skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree. From what I can tell, there are a lot of people with strong opinions based on a balanced view acknowledging both the risks and benefits. And their opinion is in general favor of mass immunization.

You have only to go to the CDC, or the WHO, and read their reports. Every single Vaccine Information Statement from the CDC says "A vaccine, like any medicine, is capable of causing serious problems, such as severe allergic reactions." They also list the risks, and describe if there are groups of people who specifically should or should not be immunized.

Where then is this large camp of people with strong view for vaccination but who do not acknowledge that there are risks? Because to me it sounds like it's a hypothetical construct based on the assumption that there must be people who are equal but opposite to the anti-vaxxers, when as far as I can tell, such a pro-vaccination group is at best small and with little influence.

Can you point me to their web sites or other literature?
The costs involved with libel cases are nothing short of eye-watering [1]. Strict libel laws are pointless if you can't afford to bring a case. (Though, there are "no-win, no-fee" agreements available)

[1] http://pcmlp.socleg.ox.ac.uk/research/project/comparative-st...
4: I've found nothing substitutes for a good teacher. Maybe try Coursera or something of the like?

On 6: You may want to write an interpreter as a first step. Google "bootstrap scheme" for a guy who implemented a scheme-like language in 22 steps. It's pretty cool, I'm following it right now.

If you're looking Look into LLVM. It's a great backend and is practical knowledge if you like what you're doing.

Adding onto languages, if you want the esoteric stuff, look at Factor, or Smalltalk (for more image based programming). Different paradigms are cool.
Well, 2 things:

1) At this point polio survivors really are pretty rare

2) Since polio is now a kind of historical gremlin ,you don't learn to fear it. Even if you meet people scarred by it, you have practically zero risk of contracting it.
+1 for Algorithms & Data Structures

In my experience with non-CS developers, this is one of their biggest shortcomings when trying to solve non-trivial programming issues in the real world.

However, if you have a design background and a knack for UI, then don't sell yourself short. There are lots of programmers and plenty of great artists, but talented people with both skill sets are seriously hard to find. Take a look at this article for an idea of what most developers (myself included) come up with for UI: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/11/this-is-what-happen...

If you have the ability to prevent atrocious designs like the one in that article then you are solving important and challenging problems. There's a reason user experience (UX)design is such a buzzword right now.
If you find yourself returning very large numbers of rows to the client, you might be doing something wrong - SQL databases are at their most efficient when you select only the columns and rows you need.

If you perform aggregation/calculations in the DB, you can potentially save on-the-wire data transfer time (and potentially CPU time on your clients.. though obviously that is shifting the CPU work to the database).

Similarly if you find yourself making multiple trips to the database, and then using loops to combine different data sets, you're probably too far on the 'client-side' and should look at using some joins and combination logic on the DB side to get what you need in a single (and likely more efficient) round-trip.
I'm actually facing a decision right now in building a new app that has relatively heavy needs for data storage and number crunching. Each paying customer would have a relatively large amount of data per person compared to your average CRUD app.

I'd like to use DigitalOcean or Linode VPS machines for processing and as web servers, but then I need a large object store like S3. Rackspace and AWS have both object storage and VPS, but their VPS machines are underpowered for the price.

So ideally I would use Rackspace-Files or Amazon-S3 for storage, and DigitalOcean for number crunching, but I'd get killed on transfer rates from S3 to DigitalOcean (for example). Amazon and Rackspace have a trump card with free data transfer within their data centers. You have to use their slow machines to realistically use their object stores in this type of a use case.

So that's the 'S3' problem I need solved, which still isn't quite what S3ForMe is going after. Extremely cheap data transfers to/from major VPS providers.
Case in point..I am viewing this forum using hackbot android app. I prefer this emensly to the browser.
If this guy wants to be a politician, which he seems to do, then passing thru hostile gatekeepers is his job description.

Anyway, even if he would not it's not as easy either. Imagine someone cold-calling univercities telling he's a headteached (whatever this means) and persuading not accept the student N. He'll be seen as a lunatic, wouldn't he?
>Fuck off Google.

Not map-related but I find myself saying that every time google throws a pop-up at me on youtube. No, I don't want my gmail and youtube account name to be the same. No, I don't care what changes have been made to channels. I was pissed enough when I was forced to use the same password on Youtube (relatively insecure, I would log in on public computers etc) with my GMail (more secure and I was very selective where I'd access it from). Also, getting to my favorite-ed videos on YT is a royal pain now.

