skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stack overflow is great but I have mostly stopped trying to contribute to it because my questions or answers are often closed or whatever. Or some mod or someone just comes and insults me on the basis that they thought my question was stupid or not right somehow.
TLDR: Linux doesnt require valve to hand over a percentage off of sales, so we will be all self-righteous about how we love open platforms and their evolution... Like we cared before the commission on windows 8 store was announced.
In case "devx's" succint comment isn't clear...

That NSA mathematician writes: Do I, as an American, have any concerns about whether the NSA is illegally or surreptitiously targeting or tracking the communications of other Americans?

How would you know? Based on everything that your organization has declassified and released, the NSA keeps its knowledge compartmentalized. Maybe what you say is true for your compartment, but not for any other. You're also not supposed to even ask about other mathematician's compartments, right? Again, how would you know?

Also, Mr Mathematician, you've got a legal obligation, complete with penalties, to not give out any information. You're legally obligated to lie, according to Clapper. Why should we believe you?
I find I encounter key movements often enough that I can definitely gauge progress. We do strength and metcon, so every few months each lift will get its spotlight - it's easy to compare my 5x5 power cleans now from my numbers in April. (Though doing something like Starting Strength is even more quantifiable due to consistency.)

In terms of metcon, I mostly compare myself against Rx, since I scale most things. So, this week I'm doing pullups with an assistance band one level harder than the one I'd been using for months beforehand. It feels wonderful. If I scale thrusters to 65lb from 95, when in the past I've had to scale to 55 from 95, that's also clear progress for me.
Unfortunately, the first structure in a remote location is often the first structure the local pyro has an opportunity to torch with no consequences. After losing a camper trailer (not on an island, but in a remote location) to this phenomenon, we've investigated more durable/securable structures but have been reluctant to invest in anything more permanent than tents.
What process are you using for finances? A budget meeting to agree on what to chip in for future years and for what those monies go to?

Did you all sign something already that talks about distribution plans if and when one of the group passes away?

Any plans to enforce "no trespassing" when none of the group is there?

Congrats, by the way!
Nice to read a real veterans perspective rather than the usual "What I learnt since I started my business last Thursday". Tim admits what he got wrong but you know that he got so much right and built a sustainable business. Most of us have favourite O'Reilly book.
Be wary of the local property taxes. Any construction will count as increasing the value of the terrain, which the county will often assess over it's true value. Keep an eye on the yearly value increases and don't be afraid to contest the valuation, especially if you don't have running water, electricity, etc.
> There is no land on earth outside of the control of nation-states, except Antarctica

Not quite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bir_Tawil
We already have a sell-by date. Long before the sun goes red giant, in fact in about a billion years from now, solar output will increase to the point that liquid water (and therefore life) will be impossible on the surface of the earth.
I'd pay $1000 for that killer feature. OP, take note.
Steambox pretty much answers both of those questions. They are bringing a platform into the console space where DirectX isn't as much of a gorilla in the rool, then when people develop games for the console they get the linux pc port for free, enough user base and demand will convince the graphics card companies.
it's got harder for everyone. i'm over 10k and mine isn't going up quickly any more. there are fewer interesting questions (partly because many have been asked, but also because the sites have fragmented and the policing is more strict) and more competition answering.

i'm less sure, but i think answers are getting worse too. it feels like the smarter people have disappeared.
There are two Twitters; Only one is worth investing in.
How one group of plants help regrow an entire forest
Best of luck to you! I suspect you don't know how large this particular iceberg is under the surface[1], but I wish you the best. :)

1: There's a reason that POI-HSSF, the Apache Java-to-Excel library, stands for Poor Obfuscation Implementation-Horrible SpreadSheet Format!
I attended a tech conference earlier this year where Rich Hickey was speaking. He was trumpeting the fact that data never really gets deleted in Datomic, and someone brought up the question: What happens if you are legally required to delete something from your database? I seem to remember him saying that Datomic wasn't really designed for that scenario, which sounds like a major problem.
I was thinking more of running a full desktop OS on a tablet device yeah, I think MS will be smart enough to keep it around, it's a very good feature.
Not necessarily. As the author of the article said, it's easier to rely on software bugs than to ship a crocked piece of hardware like this. If you manage to backdoor a mass-production piece of hardware (let's say this is a wifi card or something else similar), you're just one odd error away from someone curious finding out what's happening, raising the alarm, and the whole operation comes crashing down.

From a logistics standpoint, it's easier to break software.
Why do you assume he'd want to prevent locals from visiting?
I think it's fair to say it'll be a fairly long road. Dealing with hardware vendors, especially with GPU manufacturers, will be the biggest hurdle, and getting them all to fall in line will take a lot of work.

