short articles about building Wordpress plugins. On every page you put a tiny form that says something like "Do you need to build a Wordpress plugin? Get a free sample chapter of my book 'Creating Wordpress Plugins': [form field labeled "email address"] [button labeled 'Get Sample Chapter']".

How much of your book should you give away for free, a few paragraphs at a time? Well, Michael Hartl gives away 100% of his book for free at http://ruby.railstutorial.org and still does okay. I'm not sure that's the optimal strategy for you, because that depends on your goals, the size of your audience, how ready the audience is to buy, whose money the audience is spending, the amount and kind of value that you provide, and so on. But it's good to understand that your content isn't some kind of precious jewel that you need to hoard.
It's far from just colloquial. Infrared and thermal motion at the same temperature contain the same amount of exergy, meaning that the thermodynamic limits on how much work they can do are the same.
Very good point. It's not the language, it's how you market what you're doing with it.

What would be interesting in this survey is slicing it by industry and years of experience. Do Python programmers in Financial Services make more or less than C++ if they both have 3 years of experience? Which languages show tapering of salary after a certain amount of experience?
Why is Uruguay's cost of living so high? Just curious! I always hear how far money goes in South America in general, so what is unique about Uruguay in that sense?
تحميل برنامج نمبر بوك
Spying on military communications during active wartime is part of the game of war and is acceptable. Spying on the general public en masse is not.
New details show broader NSA surveillance reach, covers 75% of nation's internet
Show HN: Disrupt Schools
Looking at your posting history you appear to be a professional forum arguer/troll and would be in full agreement if you hadn't started off with the opposite stance, so I'll end it there.

By the way, very few of your comments have data backing them up, and often are just simple 'models' with some variables you wrote down mixed in with rudeness to other commenters.
Which sysadmin has access to grant other sysadmins access? What do you do about them?
On front-end JavaScript frameworks
Recently I was studying Programming Languages Theory with Racket (using this book - http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2012/book/) and I didn't like DrRacket. So I decided to use Racket with Vim, but the only way could do it was through GNU Screen and Slime plugin for Vim. It works, but it takes several seconds for expressions to travel from Vim to GNU Screen and it is quite inconvenient. Furthermore, I don't have invocation history in the REPL, so if I mistype function name, I'd have to type it all over again. Does anyone know of a better option for Racket with Vim? How do you use interpreted languages with Vim?
I think Obama would open a meth lab before he did that.

And if he did it would only be self-serving.
Growing up as a conservative, hyper-patriotic American it pains me to say that I hate my country. A young man exposes wrongdoing by the military and gets sentenced to 35 years in prison while the administration that started an illegal war with Iraq, costing untold American and Iraqi lives, are free.
Deliver software simply and securly using Git and SSH
About ms, it's about time people realize they always subsided dev costs of new windows... Xp was paid by Me, 7 was paid by Vista. And if you take that in mind, 8 was the most successful "money flop version" so far, so maybe they will have something significant later on...
Thoughts on day one of Al Jazeera America
No one involved in meting out that punishment has an iota of motivation to do anything but reward him. It's a deterrent they have control over.
A few people are making a similar mistake. They are saying that RIPA forces you to hand over the keys to allow people to decrypt your content.

That's only partially accurate. RIPA also allows 'them' to demand that you make the plain text content available.

Not having the keys doesn't help you if you have had the keys, or 'they' think that you can get the keys. Thus, the wikileaks files are safe for me because there's no reasonable expectation that I can get access to the plaintext content. But if I have a bunch of encrypted files on my computer and encryption software and etc they are going to claim that I have access to the plain text data.

(http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/contents)

Note that while the law talks about keys it also talks about "intelligible content" - (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/contents)

> that it is not reasonably practicable for the person with the appropriate permission to obtain possession of the protected information in an intelligible form without the giving of a notice under this section,

See also (http://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investiga...)
You can navigate Emacs with the arrow keys, too. (But C-v and M-v are much more pleasant to use.)
Can you believe the balls on them?
which one is more likely? loosing a phone or a laptop?
Source? There seems to be more at the bottom.
The Post-Futurist Manifesto
I think you have to provide exceptions for exceptional circumstances. Uncovering serious war crimes from by a nation that purports to holds itself and others to a higher standard should qualify as exceptional and be treated as such.

If those in power don't want to justify leaks and whistleblowers they should think harder about justifying and covering up murder and other crimes.
They will never let him out in 10, imagine the crimes they will have to cover up by then and they will need examples to threaten the rest of the military with.

