skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is very good reason to believe that once you have developed something someone else is close too. The reason is you found it.

If you check some scientific breakthroughs during the Cold War they were very close on the both sides in the matter of months.

Also with 5% of the world population NSA have limited talent pool. Assuming you are first to the goal in that case is ... overly confident. (Even if we correct for a lot of people that are not easy to tap in the outside populations chances are not on the NSA side). And I am sure a lot of the messages in other countries communications are fake and testing just to see if someone is snooping.
Ha, my first thought was "Archimedes" when I read this.
> I did not say it was conclusive evidence; I said it was evidence.

But it isn't. The null hypothesis requires us to assume that there's nothing but chance at work, and let evidence force a different conclusion. The fact that A and B appear correlated is not by itself evidence of anything other than chance.

> I'm well aware that "A is correlated to B" does not prove "A causes B" or even "A causes B or B causes A", but it is a data point in favor.

No, this is false. Without testing a hypothesis, and without a careful examination of a mechanism, the correlation has precisely no meaning apart from chance.

Here's an example selected at random from a vast literature that tries to make this point:

http://boingboing.net/2010/12/20/creating-a-phony-hea.html

Title: "Creating a phony health scare with the power of statistical correlation"

Quote: "In the United Kingdom, the more mobile phone towers a county has, the more babies are born there every year. In fact, for every extra cell phone tower beyond the average number, a county will see 17.6 more babies. Is this evidence that cell phone signals have some nefarious baby-making effect on the human body? Nope. Instead, it's a simple example of why correlation and causation should never be mistaken for the same thing."

I could link to a thousand similar stories, many being mistaken for actual scientific results.

> But the realist shouldn't underrate it either.

A realist -- a scientist -- always begins by assuming the association is the result of chance (the null hypothesis), and then examines evidence that might argue for another explanation. This is why all self-respecting scientific papers include a p-value. The p-value describes the probability that the result arose from chance, not the hypothesis under test.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value

Quote: "In statistical significance testing the p-value is the probability of obtaining a test statistic at least as extreme as the one that was actually observed, assuming that the null hypothesis is true."

Translated into layman's language, the p-factor is the probability that the observation -- the "correlation" -- arose by chance.

A properly educated scientist always assumes the null hypothesis is true, i.e. that the observation arose from chance factors. She then tests this assumption with evidence.
I would hazard a guess that those military personnel aren't well read on Iraqi and Syrian history.
One nice side bonus to moving to non-standard SSH ports? Your log files are a lot less noisy.
I like your idea, and I think it should be a bit of column A and column B. Kickstart the platform from both ends, users and developers and then let the momentum ride itself from then on.
I disagree. I live in Texas and as a recent CS grad there is no shortage of places trying to hire me. Pay is good (new grads starting at $50-60k in cheap cities like San Antonio), jobs are plentiful.

I graduated in 2012. From our CS department, every student who at least managed a B average walked right into a real dev job.
This is dumb.

- I don't want to mix work and personal stuff on the same machine. Too much could go wrong in terms of liability (network security, personal vs corporate IP). And if I don't use my personal machine, then I'm shelling out another $1000-$2000 to get another laptop and software for work (possibly more for a desktop, depending on the use case).

- If your company is so blinkered that it can't be bothered to provide its employees with the bare minimum equipment and tools they need to be productive, then they can go eff themselves. A developer costs a company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in salary and benefits, and even a good workstation setup is probably much less than $5000 every couple of years.
Progressive Enhancement Is Dead
Another way of saying the character assassination didn't start until the cables were published.
http://www.allthefavicons.com/
I'm curious. What do you dislike about Adam Curtis' work?

He has a considerable gift for digging up and presenting historical material. For example, the stuff about Bernays and Freud at the beginning of Century of the Self is riveting. But some of the narratives into which he frames that material seem questionable.

The one time I knew something independently about what he was presenting, I was surprised at how distorted it was. That was in his documentary about the Rand Corporation and game theory, when he included the radical Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing as an example of psychologists who worked to expand state control. To anyone who knows anything about Laing—a fascinating figure in his own right—that doesn't pass the laugh test.
When will Congress work like us... Online?
A recent nodeup episode discussed how many enterprises aren't using npm packages unless they wrote them in house, because they don't want/trust any code they haven't written themselves.
From what I can find there's been around a thousand comments on the subject over the last week. Three comments called someone xenophobic, all of those where directed at pg. No comment called anyone else on HN a racist. So either I'm missing something or you're doing the exact same thing you accuse others of, making false accusations and overreacting.
The number of modules don't matter, but what does matter is that NVM and NPM are incredible tools. I've never used any package or version manager that comes close to their polish, ease of use, and simplicity. They make a huge difference. I think the true success story of node.js lies in those tools. The deployment and project building process is not just easy, it's actually enjoyable, and exciting. I cannot say that about any other build tool.

