skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. When I say "technical" I don't mean "computer science" specifically, although I was leaning that way when I originally wrote the comment. I hadn't thought of stories like the one you linked to, but those have a place here, most certainly.
The moving background is constantly distracting me from the main content :(
And btw I dind't notice the "animation" button on the top right until I came here to read the comments.
Ah, that's good. I wonder why they don't default to it. zsh is a great shell to default to.
Yeah, this was my thought too. This whole situation is just creepy and its even creepier that so many people have a million other ways they would stalk somebody. Sure you can do all of these things, but if you have ethics you just don't.
>> I also don't think there is anything wrong with acting as if you are a pro when you are just starting out

Then why do tech startups do coding interviews and look at GitHub profiles when hiring engineers? Why do they have a problem hiring people who are "just starting out"? I don't see how hiring a photographer/consultant/coach is any different.

I think your design/marketing friend is just an example of specific tools. She didn't know Adobe tools but she may still have had design or marketing expertise.

It's akin to hiring a programmer to work on your Python project. If you're smart, you'll consider someone who only knows Ruby or C but is an experienced programmer/problem solver. They'll figure out Python quickly. But you're not going to hire someone who knows nothing about programming.

I'm not asking for people to seek universal acceptance. I just think there is a threshold (which, of course, varies by domain) and I see a lot of people on the wrong side of it.
512MB SRAM is pretty fast and pretty expensive by todays standards. DRAM on the other hand...
The Entire Construction Of New World Trade Center In One Perfect GIF
This strikes me as odd, albeit a clue. You had a photo of a girl you'd presumably never met. A photo you'd taken, that you didn't know was her at first.
What if I want fewer NSA stories but ranked naturally.
I have a raspberry pi running http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/ However, it seems to get in a corrupted if I close my laptop lid mid-backup. I don't lose anything, I just need to run disk util on the backup image. Prior to that I was using time machine on USB and never had an issue. If you work plugged in you'll never lose more than 5-10min of work. It'll remind you every 7 days you haven't backed up.

I was looking into a solution for Linux the other week and http://www.rsnapshot.org/ works very similarly and is what fits my needs there.

The benefit of time machine is that excludes unnecessary OS folders/files by default and the OS installer has a simple interface for recovering the whole hdd from a time machine backup. I recently found time machien now has tmutil, a commandline tool for accessing time machine backups which really helps make managing them more transparent.
OHSU AIDS vaccine candidate appears to completely clear virus from the body
Dialect Quiz & Survey
I think this is a very cool idea.. it means people can hack and do experiments with the browser platform.. something the big guys (the one that owns the browsers and the commites) dont like much we do

On the other side i think it will find a ferocious competition from the chrome apps.. since there are a web_contents or webview one could embed via extensions..

so the big question is, how this idea could distinguish itself enough so it can be competitive with chrome extensions? (since chrome dominate all over?)

anyway we need badly that some people stand against some standards and try to do some things better.. it must come from people outside the players.. cause its there innovation really lies..

the corporate world took control of all the standards, and freeze it out.. so they can come up with dubious platforms on the other side, or influence standards to comply with a strategy that is good for them..

so this open world we all like, are pretty much in danger
because "they" are controlling it

i think also there is a catch with javascript.. and by allow it to do more, there are a bad effect on the first good thing on html.. that is HTML markup!

i mean.. less html and more js code means we are endind with a common language and grammar of communication between computers and people .. with js taking more and more part of it.. we wont be able to understand whats suppose to print in the screen anymore.. it gets more and more obscure, and less standard.. and this in the end will just help the bad guys with their closed platforms..

anyway.. this is all things we should think.. theres a lot in stake here.. we need to protect and save what is good..
and we need to be able to distinguish what it is, so we dont end aiding the things we are against to in the first place
I think I've being unconsciously viewing it as such, and I think that's almost the way our culture treats it.

It's strange, the more productive we get as a society, the more unbalanced we become, as if there's less to go around. Shouldn't we reach a point where people are on average working 4 hours a day instead of 8?
Apple: Stop charging me $200 for 48GB of Storage
I'm a longtime Apple customer and iOS app designer, but I'm tired of being charged $200 to be able to load another 48 gigs of App Store purchases on my iPhone. (And yes, I have filled up 64GB.) Please, either bring out bigger drives or cut the exorbitant margins.
This is sort of a push poll, in that it implies a point of view--that "ranking naturally" means "less filtering/flagging."

But flagging is a standard and valid component of the way HN ranks all stories. So in what way would its use on NSA stories be "unnatural?"

