skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Do you think that everybody in say, a diplomatic mission from Nigeria on tour of a UK tank factory isn't looking for a leg up?

A leg up on what? Are they going to steal the tank designs and create their own in the (virtually non existing) nigerian arms industry?

Small countries have neither the means to spy on bigger countries, nor what to do with that information. Most often than not, lots of their diplomatic and political personel is already on the payroll of some larger power (banana republic style). Not to mention the horrible repurcusions they would face if they were caught spying on a larger country.

Some small stuff happens from time to time, but in 99% of case a country like Nigeria spies on neighborhooding countries, with which they have direct feuds (old war enemies, land disputes, etc).

>Spying comes in all forms -- it's not just 007 movie stuff.

Never said it was 007 movie stuff. We were actually discussing spying in the form of surveillance, which is totally non 007 anyway.

What I said is it's that spying makes no sense for countries that cannot do anything with the information.

>For goodness sakes, Nigeria has to manage territory larger than Pakistan and you think they don't have an intelligence apparatus?

No, I very much think they have an intelligence apparatus. For spying on their own citizens and neighborhind countries. What I said was false is that "every country spies on all other countries", and especially that small countries (influence and might-wise, not land-wise) spy on larger powers.

>Sheesh. Talk about infantilizing! That's not even respectful of other country's ability to look out for themselves.

Those countries (over 70% of them) have been colonies for centuries (and now post-colonies). What "ability to look out for themselves"?

The very notion of a country like Trinidad and Tobago spying on any large power is laughable, whatever tall tales members of it's intelligence ministry say.
> few readers here will have been at the poverty line, where it might appear a little more ambiguous whether taking a small cut from a very successful business which pays minimum wage is so clearly immoral.

WalterBright's comment indicates some confusion with this, so I'll help explain.

There's a basic notion of fairness that what you've contracted to do (your job) in return for money (your wages) is fair. But a lot of people don't see minimum wage as a fair wage: it's simply better than no wage. As such, in the context of a business whose payroll policy is perceived as unfair, then the notion of "what's fair" begins to tolerate theft: what you're being paid for isn't fair, so you're making it fair by stealing.

I don't agree with this, but I do understand it.
No we will not lose many more. The percentages who actually did something about flash very minuscule and we would lose more by not supporting IE6.
And who cares about people using Mozilla, no one should. They are in the vast minority, not worth the trouble accommodating for them. IE all the way.
You can do both! Prerender the front page server side, then switch to super-fast PJAX once the JavaScript is loaded. This nifty technique is called... wait for it... "progressive enhancement".

Airbnb's recently released Rendr library (https://github.com/airbnb/rendr) is a great attempt to make this easy for complex web apps to do.
I may be biased, but the amount of "putting them in their place" comments is disproportional to how much they overestimate themselves. I doubt Tiffany thinks that she's going to be debugging C++ for Google's [redacted] within the year, for example.

Others' accomplishments might seem tiny compared to where you are, but gradually realizing that there's always more to learn is part of the growing process. All of this "putting things into perspective" is perhaps unnecessary - when I got started, I certainly didn't (and couldn't) have had as wide of a perspective as I do now.
> For a restaurant worker, that could be things like finding ways to boost sales, reduce wastage, find less expensive vendors, improve efficiency, etc. It's highly unlikely that any restaurant has successfully optimized all aspects of their operations.

What, for free? He isn't being paid to do that.
I wonder how much they're paying for land and tech development in that figure - doing something the first time is often rather expensive.
Frederik Pohl has died
I tried the Bustle.com, showcased in the article as a good example of a pure Javascript website, on my Android browser, and the Javascript was used to reserve 25 % of my screen to show me a "BUSTLE"-banner that doesn't go away when I scroll down.