They will make a show of his parole trial and be sure to send him back in for the next 20.
Ask HN: Alternative to being a Java developer?
I have been working for almost 9 years primarily in Java/J2EE development in Singapore with WebLogic as the application server and Oracle as the database. Since I am based in Singapore, there's not much of development needed and mostly it's all about maintenance of the existing systems. After 9 years of working, I have become disillusioned with the salary. The maximum salary an experienced Java developer can get is around 78000 SGD / year (unless you're working with financial trading systems). Over the years, Singapore government is practising policies of importing cheap developers from neighboring countries which practically makes programming in Singapore as commodity. Average salary has gone down these past few years for Java development work. Therefore, it's very hard to justify to ask for a raise unless you go into management which is also pretty difficult since there's almost no movement in career in big companies. I am considering to either move into being a business analyst or presales since I believe these positions are harder to be commoditized once you're mastering a certain domain knowledge. What do you think?
Any US president. Not just Obama.
You only think this because you haven't had your system tested in a real way. Hire a really good security firm and I assure you they will easily circumvent your auditing with no more access than your most trusted sysadmin.
Rocket Ships
I took "our top people" to mean "our best people, who understand the severity of what they're doing and try hard to keep it from leaking, so don't just save the info in a PPT".

Which begs the question: what additional programs do the best of the best at the NSA know about?
Gameloft and Amiga Games to release 56 titles on Windows 8
Dang! I was about to release something for AngularJS as per my comment yesterday on NProgress.. You beat me to it! Great job!
I would have been tempted to pay for this, if it was going through.

But with it clearly not going to go through, I wasn't going to put several hundred dollars in, just to get it back again two weeks later.

I wonder how many others thought the same way.
Bradley Manning sentenced to 35 years for WikiLeaks disclosures | PickToRead
That makes root sound like a gaping security hole. Almost all Windows installations disable the Administrator account and hand out permissions only where necessary.
And what penalty did his superiors receive? Nothing. Privates should never have access to secret information without supervision. If he did someone else should be responsible and take the penalty.
"E.g. assume you have to retreat from your home in Massachusetts, no matter the current law, case law or circumstances."

Why?
No, this is the Armed Forces code of conduct. He broke the laws of his organization, was before a court of that same org. This is internal. Once you wear a uniform, other rules apply. secrecy has a different impact, loyalty as well.

Civilians might not like it or even understand, but Manning hopefully did when he chose to join the Armed Forces.

Snowden is different, just a contractor. But Manning joined the club, broke its rules. Knowingly. Hence a court martial. Not so long ago he would have been executed for it, 35 is a soft ruling.
All the extra stuff that makes vim more than just a vi clone. Everything from built in stuff like the auto-completion to plugins like syntastic. Everything technically works, but never nicely and I always end up frustrated with the warts and just go back to plain vi. I should give emacs a shot, I've heard evil is supposed to be a better vi than vim.
The worst thing for me is editing an Excel sheet. Every time I have finished typing something in a cell, I hit ESC, which results in clearing what I have just written...
Yes, but unfortunately that would be a quick, effective solution. In no way does it entail startups being accelerated into making mobile apps that disrupt some trivial aspect of daily life.

As "Ricardo Montalban" used to say on SNL, it is better to look good than to feel good. Likewise it is better to reinvent the wheel than to fix it.
I'm sure anti virus makers will be happy about the lowering of sales in the NZ marketplace....and the increase in virus proliferation soon afterwards. Could the government get sued for that? :D
Thank you for looking that up! I had never read the source code. You inspired me to go read this Jargon File entry, which is amusingly quaint: http://catb.org/jargon/html/N/NSA-line-eater.html
>Would you care to link to where people can purchase these existing products?
Story's already been broken up top:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6250431
Show HN: WriteDown - a Markdown text editor for iPhone with sync support
Hackathons don't win you customers
ACLU's response: https://www.aclu.org/free-speech/aclu-comment-bradley-mannin...

> "When a soldier who shared information with the press and public is punished far more harshly than others who tortured prisoners and killed civilians, something is seriously wrong with our justice system."

Daunting.
If Snowden could take gobs of stuff without audit, so could everyone.
> I'm not personally a big Manning fan

Can you elaborate why? I am interested in hearing your point of view because maybe I just have one side of the story.
Some sites we're working with have over 60% of their audience blocking ads! Tends to be the gaming sites in particular.
Gives a good reason to remove term limits; keeps folks from proposing silly things like this, knowing that they won't be held accountable by the electorate as they can't run after their term is up.