If the point is to measure sentiment, the poll would have worked better worded simply "I want more" vs. "I want less."
Who are you to decide what the world does and does not need?

This is a very complicated issue and it's not useful to speak in such sweeping generalizations.
I'm curious why then these stories should all be classified as political? If Microsoft was doing this - by itself, it would be a different story, right? Then, and only in contexts like that of which are deemed and vetted as technically founded, can this discussion continue? I get it - the politics of the conversation "get in the way" per se. However to address your point - there is no way to vet a lot of this information as it's not verifiable, that's the problem. If the iPhone had an embedded back door and now documents came to light showing how a new kind of processor has been hidden in the silicone, yet Apple wouldn't provide documentation around it - that conversation can't happen because there's no verifiable yes or no answer? There's a million ways you can spin a closed minded approach. It seems to me as if you're trying to build a box around very static content, of which HN is not.

I agree that HN is useful when you can take something away from it, learn from it. However, in all fairness, the essay you linked to says nothing about a strict guideline about "technical" discussions. It's also not addressing this grey area where technical problems, that are not verifiable, and are tied to government all intersect. To me that makes this topic not a closed case of binary true or false regarding it's place on HN.

That's why I like HN though, there are a lot of smart people to discuss these sort of issues - technical or technically related.
Yeah, I'm not all excited about that, but they have guns, lots of them, and they are not shy about using them.

I live in Los Angeles, so a special hello to my favorite trigger-happy police department: the famed LAPD!
I just wish it wasn't all over HN. There isn't enough real new information coming out to justify the quantity of linking and discussion that is going on here, so the community (to me at least) appears to be spinning its wheels and rehashing everything over and over. As someone who is not obsessed with the issue, that gets tiring.

It also distracts from good technical discussion. For example, when the new iPhone was announced, instead of an interesting technical discussion of the merits and problems with biometric authentication we get "OMG the spooks are going to steal your fingerprint"
No, they need to provide incentives to people who are able to make a difference and currently aren't. Like they give tax credits for hiring veterans, and other similar programs to manipulate the behaviour of employers for the benefit of potential employees.
Has anyone got any experience with using Dropbox as a backup service? They provide 30 days of file recovery for free, and for a few dollars a month you can get packrat, which provides eternal point-in-time recovery. Seems like a great use case of a git folder backup?
I also hope that the discussion continues here.

I see this community as being uniquely qualified and positioned to discuss the technical aspects of these issues.

When knowledgeable people have a discussion in public about an important topic, there is opportunity to educate or be a resource to, people who have the power to effect change. Creating that opportunity is a good thing.

The people who have the power or opportunity to effect change in the U.S. government are probably not here among us today, but they're a Google search away from finding the thoughts and opinions of a large collection of thoughtful and well educated technologists.

I'm happier knowing that.
This is probably something that would rarely come up, if ever, but I'm curious as to how transgendered/female-identifying applicants would or wouldn't fit into the program. I didn't read the article thoroughly, but it only seemed to touch upon a hesitance to _only_ serve them.
Oh, they don't. Read the article: they candidly point out that Israeli agencies have a bad record of not respecting agreements with the NSA and aggressively spying on US policymakers. In fact, they are worse than most other countries; but because of an overall foreign-policy sacred cow (survival of the State of Israel), they suppress their natural objections.

Basically, the survival of Israel trumps any other US interest, even when Israel is seen as antagonistic. That's shocking.
Currently only running in FF because of Fat Arrows and being under dev, but this page only uses divs for the js generated content in the simulation.

http://eborden.github.io/evolution-of-cooperation/
You can lend a license to use those bits in a specific way.
Reverse image search? Facial matching image search?
This engineer's view of venture capitalists (2013): They are a valid source of protein.
H1B workers are not indentured servants
But, in this instance, there IS a path to a guarantee.

If we don't share the information with them... then we guarantee they won't be given that information by us.

You need police and a legal system because, as a general rule, citizens have rights. Israel... has no inherent right to the data in question. Therefore, if we cannot share information with them without leaking the operational particulars of the civilian leadership... then we are free to not share data with them at all. And there you have your guarantee.
Cool thanks for this. Is there something similar to this for python 2.7?
The Barrett Brown case scares the crud out of me.

He linked to a cache of 5 million documents, some of which had CC information in them. Boom, identity theft. All of the other charges flow from that.

If the court is not careful we are setting ourselves up for a future where sensitive information is sprinkled in a trove of documents as a trap for unsuspecting journalists or other parties that want to make that information available for the public good.
I've been experimenting a bit with RethinkDB within the last few days. Its stability is definitely not there (too be fair, they've made this clear), so it's crashed when I needed it most. But here are the finer points:

1) Their team is extremely responsive. In fact, the most responsive team that I've dealt with on Github. I've posted at least 4 Github issues during various times of the day and evening and I've gotten a response in less than 10 minutes. Most of the time, more than one member responded.

