skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Following past trends the challenge for Microsoft is what next to copy

Stopped reading right there.
Sorry - I missed the 'non treaty' mention in your post. Doesn't that pretty much mean H1Bs (and maybe all the investor visas)?
While I agree that it would increase employee freedom to have them bear the cost and not be tied to the company, I doubt that it would end up with increasing income - in theory, all the Silicon Vally companies are already paying as much as they can to attract talent.

edit: actually, there is of course also O, L, P and I. 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. L perhaps has some overlap.
Correct. Let's see if big corps are so keen truly on merit.
Yes Linus. Why don't you use RAID ?
> but please realize that per the first line of the HN FAQ, this is on topic

Hang on - there's a big difference between saying "not all political stories are off topic" and saying "this political topic is on-topic".

Many of the NSA submissions are clearly off topic and have no purpose for HN.
Anatomy of the Cricket Huddle
Best PR ever.
Most drives, when they "wear out", simply flip to read-only mode. At least you can get your data at that point.

Mechanical drives, on the other hand, are simply dead.
iotop(8) is pretty useful.
HP's colorful Chromebook 14 costs $299 this holiday season
Nokia's Fall Could Help Finland
I don't think all political discussion should be banned from HN (I do but it's an unreasonable stance, I get that). This NSA story is a unique case, however. It's purposefully being dragged along for the explicit reason of keeping political discussion active, and it's doing that job very well, and for a good cause. I'm highly glad this is how Snowden and Greenwald decided to release this information.

HOWEVER, this is not the only website on the Internet. There's nothing special or novel gained from posting these stories to HN. No one here has any extra or particular insight into these stories.

Please read the essay I linked to. In a conversation about iPhone hardware, a person making a comment will be stating facts, with conclusions and verifiable information. That person is either wrong or right, with little grounds for confusion or grey-area. It's not up to how I feel how many hours of battery life the iPhone is going to grant a user.

Political discussions and religious discussions do not have the benefit of this rigor. Everyone's opinions end up being treated equally, even when they're absolutely not equal. It's a terrible place to try to conduct an intellectual discussion, and I'd like to see this place maintain its reputation for a high level of discourse.

This is currently the first comment on the latest Snowden development (nontechnical), here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6369472

Compare this to another submission comment (technical), here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6367943

The nontechnial comment provides me nothing but an individual's viewpoint. I can't take that anywhere, I learned nothing except that one individual thinks something, and I'm in no way a better engineer or entrepreneur for having read it. The technical comment, however? Now I have a better understanding of the submission as I've gotten an alternative (slightly different use-case) implementation. That's what HN is here for.

I want things I can walk away from HN with, as I'm here to learn. Nontechnical Snowden stories, as it turns out, aren't stories which provoke any kind of interesting comments on HN, and are therefore interfering with a person's ability to use HN to learn and grow effectively. Therefore, they should go.
But has half as many syllables thus takes half as long to say/type. Who likes wasting time?
That's why the hourly backups of a system like Time Machine is great.

I've had several drives fail, and I've only lost about half an hour of work, excluding that which was pushed, picking up almost exactly where I left off.
> So how do you write a Foreach loop from a regular for-loop in your typical imperative language?

By walking through the collection in the update step of the for loop (for languages with less-general version of for than C and friends, this may actually require a while loop rather than a for loop.)

> How do you compose that Foreach loop to make even higher level abstractions like map, filter and fold/reduce?

By abstracting it behind a function call that takes a function (or function reference/pointer, or in particularly limited languages a location to jump the current instruction pointer to) as an argument.

Yes, languages that focus on the functional paradigm (or which have been influenced by it even if it isn't their central paradigm) have syntax which makes this more straightforward than it might be in some other languages,
Great article! Images are a huge bandwidth hog. There is absolutely no need to send desktop sized images to mobile users just to be down scaled by browsers. While new markup standards such as srcset (href="http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/srcset/w3c-srcset) and the picture element (http://www.w3.org/community/respimg/) are trying to help, they still place an additional and unnecessary workload on designers...and they primarily consider screen resolution and size.

Designers should let the server side start helping them solve front end problems.

We've developed Pixtulate (http://www.pixtulate.com) to right size and optimize images on the fly before they are sent over the wire. Each visitor, mobile or not, gets the right image for them.

The author is right though, lazy loading of content is key!
More Than Just A Pretty Sight
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P4 Window Cleaning, a Breckenridge window cleaner since 1996, offers advice on other things to look for when choosing professionals who do Summit County window cleaning. They suggest that finding a company that is insured and offers a guarantee shows responsibility and pride in workmanship. A window cleaning company that specializes in high work should have SPRAT certified rope access technicians and be in good standing with the organization. Follow these tips and you’re sure to have a beautiful view.
If you hadn't written your own script, I'd recommend you use rsnapshot [1] instead. It is based on rsync. You can set up a schedule with multiple generations.