Even if he announces the "Steambox" tomorrow, without a truly open Linux solution with very broad drivers support it won't mean much to games developers. It'd just be one more platform they'd have to explicitly support, i.e. they'd have to make a Windows version, Mac version, PS version, Xbox version, and finally a Steambox version
Relatedly, Mt. Gox is now counter-suing CoinLab. CoinLab wanted to cut corners on meeting their contractual obligation to obtain the necessary licenses, and argue that they did meet the regulations under the "prepaid access" FinCen exception.

http://www.coindesk.com/mt-gox-countersues-bitcoin-incubator...
I've been using linux mint for a couple years now, and I have the feeling that mint is growing more than ubuntu.
My family has a cottage in the backwaters of Ontario (although ~one hour from Ottawa). It's on a lake, but very off the grid, without electricity or running water. We have propane stoves, refrigerators, lights, etc.

It's a bit less remote than an island, seeing as you can take a car into town, and the stray hunter still comes through once in a while.
For now. Microsoft recently retired Game For Windows Live. I'm sure they have some kind of replacement planned that fits in with their current ecosystem.
Superbugs Kill 23,000 Americans Annually
Oh really, I had no idea they were doing this. Any idea why?
It's also much easier to defend in a "without rule of law" (WROL) situation. You've raised the bar for just getting to your place. Short of scuba gear, there's no way to approach a prepared island undetected. This even goes for the dark of night if the defenders are well prepared. Would be invaders would probably also be approaching without cover against rifle fire, unless they are hiding behind the engine block of a fairly large sized boat.

There are some disadvantages that come with that. A determined group could keep you trapped on your island more easily as well.
What the Google Street View Decision Means for Researchers (and Cops)
Tesla is looking for engineers to develop self-driving cars
With the 7 minute workout, you have no excuse not to exercise daily. All you need is a wall, a chair, a mat if the floor doesn't have carpet, and about 8 minutes. You get a full body endurance workout with all its long term and short term benefits - makes you feel more awake right away and helps you sleep better at the end of the day - and just 8 minutes later you can be back on your keyboard.

You can exercise more if you want to, but unless you have an impeding health problem, you have no excuse not to do this much.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/the-scientific-7-mi...

I used this iOS app to learn the exercises (I started by learning 6 exercises and then evolved from there, in less than two weeks I was doing the full workout), and I use it every day to guide me: http://www.uovo.dk/apps/7minute.html (There's plenty of others similar apps out there which I haven't tried but this one works for me)
So if bernanke rained money from his helicopter but everyone sold their neighbour a massage that night then the money is not devalued because it was absorbed?
One of these: http://www.junglehammock.com/ and a nice Kayak is your key to staying on any coastline or island. If there's nobody there... then nobody will mind. Ownership = headache.
Ex-Wall Street chieftains living large in post-meltdown world
>> At night time you won't see anything. Almost all of the streetlights in the city have been turned off, because Detroit can't pay the bill!

Just to be clear, the city may be able to pay the electricity bill, but not the bill to repair the light or the copper wire which has been stolen by scrappers.

Lighting is just one of those things you probably take for granted. When you don't have it, and your kids need to walk between abandoned homes with no street lights in the darkness to get to their bus stop, it becomes an essential public safety requirement.

Freep.com covered how the lack of public lighting really puts kids in danger in a good piece last year.
You never met a bored teenager... have you? Of course it is Canada... maybe they aren't as awful.
But this is the problem when the system you are using is controlled by someone else. You have to accept their terms whether you like it or not.
Also wondering the same thing. The most impressive part of the translation system is the suite of admin tools that they have built.
> How do you stop developers from using Direct X?

You make something better.
Most operating systems create a vdso with user space accessable operations such as getting time, etc
Show HN: A Simple Tool to Reduce Procrastination
Tolerated? If only barely: http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/stable_api_nonsense.html also:

Basically, I want people to know that when they use binary-only modules, it's THEIR problem. I want people to know that in their bones, and I want it shouted out from the rooftops. I want people to wake up in a cold sweat every once in a while if they use binary-only modules. -- Linus Torvalds

As a Linux user (and previous developer) I can only commend these positions. I don't care about hardware companies' "intellectual property", all I want is to pay for hardware and have good drivers that don't wreak havoc with my system.
Thanks for the heads up! We'll def be sure to get on that and get some basic first aid training across the board + med kit on site. Any other advice/tips we should be aware of?
It does not matter, but i wish there was a mention of "ASP.NET" somewhere.
It is a new take on email. I just bumped into them and realised what they are doing is way different than what others are doing.

In my opinion, I would prefer looking at at a more user centric email client like they have.

Not too sure how things would work when there is a group of people talking.