2) They are not over selling their product like MongoDB did. They are very clear about what their product does and doesn't do.

3) Clustering is stupidly simple. You can have one setup within minutes and have your servers geographically located throughout the world.

4) The web UI makes administering the databases easy and fun.

After they get the kinks (stability & docs) fixed, this database will definitely have a bright future.
In our data center we have several thousand hard drives and nearly two thousand SSDs churning away day in and day out, indexing and caching Etc. So far the failure rates has been about 1/10th as much for the SSDs per-capita than the Hard drives.

Not definitive, just a data point. (oh and the SSDs are the Intel X25-M (160G version))
I think what you want is the Chromium Embedded Framework (http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded).
OpenROV Raises $1.3M for Underwater Robots
Isn't this the same exact type of gag order that is normally levied on both sides for trials? As far as I can tell this is the same type of gag order that causes defendants to say "No comment until after the trial" and the prosecution to declare to the media that "details will be laid out at the trial".
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

If it weren't interesting to the users of this site, it wouldn't be on the front page.
Uploading gigabytes of photos so that I can then download them to view them is insane.

Especially with the lousy lousy internet connection that I have.

I haven't seen a Chromebook's handling of locally stored photos, but it's a shame if it can't handle it nicely.

The only thing stopping me from getting a Chromebook now is the lack of functionality without an internet connection (I'd install a Linux, but that feels like a weird solution).
But it claimed to be a cryptographically secure one.

And I'm pretty sure even the NSA-adjusted EC PRNG standardized by NIST offers more than 15 bits of security.
Bugs, Tasks, and Tickets from First Principles
Change comes with perseverance and reason. Violence is far from the only way to effect political change.
Sshhh... I have just moved us on to this in the office.
I will admit I'm not well versed in how OpSec works. Are there no OpSec policies for what happens if something accidentally leaks? Are there no policies for what happens if a Top Secret file makes it to someone with the wrong clearance?

My gut would tell me that you want as perfect OpSec as you can manage, but then have contingencies for the occasion when something fails. Otherwise you would get the kind of flailing we're seeing right now after the Snowden leaks.
> immigration limits are not an artificial barrier. One of the basic purposes of a government is to establish and defend borders.

I think this is probably the kernel of our differing views. I do view them as artificial. My hope is that, in the future, an individual's ability to relocate becomes more a function of their means and less a function of nation-state legality. I have some anarchist strands woven in my ideology ;-)
>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

>Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Source: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Wait, whats the solution?
Or, have some faith in humanity, considering:

- This was just a fun bet between friends. Justin really didn't think it could be done and I wanted to show him how a little information goes a long way online.

- Justin treated this girl well and she even knew about this bet.

- "Look up online" != Stalking

- None of the discovered information has been posted publicly online. This isn't even her photo.
There are physiological differences between men and women [1]. Some of these are in areas that relate directly to suitability for construction work, with the advantage going to men. The expected outcome if there is no bias other than ability to do the job is for women to be significantly underrepresented in construction.

For tech work, the physiological differences do not give men an obvious advantage, and so there is much more interest in understanding why men are disproportionately represented.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physio...
1. Increased profits help shareholders.

There are fewer shareholders in a company than employees, and trickle-down economics is a sham.

2. Profits are subject to tax, and increased tax receipts fund more public programs.

Wages are also subject to tax, and the poor and middle-classes have fewer tax-avoidance options available.

3. Lower costs are at least partially passed to customers.

This is a giant leap of faith. How many times has McDonald's reduced the price of it's menu, despite all the advances in efficiency it develops?
This statement is non-sensical. The concept of citizen is inherently bound. Similarly, the concept of citizen is inherently a human (political) one. As a result, your premis is flawed, and your allusion to economic analysis perfunctory (at best).
who I am (my identity) is for all sensible purposes a construct of other people.

the real me sits behind my eyes. lets ignore that for current purposes.

my identity then is what other people chose to use to distinguish me from the other seven billion on the planet. mostly we used faces, and became real good at recognising them. then we moved to using names because there were so many of us.

but it is still notable that who I am (Paul) is really just a shorthand for other people's convenience. if I was the only human on the planet I would have no use for a name but everything about me otherwise would still be unchanged

in short who I am is my "identity" and that is just an assertion to help you tell me from the guy next door. Who I am is my name (if you are on the telephone) or my face if we are in the pub, or my DNA if you are in CSI. none of those things are to do with the quale of being Paul - but they are useful for other people.

make sense?