[1] http://www.rsnapshot.org
I'm sorry, you're complaining that Hacker News isn't focusing on the construction industry enough? I don't personally feel that's part of its core 'mission', but I'm open to an explanation. Any other industries you feel we should be including as well?
99.99999% is not good enough.

That's not the way OpSec works guy.

I realize my view is strongly informed by the military... but I view this as essentially OpSec for the civilian leadership, and the principles can't be that different. I may be wrong in my interpretation of this as OpSec, but I doubt it.

If you need that clause in an agreement, FOR ANY REASON... then you need to re-evaluate the agreement. Full stop.
>One nice thing about Ubuntu still being based on Debian is that it's easy to install enough to satisfy Steam and all the games, since Ubuntu is what they target, while leaving the Ubuntu UI off and doing whatever you want underneath.

On my Arch system, Steam works perfectly well for me.
Not actually a big fan of the New Atheists. Don't recall reading Greenwald's ripping of them but I'd probably agree with most of it.

Other than Citizens United, I can't recall an issue where I've thought Greenwald was wrong on principle. I can recall a lot where I thought he was naive, annoying or obtuse. Sort of like RMS.

And in this case, it's a very good thing that he's over the top and naive. Someone who was understated and pragmatic probably wouldn't publish this at all or get as much attention if they did.
The number of layoffs the article mentions is worldwide numbers. Not just inside US.
H1b employees are cheaper, decently trained. A lot of companies favor such employees which add to the local workforce which in turn means shipping less jobs to India and China.
Use dropbox as a remote (bare) repo, not a working directory
Surpringly well. I told her about the bet and she took everything in stride. She actually laughed when I told her. Shes a pretty awesome girl
Also have a look at "dstat - versatile tool for generating system resource statistics".

It uses colors, so it's a bit easier to interpret at first sight.

It's a simple "emerge dstat" away in Gentoo.
I find if vaguely disturbing that John Stoffel suggests to Linus that he mirror two discs in the future (presumably meaning a RAID-1 arrangement) and Linus responds with "I long ago gave up on doing backups."

Linus conflating RAID with backup?!? Surely not. My world feels turned upside down... >smile<
There are no guarantees. Ever. It's better to acknowledge that the best intentioned (which this is, admittedly, not) processes can screw up and plan for these screw ups.

It's why we have cops and a legal system instead of locking everyone in padded rooms.
How to design breakthrough inventions [video]
So now the government needs to protect incompetent HR managers and management because they have unrealistic expectations towards hiring?
She looks pretty; At least for guys pretty = memorable. When I was single I was pretty bold with the ladies and I'd have flirted with her first (perhaps getting shot down, oh well), remembered at least some demographic information, and then used it to completely F with my coworker's mind for awhile. When I was younger I was quite the practical joker.

Note the convoluted written responses about not talking to anyone he knew and so forth which technically does not exclude the girl, herself, saying her own name.

The other alternative is she's somebody's buddy/family member so it would be trivial to know before hand that she's so and so's ex or sister or whatever and given that intel, figure it out.
> What are you going to do with that attack vector?

Huh? Nothing... this was a just a fun bet between two friends with no bad intentions. I didn't discover anything, as evidenced by the dozens of others in this discussion with similar ideas.
Can I try to get this straight - Five Eyes countries all co-operate in grabbing as much traffic and metadata globally as they possibly can. this raw data is also shared with at least one favoured nation.

Analysed, filtered data can then be accessed in BigData style to gather a digital picture of almost anyone globally, covering financial transactions, phone, email and medical.

out of this comes (unsurprisingly) actionable information that covers not terrorism but more common international and domestic crime (drug smuggling, other organised crime)

however due to legal and political issues the information cannot be given directly to law enforcement so it is provided via cut outs - departments in FBI / DEA who get tip offs from "anonymous sources" and pass it on.

A similar legal niceitie is performed by say having Canada process raw data about US officials and the passing on useful data to the NSA (thus no country ever actually spies on its own people)

on top of this Israeli intelligence get raw data and probably join in the game of deniable whispers.

I think that's about it so two things

1. is there a wiki where we can all update / view what is know and provable? if not who wants to help?

2. is there any evidence they have gotten into VISA ? that might tip the balance against this program publically

3. WTF !?
I got a new Thinkpad with an SSD at my job last year and it died after 10 months. Luckily I had pushed everything but it was still mighty inconvenient. I just put one in my desktop and will be backing up religiously.