As for maps, I was trying to make a quick map for my job but I don't have access to ArcMaps so I was trying to use the free Google Earth. All I wanted was a nice looking terrain map without sat imagery but apparently they took that option out a few releases back in the free version.
I used to be a PIA customer and I liked the idea that they do not log anything. However, the lack of a good third-party audits that support their claims, is something that I found weird. Is there a way you can prove that you do not log anything beyond just blog posts?
Well I definitely don't go to those sites directly. It's usually via links from sites like Hacker News. Adblock blocks Taboola, but I don't use Adblock. I'm not asking you to solve a personal problem for me. I'm saying Taboola is shit. It offers very little value, and there are just enough of us around to click on things of little value to keep reducing the quality of crap on the internet. There's nothing to be done about than to bitch.
If you can show declines in internet usage, number of connections and number of installed web servers then I'd yes, the web is in decline. I also don't see how native vs. html5 on mobile has anything do with the argument. On another topic, I note that I'm consistently disappointed by articles on medium.com
Nothing To Lose (Very Inspiring)
There is nothing preventing you from sending a time zone offset (or an Olson timezone id like 'America/Los_Angeles') along with the Unix Time.
Considering the number of downvotes, i guess at least 3 americans got hurted by my comment. Sorry for this. All i know is that if a business is based in germany accountancy is a lot easier and i might be able to recover VAT and other stuff. US weird invoices cause problems on this side.

That said, if i get (as an example) a search warrant from a US court and i'm based in EU, i will simply ignore it. This is quite enough.
Harmful Software
20.000 protesting against NSA in Berlin
... Yes. As a self-taught programmer, I believe university is important. It gives quite a lot of advantages (mostly social ones, which are the most important). And undergrad universities select primarily based on school performance, so kicking him out definitely would've sabotaged his higher education.

To piggyback on this comment in hopes of finding some assistance: I've been trying to figure out some long-term strategy of how to get into a top-tier university. I have the ACT scores for it, but I dropped out of highschool to go work in software. The decade of dev experience is certainly nice, and I've studied core CS theory on my own (xv6 and paxos for example), but I'd really like to attend a top uni in order to do graphics research. I wonder if it's even possible for a 25 year old highschool dropout to achieve this? I was thinking I could do well for a couple years at some local university, then apply to transfer to Penn, Stanford, etc. I've heard transfer students are more likely to be accepted. But I wonder what else I could do to increase my chances.
You can't just have individualists roaming freely around doing whatever the heck they like. Where would it end?
Absolutely adore 6502. Started to learn it just a few weeks after being exposed to AppleSoft BASIC and realizing assembly was playing in the machine itself.

There was a holistic understanding of computing that came from the whole Apple II package: taking off the lid, looking at the chips, mapping that to the technical manual showing you the chips, their addresses, their wiring, their code, and being able to stick your hands in all of it. Even a kid could reason the whole machine's current state.

For a while in the late '90s and early '00s, I wondered if we'd lose that kind of education. Tablets worry me for this reason--all screen, no insides.

Thankfully "kids these days" (grownups too) have things like the Arduino so all hope of understanding computing from the inside out is not lost.
Security dangers of the NIST curves [pdf]
It emerged recently on r/ReverseEngineering that the 6502 has fewer transistors than the number of pages in Intel's x86 documentation. Link to the discussion: http://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/1lp61a/i...
Yes, it's one of our dreams too. Right now you can do:

# In a foo.cr file
fun init_foo = Init_foo : Void
puts "Init foo! :-)"
end

Compiling it:

bin/crystal foo.cr -o foo.bundle

Then in Ruby:

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> require "./foo"
Init foo! :-)
=> true

But more complex things don't work right now (because of the initial implementation of the GC, which needs to be turned off for this case).

So, yes, we are not that far from allow you to write Ruby extensions in Crystal.

We'd also like to write Objective-C code that way, and also Erlang extensions.
Is your entire argument for me to stop using 1Password because the NSA could (by your own assertion) put a backdoor in my app? Or do you have another, better reason? I could just not update 1Password, and then I'm never at risk for this supposed back door.
>Honestly, how many times does the link between vaccines and autism have to be disproven before people get it?

Honestly, there are many possible adverse reactions, and honestly, I want to see lots of good data. I know it may be costly, I don't care. I want to see the little bumps and dips in the plots of efficacy and safety for various vaccines. I want continuous quality control. I want it published publicly where the incidences of vaccine related injury were investigated, a cause found, and a problem corrected. I don't question the science or the public benefit of vaccination. I question whether the safety of vaccines as they are manufactured, transported, and stored is as advertised.

This is from the product insert for DTaP, note it cannot be considered conclusive, because the data collection methodology is crap. Would the manufacturer or FDA allow autism to be in the following list if either could conclusively exclude it? Honestly, I hope these guys have it right[1]. I think it would be fantastic if the solution were so simple.