I do think having the templating portion of the web stack being in a client side language is important, as there's typically lots of overlap and interoperability that can happen at that layer between the client and server. As for the rest, I don't buy into the whole having a single language is better for understanding and hiring. Picking the right language that has the right metaphors for the problem will make things easier than having the same language everywhere.
I remember this from the the original hacker news thread and still use it. Anything 'real' gets custom rendered icons for each size, but for side projects where the icon quality isn't critical it's very convenient.
If you're familiar with thumbnail display you know Facebook has Haystack for efficient image serving. It goes very low end. Sparkey or CDB or BAM (mentioned in this post) could be much less complex and can do similar work. Why did they go Haystack route I dont get it.
Portable Rail Handle
The thing is, if you have to walk out of the house with only one gadget on you, you don't take a Nintendo DS, you take your telephone - it'll give you some gaming on the go, whilst keeping you connected, allowing you to take photos and have a GPS.

Nintendo has to compete against that, and it is not easy. On the other hand, Nintendo could make an absolute killing by selling a gamepad accessory for the iPhone - extra battery life plus a decent d-pad/thumbsticks would be an easy sell for gamers. You could probably even price it at a pretty steep mark-up and make nearly as much profit as they must be making on the DS. Make all Nintendo games compatible with it, and run a licensing scheme so that other game companies can list themselves as compatible with the hardware.

This strategy allows Nintendo to continue innovating where they have successfully done so in the past - specifically with clever input devices. It's been a long time since Nintendo could claim to rule the roost for things like raw processing power, so leave Apple to do the heavy lifting there.
That does not contradict his statement. The reality is that programmers need to have above average intelligence, at least if we expect something more than just formulaic approaches to software problems (and if history teaches us anything, it is that formulaic approaches will likely be automated at some point). What you choose to major in in college is not indicative of your intelligence.
"English is the lingua franca" is one of my favorite phrases.

It's right up there with the allegation that "the French don't even have a word for entrepreneurship".

(Of course, only the 1st phrase is true, but they're both funny.)
SEEKING WORK - Remote or Portland, OR

Hello!

I am seeking mobile development work. I am an experienced developer with 15+ years exp, the last 3 years as a mobile app developer for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. I also develop the cloud/backend for mobile applications. Java, Obj-C, C#, PHP, iOS, Android, WP7.

Email me at csgatekeeper [at] gmail.com

--

Here is a list of the apps I have worked on recently:

Pic Tease - Sends thumbnail teases to people with optional passwords. Java/Android, Parse.com/javascript. (In development)

Caller Dashboard - Caller id on steroids for Windows/Android. Displays information about caller, call history, sms history, linked in, emails. Java, C#, Intel CCF, IMAP, Peer to peer networking. (Unpublished)

Vapp (Veteran's Appliction) Android – Developer. Provides a mobile searching platform, messaging, cloud file storage, veteran community access, and resources. Makes heavy use of web services REST/Json. Java/Android. (Published)

Life Sampler Android, Portland State University – Developer. Asks students questions at scheduled times during the day, syncs results via ssh. Makes use of alarms, broadcast receivers and notifications. Java/Android. (unpublished)

Walk There Android App – Developer. Provides visual and audio information as the user goes on walking tours around the Portland metro area. Added enhancements. Java/Android.

C25K (Couch to 5K) Android – Developer. Added GPS capabilities, media player integration, in app purchasing. Java/Android

Break Pals iOS and Android – Developer. Lightweight container bringing native application feel to website. Allows different web pages loaded into tabs. Java/Android, Objective C/iOS. Unpublished

Walk There iOS App – Developer. Provides visual and audio information as the user goes on walking tours around the Portland metro area. Added enhancements. Objective C/iOS.

Economist Pocket World in Figures iOS App – Lead Engineer/Developer. 20+ screen application. Scoped effort, created engineering bids/schedule, created architecture, and implemented product. Pocket World in Figures application provides easily navigable access to the data in The Economist’s Pocket World in Figures book. Objective-C/iOS/SqlLite.

Android social picture puzzle – Developer/architect. Application uses any picture, and creates a puzzle that can be sent to other mobile applications or email addresses. Scramble-puzzles stored on website. Java/Android/SqlLite. C#/mono/Asp.net, Linq to MySql, MySql, REST/Json. Unpublished
Good thing we're building a POS here in CA...
2045 is only ~30 years from now, and part of the line will be operational by 2027. It seems like a long time for people used to computer technology, but it's a typical generational cycle for industrial technology.