This is just one data point, I know, but I have never (knock on wood) had a hard drive of any kind fail before.
Generally accepted physics doesn't recognize that an unpowered projectile launched upward can accelerate away

Really? What is your source for this extraordinary claim? You yourself said that the equations you used are generally accepted. That means people already understand their consequences. The fact that people don't agree with you about how to apply the equations in a particular scenario doesn't mean people don't believe the equations.

The blog explains the acceleration away of supernovae

No, it doesn't, because its prediction is not the same as what we actually observe.

The "deceleration, then acceleration" is an implication based on assumptions, not something observed

No, the apparent deceleration, then acceleration is what we actually observe. The question is how to interpret these observations. The standard interpretation is that the deceleration, then acceleration are real, not just apparent. Your interpretation is that they are only apparent; but your model can't even reproduce the apparent profile we observe, so your interpretation is not supported by its own model.

So when we look close to us we'll see evidence of deceleration, and when we look further from us we'll see evidence of acceleration

No, you have it backwards. When we look close to us, we see evidence of acceleration (because we're looking at what happened more recently in the universe's history), and when we look farther away, we see evidence of deceleration (because we're looking at what happened earlier in the universe's history). Your model does not reproduce that observation, so it's not a valid explanation.
Why do companies use the H1B process if they can use the Green card process? Is it just that they have more control over the employee? Or the process is actually easier or cheaper?
Corporations themselves are artificial. Looks like an artificial thing wants a change in another artificial thing, then. Either way, the change has externalized costs that the corporations themselves won't have to bear in a society that upholds the laws that allow them to exist in the first place. To me it sure sounds like a subsidy.
Thx! I RTFA and somehow missed this.
I'm really glad to see CoreOS taking this path, forged by the likes of VMware's ESXi and Joyent's SmartOS. It truly is the only way to run scalable infrastructure.
Of the numbered main ones - but the problem is all of them get posted here - the THQ, FrozenByte, Origin etc bundles... They are far more frequent then you think: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=humble...
I worry that our quality of living is unsustainable. Maybe 20 to a house is really the only rational way to live in the coming years. Maybe we can only sustain the life we have now, because we do so at the expense of other nations.

That said:

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

So are wages, and... well... everything.

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

I really don't see that happening. Consumers don't look at a company's overall costs and conclude "your profit margin are way too high, give me a better deal."
But infrastructure is paid for separately. I'm ignoring the cost of the highways for water bottle shipping, because highways are needed with or without them.

Basically, since people already have computers and power for them to do things completely unrelated to getting this media, the 'cost' of a copy is in the same range as asking for one. Tap your phone against someone else's and you're done, for example. And if you think asking is a real cost then you've defined things so that it's impossible to be past scarcity, so I reject such a definition.
when we look at various distances from the Earth we see various redshifts

The redshifts are not the only evidence we look at; we also look at the relationship between apparent brightness of objects and their redshifts. See Ned Wright's cosmology FAQ for a good brief overview:

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#CC
Top Resources for Understanding Startup Funding
I've been toying with the idea of doing an OU maths degree. Not for the credentials but because I'd like to be good at maths... I hate not being able to understand it well. However I'm dismayed to hear the cost is now £15k.
One man's trash is another man's treasure. This ultra specific nature of the rooms is one thing I liked about turntable over other services. I found everyone else's "Radio" paled in comparison to community based playlists. They played the same "safe" songs over and over again; however, with turntable you get people trying to introduce new stuff while still under the heavy pressure of the crowd to meet peoples expectations.
It may go against the "idea" or motivation of ChromeOS, but my mother ain't uploading several GB of photos and videos so that she can sit on a couch with her friends and chat about that crap over a bottle of wine.

Whether or not it fits with the motivation of the OS, it is what the OS needs if it wants to be something I can recommend to anybody. They are making an OS for people that, as far as I can tell, do not exist: technically inclined and willing users who have very restricted requirements.

I know, I know, "most people do nothing but Facebook". That is the standard justification of ChromeOS, I've heard that all before... In my experience however those people still perform some (really quite minimal) non-intensive local tasks that ChromeOS falls flat on. I'll sooner tell those people to get an iPad than a Chromebook.

And to be clear, ChromeOS does let you browse images locally, so that is already something they have consigned themselves to doing. ChromeOS isn't saying "this isn't something that you can't or shouldn't do". The problem is that they do it poorly; the UI is shoddy.
First: selective removal of a barrier that applies to everyone is indeed a form of subsidy. I highly doubt American companies are asking for completely open borders, allowing citizenship to anyone who can physically make it to the U.S. Instead they want us to keep most people out, but let in specific people that help their specific bottom lines.