Of course that takes an informed electorate, which...well that's another topic entirely.
Zeroing in on unbreakable computer security
takes ages to load and I cannot wipe to scroll, instead I have to "click" on a scrollbar. opera mobile.
No, with DANE nothing rests on CA's. With DANE domain owners store their keys in the DNS, and the DNS records are signed with DNSSEC
But ultimately, you really don't want to set a precedent of "well, if you leak something and you really believe in your heart that it was morally justified, then we won't send you to jail."

The precedent would be, "Go ahead and break the law, if you think your cause is worth serving the time. Then when it is all over and done, we will judge if your cause was worth breaking the law. If your cause was worthy, then we won't send you to jail."

It isn't about what he felt deep down inside, it is about what the result of his actions were. I'd hold guys like Dick Cheney to the same standard - he broke the law because he genuinely believed that terrorists were an existential threat to the US. But what he believed is irrelevant, the question is were terrorists really an existential threat? If not, he needs to do the time. But if he was correct, then walk free with our thanks for making the right call.
No. This is a matter of justice, no matter whose uniform you wear or what club you join.
Motive isn't taken into account, intent is taken into account, which is a narrower concept. "Intent" goes to whether you did something by accident or on purpose (or something in-between). "Motive" goes to the "why."

So killing a person with your car may be no crime at all if you were driving carefully and he jumped out of nowhere, if you do run over someone on purpose than it doesn't matter why you did so. Maybe he's a doctor who performs abortions and you believe that you're saving babies from being murdered by killing him.[1] That doesn't make it any lesser degree of murder.

[1] I purposefully use that controversial example to make the point that not everyone agrees on the purity of Manning's conduct, just as not everyone agrees on whether abortion is murder or not. Many people believe that indiscriminately leaking hundreds of thousands of documents goes far beyond "whistle-blowing" into conduct intended to maliciously embarrass the United States in diplomatic relations.
Amazon RDS with MySQL 5.6, Configuration Variables
Anyway, I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion here, so I shall now let the sea of downvotes wash over me.

I actually think this is the popular opinion. Most people don't believe the government shouldn't be able to keep certain things secret or that any agent with classified knowledge has carte blanche to share whatever they deem fit.
If it's your system, then only you have access to grant access to others. If you hire a sysadmin to build you a system, you make sure you trust that person, and make sure that person is the only one with access to grant access. If that person lies to you and starts handing out that access, you replace her/him. And if you can't find anyone trustworthy, then you're forced to do this job for yourself.
Clean OAuth for Rails: An Object-Oriented Approach
China Will Stop Harvesting Organs From Prisoners in November
I hate any mobile implementation on tablets, my iPad 4 has a high resolution, almost 10" display and can easily handle a full screen implementation yet some websites force mobile upon it.
I should've been more explicit: it's not the one-third per-se that's brutal, it's just that when I read "35 years in prison" it seemed like a hell of a long time to me. I don't know how the american judiciary system works, so I was was wondering if he would be able to reduce his sentence significantly for good conduct or something. But a third of 35 years is still very long...

He's going to spend at least 12 years in prison. I don't know if whether he deserves it or not, but it is brutal.
Jeff Bezos’s Hiring Anti-Pitch
Bradley Manning Sentenced To 35 Years In Prison
If Adblock had a "text ads are fine" setting then I'd happily turn it on (I do leave the default setting to allow some ads on).

I don't mind supporting sites - but I cannot deal with flashing, moving, or overlaying ads. They drive me crazy.
before you waste time with some "software that does exist, just like there never was a matrix sequel", I use opera mobile classic or what's it called.
Classic MSM: refer to an offsite item, in this case here, without linking to it (just the site):

Show HN: CoreOS, a Linux distro for containers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6128700

Also this, which has some general discussion:

CoreOS Vagrant Images: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6149638
I don't know why all the negative comments here. Just because this solution doesn't fit any of your use cases, it doesn't mean it's a bad solution.

There was once I worked on a web app, which was supposed to be viewed on viewports as small as a laptop to viewports as big as a four 57" TVs strung together. Back then, I had to come up with something similar to this to make the content of the TVs visible from a distance. This library would have come really handy back then.
> but at the same time, the whole concept of classified information breaks down pretty quickly if you start saying it's okay for people to exercise their own judgement and break the rules.