Don't expect your users to have a mouse. The share of web users on their mobile phone has grown from 6,5 % to 17,25 % since June 2011. Any bets on what the share will be in a year or two from now? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Sta...)
Fifty Possible Ways to Challenge Over-Commercialism
On a train, you could comfortably eat dinner on the way.
That's the current wage in Mexico!
The Snowden comment about VPN startups has intrigued me for a while. My theory is that the NSA have filter boxes placed at the exit points of these VPNs. They sit and wait to see what pops out (at the VPN unencrypted endpoint) and then vacuum it all up. Most VPN endpoints are at major networking points. I.e London, New York, Frankfurt, etc.

It is then a simple matter of waiting for a user to leak personable identifiable information. A visit to Facebook or an email account, etc whilst connected to the VPN is all it takes, and then you can group and map browser headers (roughly) to VPN users.

Maybe they can break small key length SSL when they really need to. If there is TLS traffic of interest popping out from the VPN exit, then they store it and process it later, probably in some massive AWS compute intensive cloud service even.

VPN users have to remember that their traffic is protected from your machine as far as the VPN exit node. After that exit point onwards to the requested web server, you are as naked as before. Worse is that it lulls users into a false sense of security.
you have opened up your life to them on a semi-permanent basis

You have opened a lifetime of impersonal comments directed at a disinterested crowd. By its very nature, it won't be personal.

"I'm having beans for dinner."

"Beans a legend lol"

"I'm getting divorced and I've told you and the other five hundred 'friends' here at the same time, in the same way"
No. Wealth will be more volatile. The smart will get richer.
Oh man this is going to be the war of the decade.
You may not see this in startup-ville but this is very much happening in IT at companies where software is not the "core competency"
Nobody's saying you should. But designing things in a progressive-enhancement-type way will mean that you have no need to worry about all these "minorities" as most things will generally more or less work.

Besides we're all minorities in one way or another. I'm sure I could find some dimension by which you're a minority and you'd be pretty cheesed off if you weren't catered for for some trivial reason.
As a matter of fact, I know that English, as a natural language, is much more expressive in the sense that you can communicate many ideas using the same expressions.

Portuguese, for example, is much more expressive in the sense that you can communicate the same idea in many different ways, which may have different meanings.

There is also the contractions issue and the omission of the subject of an expression ("eu estava" == "eu tava" == "tava" == "I was"), which complicates it even more. And all of this is actually valid, depending on the linguist you "follow". ;)

Well, I did not make myself very clear, but this is what I wanted mean when I talked about expressiveness.

PS: I wanted to write something about linguistic relativity too, but I can't remember, lol.
A bit off-topic, but Facebook has always very intentionally been on the cutting edge of eroding privacy and frankly it doesn't really matter what you do. In 10 years people will care even less about privacy than they do now.

Due to Facebook people now-a-days are sharing significantly more than they would ever have been comfortable with even 10 years ago. That trend is only going to continue.

"one big database that was searchable and rampant for abuse by a rogue government agency"

I think this doomsday mentality is going to eventually disappear, and the socio-economical cost of NOT being on social media is going to grow. No advanced society (past a certain GDP) has slipped back into tyranny and all the people that think Obama is going to go fascist and read about how you love tranny porn are not grounded in reality.

Even if tomorrow the government had complete access to everyone's Facebook, life wouldn't change and the world would keep turning b/c ultimately the government doesn't have that much power. Even if Obama hated you personally the best he can do it get your balls fondled at the airport and maybe audit you (though if you pay your taxes, you shouldn't be concerned with that). And yeah, it's important to fight against tyranny and to for instance demand the dissolving of the TSA, but in reality the gov't doesn't care about you and as long as you aren't breaking any laws (and most people aren't) it's not really a big deal.
I have yet to sign a contract that would mandate that I be watched by cameras at all times.
Sympathy has nothing to do with it.