The 787, for example, which is just trickling into fleets now, was in development since the late 1990's (15 years ago). Power technology has developed even more slowly. E.g. the efficiency of coal power plants has only improved by about a factor of two in the last century or so. Heck, even computer technology is progressing more slowly these days. E.g. I wouldn't call Win2k obsolete, but it's 13 years old now!

So yes, the train will be a bit behind the state of the art by the time it's released, but it won't be obsolete.
Nimrod: The Return of Pascal
Your bargaining position will get progressively weaker as the time remaining on your visa runs down.
The top used module in npm was written for the browser (underscore)

A huge amount of code can / is be shared between the server and client, I wrote a database designed to work in browsers, a pull request away and it works in node.js using a different storage engine, 90% of the code is shared[1], the only people that arent convinced that sharing code between the server / client isnt useful just arent paying attention.

[1] https://github.com/daleharvey/pouchdb
Nacho - Asynchronous Web framework powered by Python 3.3 tulip Asynchronous IO
Python micro web-framework and asynchronous networking library powered by Python 3.x tulip.
I love every time an article like this appears. Everyone is immediately on the fence, bashing JavaScript furiously. Yet momentum doesn't appear to be declining?

I'm a JavaScript developer mainly, with a background as a front-end oriented developer (php), but I also dabble a bit with C/Objective-C - especially since JavaScript got me interested in application development in general. JavaScript does bring a lot of freedom, a freedom that can hold you back, if you're not careful (code bloat, callback hell etc). The thing is, JavaScript is just plain fun to write in, and the responsiveness and full-stack capabilities are amazing.

I think we just have to accept that JavaScript is here to stay. And should its popularity fade, I should be ok with that as well. But until then, I'll keep having fun at work.
No it won't ... it is very easy to add additional to MS key to allow singing of code.

Sideloading will create interest in geeks and developers. And in some businesses.

Anyway this is very cheap experiment to make ... the tablets are written off and it requires a simple patch.
10 Software Tools You Should Know
Generally it works so that you get paid to do things for rich people, but if you do those things for poor people you don't get paid.
For complex setups you sooner or later have to dynamically add/remove rules, based on values only known at runtime (such as an IP address obtained by DHCP). Then, a simple list of rules doesn't suffice, and some kind of programming is needed.

To solve such problems elegantly I designed my "NCD programming language" (link: https://code.google.com/p/badvpn/wiki/NCD ). The language has built-in backtracking, so in the case of iptables, the language itself makes sure any iptables rule that was added is also removed when that is necessary, in a manner not unlike exception handling in C++ etc. Link to iptables module: https://code.google.com/p/badvpn/source/browse/trunk/ncd/mod...
10 figures in revenue? Seriously?
Generics and Debug Information in Rust
umm, iptables is a part of the kernel, and is exactly the same, regardless of distribution. I've used a bunch of different distros and iptables is always the same. What is this guy talking about??
We they even gave me a free phone to port over a small hobby ios app. The phone is fine but it smells like desperation.
Google Chrome turns 5
No. The anthropic principle/branching universes theory explains nothing, and in fact is so utterly unfalsifiable it's kind of surprising intelligent people take it seriously.

If you assume that the observer is described by quantum mechanics, then the Everett Interpretation is logically required to be true. If you want to argue for anything else, then you need to explain why you, the observer, are not described by our best scientific theory.

That's a pretty good reason to take the theory seriously.
Bee Orchid
Interesting article, maybe a bit far-fetched towards the end. Correct link:

http://blog.new-bamboo.co.uk/2010/12/17/learning-japanese-th...
Note that this requires a commitment to using cdist. cdist may be great, but it's not much different from puppet or chef or bcfg2 or whatever your favorite configuration management system is.

Since iptables comes from upstream (and is closely linked to the kernel), distros running the same version of the kernel already have the same iptables quirks. (There aren't many.) The article discusses distributing an iptables config file and having it run on startup, a task which can be equally well handled by the other config management systems.
Very cool! My scientific career ended some years back, but it's nice to see the papers showing up. The size of the entries compared to others, however, is kinda depressing.
I believe the closest RV park to SF is in Pacifica. Nice location but not very practical for commuting. There might be some in the east bay with better access.

I'm surprised no other comment mentioned Jacob of Early Retirement Extreme[1]. He blogged about living in an RV at the Pacifica RV park to save money. Unlike Mr. Money Mustache who is often derided in these comments, Jacob was extreme, and recognized it. Instead of living in an RV to bootstrap a startup, he had a normal tech job and saved tons of money to invest and retire on the dividends (I'm simplifying).

