skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am an emigrant to the United States. I had to flee the place I'm from for political reasons (the place was unsafe for me and my family). But yet still I want the people of that place to do well... for two reasons I guess: 1) I just simply want everyone on this earth to do well, no matter what country they're citizens to and 2) because the people I left behind, a lot of them were family, friends. I knew them well, I still keep in touch with them. They're still among my closest friends. I want them to live the remainder of their lives peacefully, happily, prosperously.

I know that you've got a somewhat similar background story as me... you/your family left Bangladesh for a better life. You were lucky in that you were privileged enough to have the means to get out of that place -- you know that a good half of the country did not. So, what about the people still there... surely you care a non-zero amount for their welfare. Right? We live in an interconnected world. Our actions, business decisions, political decisions have an effect on the entire world -- sometimes it's good, sometimes it isn't. An argument could be made that there are people out there in the world who are not doing well because of something that our country did. Right now you have Obama on a tour trying to drum up support for a war. His main reasoning is that America is the police of the world... 400 children were supposedly gassed, and so we have to step in to stop this injustice. There are injustices of different kinds being perpetrated in other countries... what makes them so different from Syria, that they don't deserve our help?

I can understand prioritizing ... first comes the welfare of our own American citizens, and then the rest of the world... but completely ignoring the other world seems like a cruel and selfish thing to do. How is this not obvious?
Maybe I'm cynical and I hope I'm wrong, but I think that you overestimate how important these issues are to typical consumers as well as overestimate how forgiving people are of Microsoft's past sins.
Important note, if you're not familiar with individual plans: be very diligent about reading the fine print, and (if at all possible), finding someone who has direct experience with billing large medical expenses on the plan.

Individual plans often have so many hidden loopholes and exceptions that when you actually get sick, they're totally useless. It's nasty to discover that your insurance company is going to drop you for some bureaucratic detail ("you had acne once? Oh, you didn't tell us that on the application. We're not going to cover your heart surgery.") the first time you really need the coverage.
The animation here is worse than useless, it's confusing. Better if it just flashed instantly from one view to the next without things flying about everywhere.

Edit: That said, to say something nice, the animation is technically done very well.
because there's a better, more powerful tool, which is also easier to use
I studied the Lorem Ipsum (thats why its there) and the "es" doesn't look so hot either next to each other. Or was that "se" hard to tell.

The designer should be proud that the worst problems that can be found by picky people who stare at screens for 12 hours a day are relatively minor and easily fixable. Its a good programming font. Once its an "apt-get" away (and what are its licensing terms? I must have missed that part) I'll probably deploy it and use it.
Would you mind expanding what you wrote in that third paragraph ? All the better if there was a nice youtube video interview with said economist explaining him/herself.
I think that if those jobs can't pay a worker enough to maintain that worker, they should end. Business models based on slavery/poverty should be deprecated.
It's definitely not because some blocks are added and removed. Click on the same year twice and the blocks animate all over the place. The animations are worse than useless -- they actually hinder the ability to compare two years.
When Did Tech Guys Become the Bad Guys?
Scientists to sequence genomes of hundreds of newborns
More reasonable is to say "never expect other people to accept your changes to master".

Even if you are collaborating, feel free to work on master. You just may (probably will) have to knock it over to another branch when it comes time to give it to other people. Think of it like rewriting history with rebase before you push; the objective is to make it look like you did everything 'correctly' the first time through.

Branches are a 'weaker' concept in git than some people seem to think. They are really just labels for commits that can be moved (unlike tags).
When I was a security auditor, finding a PHPMyAdmin instance would make my day. Somehow, the customer would not share in my joy. How peculiar.
I agree and I am looking forward to what you come up with! :)

Passing around statements like 'give everyone a guaranteed basic minimum income' seems to be no better than Marie Antoinette saying "Let them eat cake" ... it's cute because it has a bit of merit(cake would feed people as a basic gauranteed income would give people some money) but it completely and naively oversimplifies everything. :P
NSA spies reportedly exploited iPhone location bug not fixed until 2011
I had a need for a light timer/alarm system to help me wake up at 5:45AM; my ideal solution would be an app, that interfaces to a lamp, where I could set an alarm that would ring my phone in the AM, but also in conjunction with that, turn on a lamp in my room. Basically a wemo, but compatible with more phones
Selector Query (jQuery plugin): element-level media queries
Um the US government employees 10's of millions. Few of them were elected.
Elections are not the only place to drive change. I donate to the EFF monthly because I was impressed to see them actively challenging things in court, which in my opinion is far more effective at driving change long term.
Essentially, this is the road back to serfdom. The key difference being that Medieval serfs worked land on behalf of landowners, whereas in this scenario, they simply provide services.