Now that I wrote this, it looks so much like the Messages.app
No question... just want to say that this is really cool. I recently took a Seaplane from Vancouver BC to Victoria BC and shocked by how many beautiful tiny islands there were out there and wondered what it would be like to try to get one. Now I know.
In fact, it can also be designed as a marginal circuit so that a small fraction of the chips fail due to manufacturing variance. You can test for the weakness and ship the bad chips to people whose privacy you don't respect.
I don't get it. So doing the right thing for the right reason is wrong, if that reason didn't exist before?

Or are we supposed to be self-righteous about loving Linux before someone else came along to try to improve it?
Simplicity is Key
I agree that there are cautionary lessons to be learned from the Detroit fiasco; but to my mind they're less about the particulars of, say, the Kilpatrick debt issue boondoggle, and more about the problem of incentives for elected officials. If you're looking at an average career in public service, you're going to be making decisions that have a time horizon of decades, but your electoral prospects are determined by the short term pain your constituents face, and so kicking the can down the road is entirely a sensible decision. But these sensible decisions compound, and that ends up causing enormous knock-on effects.

I don't know of a way around this.
The US problem is worse than Detroit's, because Detroit can escape via bankruptcy and the US can't. Fixing the debt by printing money and the resulting inflation and unemployment would be far more disruptive to the US than the bankruptcy process will be to Detroit.
How to weaponize tax free airport goods (video)
One thing game devs, from my experience playing games on linux steam, need to work on with linux is how to deal with multimonitor setups.

Every game I have in steam that runs on linux attempts to spread itself out across all my displays, which is especially busted when I have a vertical monitor. Entire sections of the screen are just cut off completely as the height of my virtual display is higher than 2 of my 3 monitors.

Now, I use intel's video support and not nvidia, so I'm using randr to set up my monitors and not nvidia's proprietary stuff. I wonder if that's the issue.
Why is it every framework handling run loops or communication makes its own implementation of printf? While printf is ubiquitous, I'd hardly call its semantics or syntax perfect. Why does everyone have to copy the same mistakes over and over again?
tl;dr: Use spreadsheet for simple small business accounting, directly, with ability to export to accounting package (and to gen timesheets and invoices), out of the box, without me having to grow my own macros, etc.

This may be a very limited use-case, but....

I'm a one-man shop. Every month, using my (relatively quick and lightweight) spreadsheet software, I enter time worked for various clients, prepare timesheets and invoices for them... and then re-enter said data into my (slower, less friendly) accounting package.

The regular monthly stuff is almost always the same, very cookie cutter.

Having an accounting package is almost overkill, but it supports "accountant interoperability"[1] - and using the latter to do the former is definitely overkill. And I've never been able to figure out the automation/recurring capabilities, they seemed geared for more complex enterprises.

I hate the fact I enter data multiple times, I hate that I have to use the accounting package to manage expenses, etc., etc. - but integration and automation are complex, definitely overkill for my needs.

What I'd really like is the ability to use a spreadsheet for basic double entry bookkeeping (there are only a handful of accounts I use regularly; I can use the accounting package for the infrequent ones) and for entering my time, and have dirt-simple spreadsheet functions for generating client timesheets (sometimes based on the client's format, since my clients are often middlemen), for generating invoices (based on my format), and for generating a file that can be imported into my accounting package periodically.

+1 if the spreadsheet knows about regular monthly things and reminds/walks me through them.

Lightweight, fast, cross-platform. All the things my accounting package (Windows-only, so runs under a VM) is not.

[1] Accountants are like lawyers, IMHO: If you're unsure whether you need one, you probably do; my annual taxes cost me more than doing them myself, but I have greater assurance of minimizing my tax bill while staying off Revenue's radar - audits are expensive.
As far as iOS and Android go, IMO Valve sees these as just as bad as Windows, if not worse.

In the market of "Tablets on which you can game through Steam", the GP is speculating that Windows will continue to be the leader.
Putting a price on physics as a discipline
Hah Tynan got throttled by HN for posting too many comments too quickly. I'm also a co-owner of the island:

1. Yeah, we definitely have plans for structures -- yurts, we're actually thinking.
2. Hmm, haven't explored that option. Not sure.
3. Yep - tentatively 5 guests per each owner at a time.
4. Yeah food would definitely be fantastic.
5. We don't have helicopters yet unfortunately, but when we're mad rich sure :)
I would imagine it's too similar to Google Docs and they don't want that for a couple reasons:

Potential (though unlikely) legal trouble and brand confusion.
Pretty much any time you have an open port accepting of wireless data, it should be encrypted, especially when that port is on a device with a cpu. In other words, there are no wireless data transmission applications that don't need encryption other than broadcasting.
I completely agree that doing something enjoyable is absolutely the best approach, and if you want to optimise for various things, that's great - but don't knock the millions of folk who are getting off their arses and actually moving about. (It also makes me happier to think of people out there enjoying exercise, than "putting in their time" on the treadmill like hamsters.)