I'm saying that don't call into the trap of thinking that if there was some way to determine who I am really, the we could get rid of passwords. who I am really is a quale in my head and no use to anyone else - so instead we find ways to distinguish bags of meat and call it identity
I, too, would be interested in watching this presentation. Would you happen to have a link to it?
What's the point of this post?

If there were market demand, Apple would do it. Despite outward appearances, they do significant market research (and you should see some of their internal social media analysis tools). But there isn't (at this time) so they didn't. The cloud is in.
Sometimes I think of the HFT and quant trading industries are like the Formula 1 of tech. A way for extremely talented people to apply their skills and compete with each other, with lots of money involved, but ultimately the technologies developed for the 'race track' make their way onto 'main street' in some shape or form.

I'm sure all this research into ultra low latency infrastructure and live data mining is bound to come in useful somewhere else. Maybe this is off base but why be cynical.
> Protectionism in the form of onerous immigration regulations is a losing battle

So is maximizing profit by replacing expensive workers with less expensive ones from abroad. At some moment the situation becomes untenable, causing a social rupture and eventual reorganization, sometimes very painfully.
I use it like that. iTunes, development, documents, all sorts of things. Easily synced to a new machine if needed.

On top of that I pay for Backblaze, just for a little bit more protection.
"I either have to do some hacky position:absolute things…"

Why do you think this is "hacky"? This is precisely what absolute positioning is for.
This is actually remarkably similar to Backbone.MarionetteJS, only, swap the O with C for Controller (but don't be fooled, even their docs say it's not the most fitting name).

For those interested in learning more about Marionette, Amy Palamountain made a fantastic presentation you can check out at her site: http://amy.palamounta.in/2013/04/12/unsuck-your-backbone/
> Sorry - I missed the 'non treaty' mention in your post. Doesn't that pretty much mean H1Bs (and maybe all the investor visas)?

> edit: actually, there is of course also O, L, P and I.

And the immigrant E series Employment-related ones. There's a few others that might fit into the general description I laid out depending on exactly where you draw the line on transitory (non-immigrant H-2A, for instance, could be argued either way.)

(I specify immigrant/non-immigrant, because there's a handful of categories designations used for both immigrant and non-immigrant classes where the use between the two classes has no real relationship; E is one of these.)

> I'm not sure how much you'd gain by folding them into a single category - there's very little relationship between,e eg, whether Nadal should be here for the US Open and how many programmers should be coming here.

"How many" isn't really an issue, since the whole idea of folding it into one class is that its a class that is open to any non-banned entrant and isn't numerically limited, instead its open-for-pay.

Anyhow, I'd think Nadal for the US Open be a non-immigrant B-1, which is transitory by any reasonable definition, and certainly isn't in the scope of what I was proposing.
Most old popular games come with a .exe that you can run without installing the game. Make for some real easy sharing in Lans. Valve making it almost as easy.
As another example, the Navy is full of procedures on how to cover the situation where a procedure wasn't followed properly.

You can order a command to ensure that evals are submitted on time as much as you like but in a Navy of 320,000+ active duty sailors eventually some command somewhere will screw it up, so the Navy has procedures for that case too.
Jacob Applebaum has been targeted in this way as well, afaik, as well as anybody vaguely related to Wikileaks.
I have a IFTTT script that crawls Craigslist for specific keywords and then it emails me the hits. Craigslist generally has a low signal to noise ratio, but I have landed a few things from there.
Save Walter White
I was referring to level of abstraction. At an abstract level, many functions simply describe what something is, not how to get it. Easiest example for me is X to the Y. The naive implementation of calculating that is terrible compared to a good way. Yet both are mathematically the same.

Essentially, the difference between a descriptive equation and an algorithm. :)
except that this is an intellectual challenge, more like a puzzle.

You could pay a puzzle solver to solve a puzzle, but that defeats the purpose.
http://precog.com/
slava @ rethink here. Could you link to the crashing bug you're referring to here? (just so other people have the benefit of learning about it)

EDIT: also, thanks for the kind words!
Exactly right. Something like this seems so easy for them to catch too, I wonder why/how it made it through. Maybe the case was a last-minute addition
No, that's not all the charges flow from. He was arrested for threatening an FBI agent and his family. That's what the initial indictment was about: http://freebarrettbrown.org/files/bb_indictment.pdf.

It gets good on page 4-6.
> Who are you to decide what the world does and does not need?

Presumably a citizen of a democratic state, with the responsibility to oversee and manage its government, including, inter alia, deciding which ends it should serve.