I agree that it's a social disaster in the making, but I suspect it's a real possibility.
I fear unemployment like I fear the plague. Honestly I don't get anyone that would even jokingly refer to something like "funemployment". In fact, the very word brings up every negative stereotype about unemployed people such that I would hesitate to hire anyone that ever used it.

I've been employed constantly - literally without a day's break - since I was 14. That's 27 years of continuous employment but I still fear unemployment tremendously.
l and 1 look very similar. Aside from that, I think it's a great font.
I suspect that when you are the one in the hot seat, your thinking is something like, "Wow, if I don't stop this we can lose tens of thousands of lives. I'm not going to be the one to let that happen. We'll debate the true meaning and value of freedom later, but right now I'm listening in."
Sorry if I come across as too negative -- I definitely 100% support people trying out new things.

[Edit: I think the rest of this comment was too negative, and the guy submitting it doesn't seem to be the author of the font, which I didn't realize, so was perhaps not really applicable. Never mind!]
Of course location makes a big difference. If you're in a market where the house price to rent ratio is favorable, then it can make sense. Of course, when you sell your house you're on the hook for the 7% commission, plus all maintenance items. The sort of stuff a renter never pays.

I'll just say that I ended up renting when all my friends were telling me I was stupid not to buy. Three years later I walked away from my rental after paying $30K total in rent, while my friends ended up losing more than $30K when the price of houses dropped (only 10%). That doesn't even include the mortgage payments they made as well. All in all, they paid twice what I did for a place to live.

Also, home owners often forget to include the cost of their down payment. If you put $100K down and your house appreciate 2% per year (which is pretty decent) you're out the extra 3-4% the renter made by keeping that money invested in the market.

I think we can agree that owning a house sometimes is a good thing, but it certainly isn't the best financial move for everyone.
Disappointing. Whenever I hear people say "there needs to be a balance", what I hear is "I'm with NSA/the government on this one" - because that's exactly what everyone saying that are actually saying. It's what Nancy Pelosi said when asked about it, and she meant the same thing. Same with Bill/Hillary Clinton. If they're not outraged about what the NSA and the administration are doing, then they most likely support it.
How Much Does It Cost To Make An App?
That's most likely untrue unless you find a rent controlled apartment or you compare apples to oranges in housing. Sure if you compare an $800/month 1-bedroom flat to the mortgage on a quarter million dollar home, there will not be parity, but you need to compare apples to apples. In my area, $800/month is standard for a very modest 1-bedroom apartment with maybe heat paid. $800/month can also pay the mortgage and utilities on a small 3-bedroom rambler.

Rent tends to increase exponentially at around 2-3% per year. The difference is that generally homes are a store of money in relation to inflation and rent is not. On a fixed 30-year mortgage, that $800/month will only fluctuate with the cost of utilities and taxes.

The obvious tradeoff is that it's easier for a renter to become mobile to follow jobs and presumably increased pay, but really it's a lifestyle choice.

Here, the NY Times made this all into a graphic awhile back.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/buy-rent-calcula...
I've seen a similar thing in projects that are in trouble: the relevant manager demotes the person responsible for the failure but leaves them on the project. Only your failure can validate their failure. In your examples, if their ERP software is being replaced, I suspect it's hard not to see it being declared a failure.

Another thing I've heard about what some called the "Procrustean bed" of SAP is that it can get terrifically resisted by stakeholders because it insists on rational business processes, and plenty of companies aren't run very rationally.

My family saw that while computerizing one doctor's office in 1980: after the data entry was done, the printer would just not stop in the first accounts receivable cycle. Turned out the office workers sent out a fixed number of bills per month (something like 200?), no matter how many actually needed to be sent. They didn't totally understand what was happening, but they knew "the computer would tell all".
No, you can't. It's a pervasive and harmful meme that JS crypto code is easy to inspect. But it's not:

* If 100 different users are served the code, it's easy to pick 1 unsophisticated user out and serve them something different.

