skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I assume other countries' currently spy on us. Maybe no individual country has quite the intelligence capability that we do, but the US is one giant target and I imagine the combined intelligence of every country that spies on us is fairly close to our own capability.

That doesn't make me feel any different that the NSA does it to others. If anything, it means that the NSA is necessary to even the odds.
I love both. Seriously.
> fixing the issues you raised means starving people to death.

No not everywhere.
Backend, just because frontend programming is a mess, and for the web, doubly so.
There are fewer frameworks than there are domains out there, so audience of hackernews tends to connect over frameworks rather than domains.
An anonymous donor was willing to match 20,000 dollars in donations, but only if 20,000 dollars were donated by others. The deadline for reaching the mark is September 22 2013. As of August 30 2013 they had 3,000 dollars toward the goal; though this was prior to the recent burst of news thanks to the gag order.

http://freebarrettbrown.org/fundraising-drive/

I don't know how far they've gotten in the meantime, but I'm happy to see this issue getting more attention.

Meanwhile, the new Project PM website --wiki.project-pm.org-- appears to be back up! I'm hoping to do some cross-referencing of the various releases of the past few years. See if anything has been missed or passed over.
But nobody in the US says, "We have to make sure China retains its ability to hack into Google."
And for a moment we all thought that skeuomorphic designing was on its way out. Apparently it is, except for cards, which are <breathless> "the future of the web" </breathless>

The biggest reason why companies & brands are taking to cards, and why consumers should be wary of them is the _seamless and transparent transfer of our demographic & contextual information with every click_.

>> The aggregation depends on:
>> The person consuming the content and their interests, preferences, behaviour.
>> Their location and environmental context.
>> Their friends’ interests, preferences and behaviour.
>> The targeting advertising eco-system.

Cards take away the control & choice from users about what information they want to transmit to brands through their browsing. That can only be done when we're constantly logged into services from Google, Twitter, Pinterest etc.

I'm not sure that is the future web I dream of.
Oh don't worry folks! He's got a black friend!
Obligatory: http://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence...
Definitely backend.

Backend is where the client knows what she wants.

Frontend is where the client thinks he knows what his clients want.

Big difference.
Data formatted in a regular pattern so that we can easily parse it.
If Google comes up with a much more sane version of or alternative to IPsec, deployed on all their boxes, it would be an amazing improvement for the world.
>career scientists get to make a name for themselves

Yea, there's so much money in climate science, as opposed to say, energy extraction.
There is no law preventing a 17 year old from applying to YC, nor do we have any rules prohibiting a 17 year old from applying to YC. But as the other commenter noted, the problem with minors is that they cannot enter into contracts that are not voidable at the option of the minor. In California, there is a lot of case law on this subject related to minors in the entertainment industry. If a minor is accepted into YC, then we would do our best to find a work-around.
This made me chuckle:

> The “build your rig” workstation budget was a good idea... at least until one of our new hires requested one [...] Suddenly we had hires asking to use their own laptops and spend their budgets on expensive peripherals. Others wanted to assemble systems that were sure to be an IT nightmare and high-maintenance. And all the while I knew everyone should be using Mac OS X because it would be clean and simple.

Isn't this the whole point of the perk? All corporates want you to use their own clean, consistent, standard desktop, even though we have more powerful tools at home customised to our likings.

Letting me use my own laptop and giving me a nice huge monitor and chair to pair it with at work would cost less and come with real productivity benefits.
I'm going to throw out a wild theory here: you're not a woman, are you?
Aeon Financial, LLC, aka CapitalSource Bank

http://www.ilsos.gov/corporatellc/CorporateLlcController?com...

I'm not quite sure what the HN policy is on personal details, but you can find the individual whose name is on the ownership of Aeon Financial on court documents across the US for tax lien purchases.

It appears this document that appeared in a google search indicates that staff at CapitalSource were trying to separate the tax lien operation from the business by operating under the DBA Aeon Financial: http://www.delaney2012.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/09-07-...

Google "capitalsource bank fbo aeon financial" for a wealth of results.
Which are the most commented posts?
Junior developers become CTO's of startups all the time, it's really not that remarkable, all you need to be is a co founder and since such teams are usually CEO and CTO, the roles are quite obvious.

The main mistakes that junior engineers make when they accept the role of CTO is to think it's a 100% technical job. It's not, especially when you have fewer than 30 employees.