[1] http://earlyretirementextreme.com/
Facebook is bad for you: Get a life
Linus Torvalds made millions off the VA Linux and Redhat Linux IPOs, both of whom gifted him with decent stock grants for his role in their corporate success. He's not hurting for money, and in terms of percentiles would easily be in the top 1% among both developers and the general public.
Note: Title is verbatim from the economist article.
variables aren't declared; when you use a name, the interpreter just travels up the call stack looking for somewhere that variable is defined.

You could have just said "the variables are dynamically scoped" and be done with it. :-)
> What you choose to major in in college is not indicative of your intelligence.

I agree with the sentiment you're trying to express, but there actually is a general correlation between intelligence and what one chooses to study in college. For example, it would be difficult to fault a spectrum of majors with physics on one end and psychology/sociology at the other.

Title: "IQ Estimates by College Major"

Link: http://www.statisticbrain.com/iq-estimates-by-intended-colle...
Except no - do you really think that prism and the budgets are really secret? Give some credit to the US adversaries.

I suppose that Snowden leaks were not a great surprise to the foreign governments.
(I do know what anarcho-capitalism is; I'm anarcho-capitalist myself.)

Libertarianism is a broad term. Anarcho-capitalists are as libertarian as minarchists are. "Libertarian" can refer to either. It's obvious @essrinn was referring to minarchism, but I just wanted to point out that minarchists still advocate presence of a gang with weapons to preserve the "order" in the society and steal from people along the way.
What the fuck?

I have never heard of a job this bad. Maybe the U.S. is just El Dorado for programmers?
Meh, saying IOS is a gaming platform is a joke. It is a race to the bottom crapfest. There are good games among the chaff but seriously why would Nintendo go from 35 dollars a unit to 10 dollars or less a unit. They will not.
You talk about poor people as if they are a different kind of human being from "normal" people.

In fact, 80% of USA citizens are poor at _some_ point in their life. _Most_ people experience poverty. It's not necessarily because they "don't know how" to be anything but poor. (Often it's a result of becoming too old to work.)
Sounds like one of the reasons I was instructed to use Firehol by my system admin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireHOL
Not to defend JavaScript specifically, but almost all scripting language can be used for general-purpose computing. That's what scripts are for.

(Although JavaScript in particular is not an excellent language for anything.)
I can't imagine there won't be major improvements to conventional high speed rail that will be able to run on existing lines. This requires an entirely new track that can't be used for anything else and the trainset itself can't be upgraded as easily as it is tied to the track. These will be also limited by the noise they produce; even if they can go faster in theory noise pollution is going to be a major issue as is. I'm not sure they have solved most of the tunnel boom problem; a major requirement in Japan.

So I wouldn't expect there will be a lot of room for improvement of this design over the next 30-60 years. It will probably cost a lot more than expected as well.
Comparatively, there are a lot of new technologies that could deliver major improvements in transportation efficiency and speed without the large capital investment of a maglev line over the next 30-60 years from traditional rail to self-driving cars to new aircraft.

I'm really skeptical of the wisdom of this project to be honest. If you want a maglev design you might as well go with a near-vacuum tunnel and more than triple your speed rather than just increase it by 50%. This would also have the advantage of eliminating the noise issue. I believe China is looking at something like that.
> It's the reason that people need to be paid for most jobs, since they won't do them just for fun.

There's a huge difference between (a) not being interested in doing a job, but doing it because you're getting money for it and (b) not being interested in working and doing it because you're getting money for it.

You're arguing (a), but I'm arguing (b).
Mini blog ThoughtStreams now has monthly plans with a free tier
Favorite science/math questions from high school teachers. (Interactive quiz)
According to https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_... if you built a chip that could could test a password with a single increment of a counter, and that chip was the most efficient chip theoretically possible, and you built a dyson sphere to capture all the sun's energy to run the chip, it would still take 32 years to crack a 192-bit symmetric crypto password.

ASICs may well be involved, but they'd need math advances or implementation bugs rather than just brute force.
For people who are new to creating/launching a product, 10 customers in the first week would be a huge win. So this is a very instructive conversation for people in that camp (who I'd guess are the majority).

And the impressive part of this story is its not 10 customers within 1 week of "launch" day. It's 10 customers within about a week of deciding on the "idea". Idea --> MVP launch --> Paying customers... 1 week.
I get the joke :) Although, taken literally, this is not the case. The existence of a variable in Lisp is not decoupled from its human-string-name, as Lisp source is textual. If you were to rename a variable, anything that referred to it (binding sites) would be broken. The human names in Lisp source code are crucial to program execution, unlike, for example, compiled native binaries without dynamic linking.
Big Data and NoSQL articles