* Even if your users are sophisticated, they effectively have to install the code every time they use it, so any inspection they did yesterday will help them not-at-all today

* Browser Javascript code is influenced from all sorts of places across the DOM, meaning that you need element- by- element, attribute- by- attribute inspection of the entire page context (and this is before we get into things like caching) to have any clue what a piece of JS code might be doing

* The browser itself offers you no mechanism to hash and verify the whole runtime, so there's no way to lock in a specific inspected cryptosystem; even if you have the SHA2 hashes for your crypto .js, you won't have it for every point in the DOM that can override methods in that code

Leaning on browser javascript for cryptography is a bad idea that, I think, shows a fundamental disrespect for the security needs of actual real people who will be fooled into relying on it. I strongly advise you to go in some different direction.
This post seems to be targeted to our favorite NTWTFK archetypes. No ability? No problem. No knowledge about computers? No problem. No experience? No problem. After all, we have cloud social viral app store now. School? Worthless. Learn rails in two days and sell your company for $50 million dollars. (That gets a qualifier added in a footnote of "just kidding, everything I said above isn't true, you'll actually need to know things. I'm practicing being a motivational speaker. How am I doing? Vote on HN.")

The "just quit and do imaginary things" equation changes rapidly when you have a talented engineer giving up $250k/year at google to play fantasy startup land.

As much as we read about up and to the right success, happy luck after moving to The Bay Area, and becoming multi-millionaires after two years (or just six months if you're great at tricking people), it doesn't happen so magically.

At least you're keeping the dream alive?
I do have something that I have in mind that I think will appear in my obituary. I've known it since late teenager, and I knew it won't earn me bread. That was why I came into CS, because I knew it would earn me bread, and, well, I was good at it and enjoyed it.

Some of my peers in university never liked that I acknowledged blatantly that I've come to CS for better job prospects. Sure, I do find CS very neat and enjoying. I love solving problems, making things from the scratch, but the problem that I will dedicate my life into has already been found, in early stages of my life.

What I don't understand is why my existence in the field with impure intentions infuriate them.

I plan to keep myself educated and learned to keep coding until my retirement. I actually enjoy developing. I don't consider development as boring day job. It's my passion, just not the passion of my life. I'm sick and tired of perspective that views my attitude as impure in the tech world.
I agree. I was just trying to imagine what Apple's will do since they have been trying for years to eliminate the file system for the every-day user, even on OSX (iTunes, iPhoto, Notes, etc.)
On Android I use the K-9 Mail app with APG for encryption, works like a charm.
Agreed. This is absolute nonsense. You don't go back for another visa every time you leave the country with an L-2.

Shame on OP, not only for lying, but doing such a piss-poor job at it.

Shame on HN for blindly upvoting this garbage. I thought we were better than reddit.
Storify attempted a monetization plan 5 months ago: http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/18/storify-business-plan/

I guess that didn't work as well as hoped.
Would you please describe some of the faulty arguments for the "minimum guaranteed income" and also maybe link to the credible economic arguments to contrast? Otherwise you aren't really providing any information to further the discussion. Thanks!
One thing I wish this article talked about: Sometimes, people are brutally honest with little tact. If you're overly sensitive, you might think that such a person is being mean or being a jerk - but they have your best interests in mind, because they are telling you either a factual truth or an unvarnished personal opinion.

The reason why they are brusque is not because 'they have been abused' but because, the tolerance for bullshit is low - because of two things 1) they have seen bullshit bring down otherwise promising projects or ideas, and they don't want that to happen; 2) they percieve that varnishing your emotions or opinions with too much tact increases the cognitive load required by the recipient to 'get to the truth'.

Whether or not being brusque or diplomatic actually is effective is debatable. Nonetheless, I think missing this very important concept is generally bad.

In some fields, like science, having to deal with people who will trash your idea with honest commentary - that makes you think twice about what you are doing - is far, far, far better than having to deal with the silent judgement of a failed experiment that lets you down dispassionately, and wondering, "why didn't anyone care enough to tell me I was stupid to try this".
It would be really cool if you could use a PS4 plus one of these boxes to do dual screen co-op as an alternative to the usual split-screen local co-op.

This is certainly a niche use (and Sony may not see it as being in its interest since it might cost them a small number of full PS4 sales), but it would be pretty cool and Sony has done plenty of nichey things in the past like using 3D tvs to do full screen co-op where each user sees a different image on the same tv.
I know, I know... I just snapped a little and ranted, perhaps out of the place.

As for the added piece, I think I've responded it on the other comment in this thread: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6354885)
Oh boy are you right. I read and read about marketing and promotion for startups and they all seem to say how simple it is to just use your connections and social influence to get lots of initial signups.
When you don't have that card to play, you are just another piece of sand in the ocean trying to get noticed.
It's been a frustrating experience trying to get people to my startup to even check it out. I commend all those that were able to do so.
I'm not sure mass surveillance is necessarily evil, but it certainly is something we should fight against. It seems to me that there are essentially four routes we can take:

a) The legal route - donate to EFF and friend https://www.eff.org/ - and hope that in 8-10 years it takes this thing to get through the courts, all this will be found illegal.

b) The legislative route - stage protests, pour money into congressional and presidential candidates who believe privacy is a right, fund lobbyists, find candidates that believe in privacy and push them to run, punish officials with expensive reelection campaigns for those who don't.

c) The encryption route - make encryption easier to use, push forward stronger minimum encryption standards, push for IPv6 (mandatory IPsec support), push for an end-to-end encryption standard for HTML with encryption/decryption done by the browser for elements on a page/posted content (for things like webmail), constant vigilance against vendor-introduced security weaknesses, etc.

d) The disinformation route - flood the internet with enough noise that it becomes cost prohibitive and technically unfeasible to have any confidence in the results coming out of any big data analytics system monitoring internet communications.