The CTO title is pretty meaningless unless the company either has > 30 employees or has at least one successful product.
Grow Beyond with Google: Guide for Technical Development
Grow Beyond with Google: Guide for Technical Development https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_Y4kz709TVwaVZfdnl3blI3UWs/...
I sympathize with Barret Brown; the NY times article unfortunately is rife with the attitude that 'journalists' (as in 'the class of people that gets that special 1st Amendment protection 'of the press') have certain characteristics or accreditations - whereas, his actions should be protected by the 1st amendment regardless of whether or not he is a journalist.
Actually in the world of cars, most expensive luxury car brands are manufactured or owned by the "poor man's" version.
Fiat owns Ferrari. Honda owns Acura. Tata owns Jaguar.

Summing this move into "poor man's" is just too simplistic.

Daimler manufacture Mercedes and Smart. Smart isn't a poor man's mercedes
Test higher prices, like you've done so far.

Some price point is too high, but you won't now what it is until you've found it via testing.
I have heard several variants of this opinion, from several people, and it always blows my mind.

Steve Jobs practically invented garish colored plastic housings. Don't you remember the iMac? In translucent 'Bondi Blue' and then every color under the sun? And how somehow just about every product on earth -- even like kitchen gadgets and car air fresheners and shit -- suddenly started coming out in weird-colored plastic housings?

And then how Apple-under-jobs returned to that playbook for their music player line?

I think the people who now say Steve Jobs wouldn't have made a cheaper colored-plastic-clad iPhone are the same ones who now say he would never have worn stonewashed jeans with huge non-functional thigh and knee patches.[1]

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE
Oh dear, sounds like frames again...
This article is over 2 years old, not only is most of the "chart" out of date, it also cites facts which are no longer true.

Why did this get posted?
I'm the biggest Android fan out there and would only own an Android device ... but they don't stand the test of time as well (especially if you're not into the ROM scene). An Android phone from that era with stock software is going to be very very slow compared to an iPhone 4. I don't know why, but it's true.
Why???

Anyway, FYI, using people's complete formal names is a long-standing editorial policy at the NY Times and some other established papers. They referred to Steve Jobs as Steven P. Jobs, too.
This is glossing over one important point though: Most people don't frequently replace their PCs with new ones.

I still use a rig built 4 years ago. My mom uses one that's about the same, but before that, she owned a Dell tower that was 7 years old. Most of my friends own PCs that are 2-5 years old, but none of them would ever say that they use the web less. Besides Facebook (which is being shunned lately by folks I know) and Twitter, the web is quite vast and email, games, docs and music aren't the only things to be created or consumed.

Now I've had to replace my phone quite a lot more and I got a new tablet recently. These things will add considerable weight just by the rapid obsolescence and frequency of upgrades. The same applies to laptops (though I've used my old Inspiron 8200 with XP recently).

PCs enjoy a different domain in that regard.
I'm skeptical that the shown modifications lead to the claimed performance differences. Those leaded capacitors have no effect above 1MHz because their performance is dominated by the inductance of their package. Cable modems operate between 5MHz and 200MHz, where all power supply transients will be served by those little ceramic surface-mount caps the author bypassed with leaded tantalums. Above about 1GHz even those are useless and the power supply decoupling is achieved by the capacitance between the copper planes of the circuit board.

So it kinda looks like racing stripes on a Geo to me. The claimed improvements could be due to almost anything including unplugging the coax and plugging it back in differently, atmospheric conditions, time of day, etc.
Depends. I find both complement each other workflow-wise. When I'm stuck on back end problems, I use front end work as procrastination and momentum to get back to the back end.
I'm also on ADSL2+ in Perth, my area isn't going to get NBN for the next 3 years. When I've finished moving house I'll open up my modem and have a see if there are similar power noise problems - I've got some decent electronics equipment (scope/SMD soldering station/dmms). If you're in Perth then you're welcome to join in?
So if I drive drunk and mow down a few people... I'm fine as long as I didn't mean to kill people after driving drunk?

Intent doesn't always matter, and in this case of puerile humor it doesn't matter.

The world could be 99% white, and if I spoke from the perspective of a white person, as if white people are God's gift to humans, I'd be insensitive to the 1% of non-white people. I'd be instilling in the minds of non-white children growing up thinking somehow they are worth less, and are lesser human beings. The whole point of political correctness is that you don't have to actively say negative things about other people, races, or religions to have a negative effect on them.