Second: immigration limits are not an artificial barrier. One of the basic purposes of a government is to establish and defend borders. Allowing immigration is an affirmative action on the part of the existing citizenship of a country to admit new members into its fold. It's an affirmative action to not just admit those new members, but to integrate them culturally, allow them to participate in the public life of the country, and allow them a voice in political affairs that affect all citizens, new and old. It's a commitment to defending them in case of attack and extending to them and their progeny, in perpetuity, the essential privileges of being a citizen of the country.
Ask HN: Has anyone tried the hamster ball robot?
You know which one I'm talking about, http://xkcd.com/413/. Although nowadays it would be a Raspberry Py instead of EEE, and it would make friends with Siri instead of Roomba. But the Python bit would stay the same. ;-)
64-bits has little to do with amount of addressable memory. In fact, 32-bit and 64-bit processors can address just as much. For example, 32-bit ARMv7 Cortex A15 can address up to 1TB of memory.

The only difference is amount of physical RAM you can map at once. Only virtual address space is limited in 32-bit processors. But even then, you can change the virtual-to-physical mappings at runtime. It's only inconvenient.
What do you do with the old ones?
There is some redeeming social value in publicly defusing paranoia.

Coincidentally this is 9/11 day... It turns out that anyone of room temp or above IQ can easily do something fairly awful, but the fact it almost never happens provides some faith in humanity that basically no one (on a statistical basis) is actually awful.
Clickable link: http://xkcd.com/413/
True, but they are related though. Both worlds don't happen in a bubble, eventually the consequences affect all of us here. We have one part of the nation axing millions of people without any intention/need to hire again, and another set saying they are in dire need of employees. Logically the companies would look at the existing labor pool, and try investing in training for the most capable of that set whether its 10% 20% or even 2% of that pool.

However none of that is happening. Companies do not want to do that of course, and why would they? The government subsidizes the training through college. The loans are unaffordable, and the returns are not even there for anyone other than the brightest/most capable (however that's scored) 20%. Companies don't care, they aren't on the hook for those costs. Now that that pool is nearly exhausted, companies are lobbying Congress for immigration reform that will bring cheaper younger talent over. Companies assume minimal risk in the current format. And by forcing the # of the visas up, they can suppress wages, there was an article even on IT wages last week about that. This current format is bad for US Citizens, Green Card Holders, and a substantial set of Visa Holders as well.
I have Arq (http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/) set to back up my ~/git folder every hour. At most I can lose an hour of work.

This came in handy once when I accidentally did the equivalent of rm -rf ~/git. Lost 54 minutes of work.

Arq is Mac-only, but you could accomplish the same thing with https://www.tarsnap.com/ and a cron job. Both are changes-only backups so there shouldn't be a huge performance hit.

I also use Time Machine when I'm at home but only sort of trust it.
A few more Hollywood movies to keep y'all quiet.
No, status quo means "the existing state" (i.e. how things are right now).
Senator X accidentally sends an email Y from an alternate email address that the US doesn't have directly linked to them (maybe they just created it). This email gets filtered with no reason to assume it's from senator X.

Cooperating government Z gets email Y, and discovers it's from senator X because they look more closely and connect dots the US may not have. No process could have prevented this (except stopping the sharing entirely). It's a reasonable clause.
I feel like the majority of folk are treating this as a purely intellectual challenge. Which it sort of is (to the HN crowd, since the actual photo information is missing) but please, let's not forget the context here.
Is it just me or is this spectacularly creepy? "I bet you can't cyber stalk my friend! I bet you we can!" I could understand if this was at defcon or a security/privacy related conference and all parties involved were in the field, but just cyber stalking some random woman? What's the point?
Silicon Valley is basically just Wall Street wearing a clown suit...
Are you mistaking header and head?
Sure. I'm saying, personally, I'm perfectly fine with the numbered HIBs being posted. The others I could care less.
Paul Graham has said that any company that hires you is, economically, acting as a proxy for the customer. The rate at which they value you (salary + equity + bonus) is an attempt to estimate your value to their customers. As an engineer starting your own company, you're appealing their judgement and opting to be valued directly by users.

But wait! The venture capitalist that invests in you is also acting as a proxy, only for the limited partners. Can you appeal the venture capitalist's judgement and opt to be valued directly by investors, angels or otherwise?
There are some laptops with two hard drives, but whether or not these models are nice to use, I don't know. Or maybe they have other hardware with poor linux support....
There is so much misinformation flying around. Most H1B can change job in 3 months or so. Many do.
DRM free Linux gaming is still lagging behind though. We need GOG on board to boost the progress.