.

Now, the encryption route seems to be what people around here generally focus on since it is a technical solution to the problem and most of us are technical people. It unfortunately is also the most difficult since it requires end-user participation and trust in everyone from your OS vendor to your CPU vendor.

The disinformation route is also a technical solution, but it can be carried out by a much smaller group of people though some of us might have issue with effectively spamming the internet and in order to create the right kind of disinformation, you have to know what they're looking for in the first place and the resources to fake interactions that looks similar.

The legal route is something we can all do. It is slow, but donating money to lawyers is relatively painless for most of us.

The legislative route requires organization and mass participation. So far, people aren't angry really enough about it to do anything. There is no charismatic leader leading the charge. As far as I know, there isn't even a PAC we could donate to that would fight the good fight.
Can someone explain how a little wrapper around LXC gets major magazine articles and hype, whereas the people who've been doing the real hard work for years get no attention at all?
the main issue with pgp... and really i mean the gpg implementation, which everyone but symantec uses, is that its far from user frienly. its unintuitive even for experts. its not impossible to use either but its pretty painful to setup.

that and being misunderstood, both design and some functionalities
I agree - one of the areas it would be great to have some development work done around is making replication administration simpler and easier.

One feature which would be really nice to have is the ability to do a manual switchover, ie making the existing master into a replica and an existing replica into the new master.

Another poster mentioned repmgr which looks good but hasn't had a release in sometime ( https://github.com/2ndQuadrant/repmgr/blob/master/HISTORY ) with 2 new Postgres releases since, although there does seem some sporadic work on a new beta.
I agree 100% with the idea that we need to build the next generation web-of-trust so that from the user's perspective it looks like a social networking app/game.

Trust grows organically as your interact with others. Our computational model of "trust" needs to work the same way.

Part of the problem with existing web-of-trust usability is that it makes "trust" too explicit and coarse. It would make more sense to tell the user "this message is signed by the same person you've had 70 conversations with before, and who has liked 40 of your photos" or "this message is signed by someone you've never interacted with before, but they have a long history of interacting with your friends X, Y, and Z".
I think that there should have been example usage of the new font within the web page rather than a link to an image...

That said, I like the font, so am also dismayed that there is no download available.

Which formats are going to be released?
The problem is that this kind of technology is incompatible with creating a lucrative business. Investment seeks out prospects of creating a new middlemen for high-margin success. But if users don't have to trust the server, that means they can easily switch to a different one. So you're left in a highly competitive market of selling commodity storage and bandwidth instead of the scalable home run that VCs seek.

I do think this is where our technologies have needed to head for at least the past ten years. But real progress occurs slowly, and most of the tech community's attention is captured by the VC-fueled marketing circus.
Crowd dynamics is a factor missing from the list. In my opinion, the best time to do a startup is when few others are doing them. I actually think now is relatively bad, because pretty much every endeavor has become difficult due to competition: hiring, paying rent (in silicon valley), getting users, getting press, etc etc.

I agree that a lot of the grunt work has been streamlined, but I think the outcome is influenced more by resource competition than by operational hurdles (e.g. processing credit cards or allowing users to share with friends).

UPDATE: I should admit that, while there have been better (less crowded) periods to start companies in the past, there's no guarantee that we'll ever have less crowded times than now.
Try to keep in mind that the generally accepted wisdom that you glean from regularly reading HN comes from a very narrow segment of the population. That's not a negative criticism; in fact that's probably why it's such a good source of curated tech news. But trust your own instincts on what you should spend your time doing.

Personally I find the average work-life balance to be a little out of whack here.
There's no download link. That means the font doesn't exist. And what grinds my gears even more: by submitting NOTHING the submitter has earned by hate and the maker of the font, no matter how nice the font may or may not be, will ensure that I will never mention the font to anyone. And if anyone dares name the font they will be getting an earful in return.

Submitting garbage (non-existent garbage) like that is like promising to do something... later. And never delivering.