If you feel your wages are too low, negotiate for higher ones. If that doesn't work, accept it or quit. If you've been wronged, you have access to redress from the courts, and the courts are very sympathetic towards workers in disputes with employers.
New TX law will allow police to sell confiscated guns
What Assad and his troops are doing isn't your typical civil war. There is no rationale behind the bombardement of civilian areas. Even if these neighbourhoods really were packed full with islamist terrorists (which they obviously aren't), carpet bombing and shelling is hardly a very effective method.

No, this is genocide, pure and simple. If it takes a poison gas attack to elicit a punishment, so be it. The main reason for the planned intervention is not regime change or bringing about democracy. It's about showing limits to what dictators (at least in the smaller countries) can do to their people.
Am I the only one that is irritated by the way the molecule is displayed in the image? The 'nanomachine' is displayed at a vastly larger scale than the water.
The Iraqis managed to kick us out with rifles and improvised mines. Not even a single artillery piece, armored vehicle, aircraft, nor any technology less than 50 years old, against $2 Trillion worth of US anti-insurgency doctrine.
The submission shows a great capacity for humility.

I hope that's not a trait unique to women, but one wonders.
>Contradictory to all known history. They all dream of it. Some of those are even full out wet dreams.

No, they really are not. In fact in the last 2-3 centuries of known history, most countries, not only wouldn't spy on large powers, but were under their direct command, as colonies.

>Infantile, small, and poor countries don't have the knowhow and resources to effectively spy on other more-advanced nations. That's the only reason they "don't",... because they "can't". It's not a moral stand.

Well, that's what I said too. Although I disagree on the latter part: not spying, even if is because you can't, gives you a moral high ground.

>>A lot of small countries not only do not spy, but they voluntary let other large countries spy on them and handle over their citizens data.

>Don't worry, they either get paid, or get some benefit from that arrangement.

The lackeys in government yes. The countries (as in, the general public, no). They are royally fucked over from that arrangements (see: banana republic).

>Nations fight for self-interests first and foremost, not for the interests of other nations, big or small.

There are ways to go about your self-interests as a nation that makes you a jack-ass and there are ways that are better. Nazi germany went after their self-interests too.
Amish Community Not Anti-Technology, Just More Thoughful
No need to censor if watching people means they'll self censor.
>Ok, so let’s take this iteration of what he is supposed to be saying. “If you have an accent that is so strong that very few people understand you and nobody feels like listening to you then it is bad”. That is very anti-climactic, definitely not a surprising top red flag that he seemed to indicate.

In fact, when it comes to startups, that is exactly what he is saying, and your dismissal of it by saying that it's not a surprising top red flag tells me that you are consciously trying to make this more racy than it actually is.

If you read his real initial position in the New York Times [0], you'll find: "“You can sound like you’re from Russia,” he said, in the voice of an evil Soviet henchman. “It’s just fine, as long as everyone can understand you.”" Again, the issue is communicating to reach an understanding. If you cannot convey thoughts, ideas, facts relevant to the core of your startup/idea, then you are at a disadvantage. Plain and simple.

I come from a community of Egyptians with incredibly thick, hard-to-understand accents, my father being one of them. I have difficulty talking about very complicated subjects with him because neither of us can clearly articulate our thoughts in the other's language, and so we never fully get a grasp on each other's opinions or the positions we hold. We both know the other isn't stupid; there's just a language barrier that's preventing effective dialogue.

Now take an investor who is deciding whether to risk his/her money on a startup. If an investor cannot come to a clear understanding of what it is you do or effectively bounce thoughts back-and-forth to assess you and your company, then they are not able to minimize their risk as much as they can, in an already incredibly risky endeavor. I'll also say again that had PG discovered that there was a correlation between risk of failure and stammering CEOs, he would've mentioned it.

Anyway, I'd like to think that instead of sparking an entire racist investing trend, that PG's advice has motivated a considerable number of foreign entrepreneurs to improve their English-speaking capabilities -- a skill that will certainly help them in every part of their lives (if they hope to plan to move to America to pursue a startup).