Lawyers, priests, doctors, and psychologies who is all under strict confidentiality sometimes has to break that rule of secrecy when particular crimes is heard or observed. It doesn't matter how classified the conversation is, or the medical records. If they show child abuse, they must break the confidentiality and call the police.

The system has not broken down yet, even if those people has to make their own judgement calls when to break confidentiality. It is enough that they just suspect that a child might be in danger.

Shouldn't army personal who not only suspect, but can prove illegal activities be under the same scrutiny?
1.5 million people is less than .5% of the population.
The questions are exactly the same. All they do is point out that if all your information is routed through an intermediary, you'll never be able to prove that the intermediary is telling you the truth.

Whether you describe that in terms of a meat brain being suspended in nutritive solution and hooked up to cables, or in terms of an electronic circuit receiving input from other electronic circuits, has no bearing on that.
Well, that's kind of the point that the Mannings and Snowdens are trying to make, that the "paths to responsible disclosure" are at best ignored, at worst mined for reprisals as well.
If they are going to torture you just in case there is a hidden volume, they might as well torture you just for fun.
This could better be said as beware of Content Providers in control of the Pipes.
I'm fairly sure if you killed "a few babies in cold blood" you would not be out within 10 years.
Why startup programmes are like Coca-Cola
from what I read, I think there is still some level of appeals? The case could drag on for a long time...
Wait what? This is a full move into ad hominem. Just because you don't like my request for more information and a better explanation, or don't like my past involvement with trolls, doesn't mean my point is invalid.

I am merely requesting more information on your claims.
Red Hat doesn't sell physical security. Let me know when ADT wants to bet money on it.
I was born in '91, and grew up under the Internet, and from a very young age (3?) I realized everything that was leaving my home on a network connection was easily recorded and monitored. I never assumed otherwise. Anything I don't want my Internet provider, government, or hostile snooper to know I just don't put online.

I don't think I ever expected any less, since I was raised knowing the horrors and atrocities of the last hundred years between ww2 and the treatment of the Japanese and the cold war and the treatment of pretty much everyone.
I mean, isn't this almost surreal? Like a cheap sci-fi novel has become reality?

Not surreal but I ask the HN community: will this ignite a hacker revolution against the government(s)? At one point the different governments are in a weaker situation since there are a huge amount of cybersecurity attack vectors against them.
>>>and a bunch of diplomatic fiddle-faddle.

Oh really?

http://www.wavy.com/news/military/evidence-of-damage-from-ma...

"The 250,000 diplomatic cables that Pfc. Bradley Manning disclosed through WikiLeaks endangered the lives of foreign citizens and made some international human-rights workers reluctant to seek U.S. help, a State Department official testified Friday."

"Kozak said some of the cables that Manning downloaded from a classified government computer network identified people as sources of information that would put them at risk of death, violence or incarceration if their involvement were publicly known"

"Kozak said the greatest damage to State Department human-rights efforts was a "chilling effect" on foreign activists seeking U.S. help."

"They can't be sure now whether what they say to us is going to remain confidential or whether it's going to be broadcast around," Kozak said."

He basically outed a bunch of foreign activists that were helping us and put them in danger. Not exactly what I would refer to as "fiddle-faddle"
I'm pretty sure Microsoft did.
And a revolution fighting against modern weaponry is practically guaranteed to fail. With the government constantly trying to restrict the citizens' access to weaponry there's no way to even make parody (pun intended) to hold the government accountable. Add to that the fact we've a standing military, something the Constitution never authorized, that's professionally trained. We've had problematic generals before but none of them tried to seize control of the country, yet.

If a revolution breaks out we aren't talking about a conflict the size of Syria's or Egypt's. We're probably talking about the biggest civil war ever, or a military coup. And the outcome of it (no matter if it worked or failed) would effectively gut the USA.

Tyranny is almost assured. We're on the bubble right now if the outcome hasn't already been decided (and we won't know except in hind-sight).
I don't think Nate Silver is an actuary, he's a statistician - completely different jobs.

When I went to university (late 90's), the web was still one big geo-cities, there was no such thing as smartphones. I lived in Australia, and unless you were extremely talented you would probably end up working a fairly low paid job doing fairly boring work. The world seems to be a far more exciting and potentially lucrative place for software engineers now.
double-tap to zoom and all is good.