"Adverse events reported during post-approval use of Tripedia vaccine include idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, SIDS,
anaphylactic reaction, cellulitis, autism, convulsion/grand mal convulsion, encephalopathy, hypotonia, neuropathy, somnolence
and apnea. Events were included in this list because of the seriousness or frequency of reporting. Because these events are
reported voluntarily from a population of uncertain size, it is not always possible to reliably estimate their frequencies or to
establish a causal relationship to components of Tripedia vaccine."

source: http://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines...

[1] http://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/30/iodine-deficien...
CNN releases classified video of Syrian gas victims shown by Obama to senators
One approach I've seen that works well for untangling gnarly SQL is to refactor those mega-queries into smaller, component queries that are pieced together by application code. This keeps the processing on the DB server but avoids the pain that comes with programming in SQL. I rather like SQL, but it doesn't handle complexity well at all (e.g. maintaining a "variable" to be used in different parts of the query).

For example, I once worked on a Foursquare clone originally written by a hardcore PostgreSQL nut. This system had a query that, if memory serves, returned a list of places of a certain type within a geographic area along with user activity on those places (votes, comments, etc). This was around a 75 line SQL query that actually wasn't that fast (response times from the DB were roughly 1 second even with every join indexed). We rewrote that query into 4 smaller queries (place ID's within that area, place ID's within that category, hydrating those places from the filtered ID's and then getting the user info), and that cut our DB response by about 70% in addition to making the system easier to work with. This required roughly 10 lines of Java code and a variable - a list of ID's that we got first and passed into each other query. It also freed us up to do other things - for instance, if performance were still a problem, queries 2-4 could have been done asynchronously behind a latch. By lifting the "glue" out of SQL and into a better language, it freed us to do new things, and it freed the database from having to juggle unnecessary complexity while planning and executing its queries.
Browse around http://www.how-to-hide-ip.info/ Might find something that fits your needs, as @rdl mentioned, there's no right answer.
And before that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4213806

But it's been a while.
Why not use Rackspace-Files and get dedicated servers from Rackspace? That would solve your transfer rate issue and likely get you far better performance than Linode or DigitalOcean.
One of Ruby's benefits is UTF-8 support for strings. C-strings make it seem it's absent. Or did I missunderatand?
I have an Acer Revo that has served me very well for many years, I recently put an SSD in it and gave it a new lease of life. Not sure how innovative this is.
> I happen to disagree that it is the only logically consistent position

When I say it's a logically consistent position, what I mean to imply by that is for people who think that government is an abomination, it is logically consistent for them to hope for the dismantling thereof. You, who most decidedly do not think that government is an abomination, as a lawyer, are logically consistent in thinking that it should not be dismantled.

> Much like a corporation is the legal stand-in for the will of the collective shareholders, a government is the societal stand-in for the will of the people at large.

Except that it most clearly is not.

> A society that tries to maintain no government, or very limited government, is at an unstable point. In the best case it will collapse from internal conflict but be left alone from there (e.g. Somalia, tribal areas of Afghanistan/Pakistan). In the normal case the society will simply be eventually overrun by those who choose to organize (e.g. USA vs. the Native Americans, Hitler vs. the appeasers), but a government will spring up again one way or another.

That's a normalcy bias, there have been many points throughout history with no centralised productivity extracting parasitic force initiating agency. In fact, the variant we have now with extremely high direct taxation on the incomes of almost all productive activity within a society is the historical anathema. Not only that, but this fails to take into account the methods of control the state actually uses to exercise control on its population, and that currency control was recently removed from their hands.

Agorism becomes a very real threat under these circumstances

As a nash equilibrium, an involuntary centralised productivity extracting parasitic force initiating agency is not at all stable. It stands to reason that it will only be able to maintain control by either force or fraud. Right now they're going with fraud, from the amount of discontent I see with the political state of the world I don't know how much longer it will last until they devolve to force.
It's a double satire, actually. The obvious level is the infeasibility, in the good old style of http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3514 `Evil Bit'.

At the other, darker and more nefarious level are the proposals of national electronic ID, being put forth every once in a while. A government-issued ID would be the mandated ID for official and semi-official transactions. It's easy to imagine that any communication not signed with such ID would be subject to extra scrutiny, and possibly treated as exempt from legal protections.
I was fascinated with Plan 9. It just has really cool ideas in its design.

It has been said before and I agree. The problem with Plan 9 adoption isn't Plan 9. Plan 9 is beautiful. The problem is that Linux is quite alright as well.

Also, Linux has drivers for more hardware when Plan 9 was ready to be played with. Plan 9 doesn't. It is a chicken and egg problem. I remember trying Plan 9 and it just didn't have drivers for some of my hardware. It was like Linux in back in the days.
So not backed by the research you said I should do.
The Trouble With Bright Girls (2011)
> There's a contingent of people who find this attitude morally offensive. They worked hard for their health and are disgusted by those who want an easy way... and also people who didn't work hard to stay thin and are thin anyways like the self-congratulatory notion that they're doing something right.