Sadly, finding a form of exercise that fits is easier said than done, as with so many things.

If you are unfit, there are many barriers - both physical and mental - to just trying out new sports until you find the right one. Even less unfit people can be paralysed with fear of the unknown, over-abundance of choice, etc.

College and workplace activity offerings are great, as are good gyms, because you can just try out a bunch of classes once and see what works for you. But it took me many years to get to the point where I was brave enough to walk in the door of a Crossfit gym, which I now thoroughly enjoy.

Maybe the point here is that if you have friends or acquaintances that "don't like exercise", bring them along to something you love or have always wanted to try (ideally the latter - doing someone's favourite sport with them is way intimidating if you're new to exercise, failing together is much more enjoyable).
> their games will also have moved on.

Valve Time seems to disagree.
This is a great list, now I can refer my new programmers to a single place.

Rich is quite possibly the greatest marketing asset for the Clojure programming language. After listening to one of his talks (about concurrency) I realized that there is an extremely smart person that does a lot of thinking and makes a lot of sense, so perhaps Clojure might be worth a try. Haven't regretted it.
But web development is terrible. There are so many approaches, languages, frameworks, and philosophies - its incredibly hard for newbies to enter the field.

Educational systems have evolved a solution for this kind of thing: you isolate newbies from conflict. You essentially lie to them, you simplify the situation, and tell them "do this". They do it, and now they know something. Now they have a bit of skin in the game, they have a data point to participate in future academic conflict.

But with modern web dev, the conflict is up-front-and-center, and newbies are not isolated from it.

Bowery, GAE, and meteor address these issues in a very similar way: they make reasonable up-front decisions about how an app should be structured. You can deviate, but the defaults are not bad.

These decisions are a real pain point for a lot of people, and I think that's what they meant with that statement. I would also add: be careful defending complexity. It is very easy for a professional who's built a career navigating complexity to descry reductions to that complexity, as it will directly affect her ability to make money.
Hmm I interviewed there for a SE Data job.
I call bullshit.

Reading through your past posts, I see that there's a trend. You have a distinct, extreme ideology of free market libertarianism. And, you try to cherry pick reality to fit into your ideology. You're not convincing anyone that way.

Poor immigrants and minorities with two-parent households don't succeed any more (and probably less) than poor white kids with single parents.
IOS: A visual history
I have been looking around for accounts of NFC being as successful as you and other people claim. I'm not refuting your argument, just asking for clarification.

The top search results for "nfc asia" and "nfc hong kong" mainly return press releases and news articles about how NFC is being rolled out. In fact, most of the ones I found are as recent as July and August.

There was one older story from April 2011 talking about "hundreds of field trials" but no follow-on detail.

I'm not doubting that certain markets in major Asian cities have seen NFC rollouts. But I question a) the scale and b) the public reception. Indeed, since smart phones are still catching on in major markets in many Asian markets I am doubtful of how wide-spread NFC adoption actually can be.

I'd love to see some specific stories that refute my point of view.
The point is that it's dead simple for a developer, but impossible for an "idea guy".
Do you have any data to back up that feeling?
With all due respect to Paul Graham and on behalf of my fat ass and all my fellow (especially telecommuting) fat asses out there, /screw that guy/!. :D
You're welcome.

Basic engine repair skills, something to patch up your boat in case you spring a leak, a basic comms kit+genny so you can call up the coast guard or a passing boat if you should need them (assuming your island is out of cell phone reach), cache of freshwater, fuel, waterproofed matches and a couple of days worth of tin cans in case you ever get cut off. Halifax coast in winter can be, how to phrase this, impressive, to say the least.

Mind you, the real kick is when you are isolated but there is an additional degree of risk there. No need to get your appendix out as a precaution just yet ;)

All of this is assuming you're on the salty side of things, if you're in a lake it's a lot more relaxed but you will still need to take basic precautions and you'll need to be extremely careful with what you do with your wastes (you'd need to be just as careful in the ocean with that for ethical reasons but there will be fewer watching eyes so you can drop the 'extremely').
Gabe now sees that Windows 8 is not a viable platform for games

What does this mean? I am able to run every game on Windows 8 that I was able to run on Windows 7.
Will it? People are getting fired up, and the anti-American feelings in Europe are strong. The politicians might understand better but will the people? Or will, after years of being told how evil the Americans are, functionally see their choice as one despot or another? Which is sad, because all of this hoopla over spying... isn't a hoopla in the east. It's just the status quo.
The amount of time being discussed here is well under thirty years. In any event, property stolen during the Second World War is still being returned forcibly to its original owners.
Is there some reason you're reluctant to reveal the actual price paid?