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/magazine/y-combinator-sili...
A huge resource of free developer tools
The same can apply to all frameworks and libraries, both front and back end.
Startups aren't black and white
H.B. No. 1421:

http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/83R/billtext/pdf/HB01...
How to Recover Any Byte of Plaintext on RC4
"I can't help but have a feeling that I don't know enough"

Clicked on your profile, and you know Brazil (cool) FPGAs (cool) and EE stuff (cool). We have some common background (well, other than the Brazil thing).

Observationally those subjects do not come up very much in the stereotypical HN "yet another coffeescript release" stories, but when those topics do come up, the discussion is interesting.

I get a huge rush out of finding something new that I don't know anything about. Exactly like how I felt as a kid opening presents. Addictive.
Not everything in this world has to cater to me. I'd prefer it if everyone stopped trying to be all things.
Are you saying the world doesn't need a common language? Or that there's a better choice than English?

Yes it sucks a lot for some people, and no it isn't fair, but that doesn't change it.

What would you have us do?
I wouldn't say that it's not a technical or UI problem. But I do agree that there are also political problems. Decentralizing "the cloud" isn't just something that can be addressed by technical means. But technology plays a big part in changing the status quo.

The dashboard was forked from a prior project called Ajenti, which the fstab interface and many other parts were included from. It is being converted in stages and that is one that has not been addressed yet. So be patient, the current version is far from what a usable edition is supposed to look like. :)
Hey solve,
I think that pidgin are easier than English, and this is why: they are intended to use in a very simple and effective way.

A full language, like English, has much more complex phrasing.
Maybe it would be good for people that are new to frontend js frameworks to pick up something like Ember first and learn angular after they've established best practices.
I think a better idea would be to just limit yourself to a small number of photos. It used to be that you were physically limited to 24 or 48 photos. Limit yourself to that. You'll appreciate having some photos of your vacation without spending the entire time documenting.
Are Marketplaces Winner-take-all?
You're welcome to come down here. Salaries just seem to be going up in my area.
Maybe it's old age but I find that annoying too. Looks pretty but is unreadable.
> In the new study, the tracking software was NCR’s Restaurant Guard product, and NCR provided the data.

> Not surprisingly, NCR is delighted by the results.

I really hope they had a neutral third party going over the data.
Just because a theory is unfalsifiable does not mean that it's not true. It just means that science and logic are insufficient to refute or confirm the theory. Where science and logic are not capable of shining a light on reality, we can only rely on non-logical and non-scientific beliefs and philosophy.

For example, scientists tend to hold the belief that the laws of the physical universe are constant. But in fact, there is no __logical__ reason to believe that. It is merely an inductive belief that could be violated tomorrow. The theory of constance transcends scientific experimentation and logical proof; it is simply held as an axiom (which could plausibly be wrong).

Beyond logic and science, the multiverse theory is just as plausible as the universe theory. Your intuition tells you that simplicity implies a universe, where others see that simplicity implies a multiverse, where still others find no reason to believe that reality is rooted in simplicity at all.
Double slit experiment with a key ring laser. Liquid Helium.
"I agree that putting content behind JavaScript sucks; I'm just advocating that the content be JSON (or some other normalized format), not HTML."

Ah, so don't put it "behind JavaScript", but put it in a format that a browser can't natively handle in a sane way. And use a grab-bag general object format instead of one that has built-in semantic definitions that are be useful in a document context, like, idunno, <strong> <em> <p> <a> ?
“How can they be so good?”: The strange story of Skype
Every day I am newly amazed by the apparently limitless extent of modern greed. People will do ANYTHING to make money, and it's truly incomprehensible to me how far some will go.

These "recruiters" go to a foreign country, promise people a better life and money for their families. They then put them in constructed slums, a service for which they charge exorbitant rent to the inhabitants. They then create random fees and regulations to reduce the worker's already tiny paycheck to nearly-nothing. On top of all of that, they constantly threaten the workers with legal action and deportation if they don't shut up and smile. All these people wanted to do was clean toilets for minimum wage!