From my own experience, all the people that I know for sure 'worked hard' to achieve their fitness levels, are always the first to be the most understanding about the whole ordeal. Even the strong personality types. The vibe is always along the lines of: "yes, it can be incredibly difficult, and there are many paths to the same destination, but look at me -- it's possible!". I haven't seen many of of these people 'disgusted' at others who want an easier way, if anything they can probably sympathize cause they were probably there themselves at one point.

So that leaves the "didn't work hard" camp, and the "disgusted by an easy way out" bunch... Now, I'm not gonna draw any conclusions cause this is all anecdotal, and perhaps some people don't like to flaunt their successes or use them to inspire others, but it is tempting to make the correlation.
Weirdly enough, Light Bot is one programming game I enjoyed the least. My personal favourite would probably be Manufactoria [1].

[1] http://pleasingfungus.com/Manufactoria/
One programming topic I'd love to see a game for is software concurrency. This is one topic near and dear to my heart which I think a lot of us struggle with since a lot of it can be so counter-intuitive. Reading through "Java Concurrency in Practice", some of the ideas and best practices really popped out at me as something that could be translated into an abstract art style game, and for some reason, the mechanics of guitar hero with multiple guitars visualized in my head. It would be a fast paced game with trippy colors and great digitized procedural music, and you shouldn't need to know anything about programming to play. Threads could be visualized as lines going through space, and you have to protect data units with good use of abstractions, queues, locks etc so they don't get corrupted. And the better you get, the more threads you have to deal with and more advanced topics/tools you'd need to use. I'm not a game developer, but I'd love it if such a game existed :)
He hasn't done it yet.
it's simple. they want to play Nintendo games on Apple hardware
Prime Minister by 30?
Jason Calacanis interviews Jerry Colonna - Life/Business Coach & Former VC
The internet is not the web. Many native apps use the internet, precious few use the web.

Quick litmus test: if a system does not have URLs, or the content at those URLs is not usable by multiple independently developed user agents based on open standards, then the system in question is not the web.
Despite the unfortunate name, http://www.hidemyass.com has a pretty decent service.
I like fogus' list quite a bit:

http://blog.fogus.me/2011/09/08/10-technical-papers-every-pr...
Woz talks about this a bit in his autobiography. About how lucky he was to have been around when you needed an understanding of the machine at a very low level, compared to growing up in a time where most of that was already abstracted away.
Prior to the last half of August the OSM.org style had not been touched in several years. If you're seeing problems you should file a bug on the style's Github page:

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto
Letting them play and making sure that they don't start fighting is pretty good.
Japan is a rich country, with one of the best education systems on Earth.

I'd call this -- aside from being very, very questionable -- an important missed point that might otherwise have been a cornerstone of this article.

The Japanese educational system, from preschool to college, is built to do one thing: Prepare Japanese people to pass Japanese standardized tests for the purpose of obtaining work with a Japanese company.

The author's other points aside, I don't see how this could possibly not contribute to a weak entrepreneurial culture.
If you have basic understanding of JS, I think you will be fine. The learning curve for AngularJS is steep so you are going to spend a lot of time going over new material.

As soon as you are able to write a basic program in JS then jump right to AngularJS.

Tkae a look at this book as well. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596805531.do
It's really helpful.
Plan9 is fine if you only care about daemons and command line interfaces.
And possibly rumors of additives to vaccines (adjuvant - Squalene, Mercury, etc.)

I have been made aware anecdotally how may times profit is chosen over safety when critical decisions are made... It has lead me to question some decision makers about the actual priorities for their decisions...
Think like the NSA
Well, the problem with Plan 9 is that it requires everything support the Plan 9 protocol. The entire stack has to speak Plan 9, otherwise nothing works. So anything that interacts with it would have to support the full protocol, whereas Unix is just "pipe this output stream into that input stream," which is quite a lot easier to adopt.
In general a very interesting experiment. Assuming this is not a Google PR thing, why limit yourself to only the G+ community though? There's lots of other communities to connect with interesting people (HN could be one of them).
Is it possible to travel across the world for FREE using nothing but +Google+ and a whole lot of hugs?

There's a significant opportunity cost associated with hugs.
You almost feel sorry for the teacher in this case. Sure, he's about to get the just desserts of a repugnant action like this, but its kind of like a dog digging up a nest full of yellow jackets. He "deserves" the stings but he's not going to understand why he is suddenly being stung.

It boggles our tech-savvy minds that someone could be this out of touch and still have a position of any authority whatsoever, but there it is.

I also hope the best for the student, but I can't help feeling that this will be nothing but a minor setback for him as much as it seems to potentially suck now.