So these "recruiters" will treat a group of strangers like animals (actually, worse than most American pets are treated) just to make some commission on the very small wages they falsely promised to these workers. Their desire to make a few dollars completely overrides any consideration of the people of whom they are taking advantage or the families suffering overseas waiting for a promised paycheck in the mail. In my mind this is morally worse than the wall street brand of greed, because at least those investment bankers don't go out of their way to treat individual people in a subhuman manner.

Excuse my language, but fuck all of that. Fuck those people and fuck whatever system made this a profitable enterprise. I really don't know who these people are or what to do about it, but I just wish I didn't have to live and work with people who are so insufferably greedy. This is real evil.
Might I interest you in Site44? (I'm a founder.)

www.site44.com
Remember that OSX makes fonts a lot thicker so this font looks insanely thin on other OSs. I'm on linux with ubuntu font rendering which is somewhat thicker than windows and it looks to thin to me.

Usually this means that it will look impossibly thin on Windows.

Raleway medium would look better, or you could look at some other fonts like Lato http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Lato
I especially liked this phrase: "You shouldn't be the first in your neighborhood to adopt the new technology and neither should you be the last."

We have some Amish near where I live. Some drive the traditional horse and buggy. Some drive cars. They see the same doctors we do. They tend to keep to themselves except at farmers markets. Very knowledgeable about woodworking and animals.

I also liked the term: "Amish hacking".
I wonder how fast they could make the train if it had the smaller cross-sectional area of the Hyperloop pods?

Another way to put it: What about a 310 mph maglev on a solar-panel shaded elevated track between SF and LA?
Yes, those are greenhouses. Move north-east for a bit, and you hit the Westland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westland_(region),_Netherlands), an area of greenhouses with the occasional road or house in-between.

At night, from the ground: http://straatkaart.nl/2286JK-Albert-Schweitzerlaan/media_fot...

At night, from space: http://www.flickr.com/photos/astro_andre/6769497883/in/set-7... (the large bright spot are greenhouses with artificial lighting to speed up plant growth)
I bet that'd be hard, ha!
Actually, (modern) English is a pidgin, with two main constituents (Anglo-Saxon and Norman French) and many additional ones.
The "issue" is that you can just put the simple content in a noscript tag and then your simple content site does not require JS. The content cannot be simple if JS is required.
I said I agree with you.

>If you feel your wages are too low, negotiate for higher ones. If that doesn't work, accept it or quit.

I wish more people would do just that. It's what I did, after about a month of working as a barback.

>If you've been wronged, you have access to redress from the courts, and the courts are very sympathetic towards workers in disputes with employers.

No, you really don't, and the courts aren't. Where did you get that idea?
You're making the wrong comparison. The comparison shouldn't be "sitting in front of a screen" vs socializing. It should be "sitting in front of a screen" vs the amount of work it takes to achieve a similar career in another field vs the amount of work it has historically required to achieve a similar career.
California will never build their line.

CA HSR authority signed a construction contract with Tutor Perini to start construction in the coming weeks. It's happening.

* In the meantime, projects like the Southeastern High Speed Rail Corridor [..] will be starved of funds.*

This isn't an either/or situation, we can (and are) doing both.
Also, I've very rarely (if ever) seen something I'd describe as a "solid JSON API".
"you were comparing a world median with a U.S. average."

No, I was comparing to the official legal definition of "poverty line".

My gripe is that in all this talk about "poverty", either nobody defines it or they define it upwards to rediculous. If someone earns more than 87% of everyone on the planet and is still deemed "poor" then the definition of "poor" is absurd.
The Math Behind Estimations to Break a 2048-bit Certificate
The Math Behind Estimations to Break a 2048-bit Certificate