I may not have intended it because of ignorance. I may not have intended it because I have never met a non-white person, and everyone I've met has not been offended by it. But that does not mean my actions are without real consequences to non-white people who happen to hear me when passing by, or from normalizing this action so that later other white people end up adopting this attitude in front of non-white people.

The titstare app is pure and simple objectification of women. That 9 year old programmer is coming into an industry and shown that the most interesting thing about her will probably be trumped by her breasts. She's being placed into a culture she can't genuinely adopt (unless she's bisexual or lesbian) because she's not a man. This is alienation. It may not be intentional, but it does have negative effects due to ignorance.
Now imagine every IT purchase decision in Brazil from now on, "We need a few million dollars of network or computer systems, should we buy it from Cisco or HP or IBM or Microsoft? Hell no! It'll probably have an NSA bug in it."

Repeat for every other country and you have the beginning of the end for the dominance of the American computer industry.
IPhone 5S parody ad: 'the S stands for same'
> If the code works you'd damn well better understand it completely before rewriting

But then, one of the primary reasons that usually motivates a rewrite is that nobody understands the old code. (sometimes acknowledged as such, and other times indirectly in the form of "every time we try to fix a bug we break something else, this code is terrible").
Writers and Their Books: Inside Famous Authors' Personal Libraries (2011)
A fun endeavor for sure and I like that he measured before & after results for comparison, but I'm not convinced that he made a real improvement. He notes that he saw "a 1db increase in downstream levels occurred along with a full 1db increase in S/N" but 1dB is well within the margin of error and day-to-day variations, especially for the imprecise internal power measurement circuits of the modem. In fact, simply adjusting and re-tightening your coaxial cable can easily result in more than a 1dB change. Also, I'm not quite sure where he came up with the 1000:1 reduction in power rail noise, because his waveforms show significantly less (although still significant) noise reduction. Finally, having a 10-ping average of 7ms vs 6ms is very much within the margin of error one would expect to see.

If he really wanted to improve the RF performance of his modem, he should have used small, low-value, surface-mount capacitors instead of the large tantalum capacitors with relatively long leads and large electrolytic capacitors. Cable modems and other RF equipment operate at very high frequencies by definition, and tantalum & electrolytic capacitors with long leads are ineffective at these high frequencies. The long leads of the capacitors act as inductors, which will prevent the high frequency fluctuations from ever even reaching the capacitor.

If you look closely, you can see that he added his tantalum capacitors to the already-present small ceramic decoupling capacitors. If he really wanted to improve the RF performance of the circuit, he would have been better off adding more low-value, surface-mount ceramic capacitors in parallel with the pre-existing ones to help with the high-frequency decoupling, where it counts in an RF circuit. If he was really adventurous, he could splice some ferrite beads in series with the supply lines to form an LC filter for even better noise rejection.

Furthermore, he could have taken measures to improve the S/N ratio of the circuit by improving the shielding around the sensitive RF circuits in the middle of the board. You can see where the designer originally made room for a shield "can" to be soldered over the sensitive components, indicated by the exposed copper rectangle around the heatsink area. However, you may get unlucky if your shield can volume has resonant frequencies in the operating range of the circuit which will trigger feedback and render the circuit inoperable. A safer option would be to add some RF-absorbing foam over the sensitive area to absorb the noise.
Like a window?
Apple Reportedly Opening R&D Center in Taiwan
It is tricky to manage any large company. The more tricky problem for Microsoft is that it heavily depends on old business models. A significant portion of Microsoft profit comes from Windows and Office. Other companies, like Google, can offer competitive products almost for free. That could happen eventually. It won't take Google too much efforts to provide a desktop version of Android and Office-like product. Even at several billion dollars R&D cost, it is still much cheaper than Motorola purchase.

Microsoft enterprise business is hugely competitive. But other than that, it is hard to achieve meaningful profit margin (xbox may earn couple of billions, internet services always lose money, Nokia probably break even for next few years). So the problem is more about innovate than manage Microsoft.
Also because The Onion is actually funny. But then, Onion is written by professional writers and they have very pretty high standards.
the clojure project links to https://github.com/epsil/gll, the last section of which has suggestions and useful links for implementing the algorithm in other languages
Matt,

All I wanted is to file a feedback. And after paying >$1000, not getting anything back, my project (the one that I started and paid for) was closed by a developer, and I can't even leave a feedback! So, what kind of protections do your customers get?
Well i took a look into the matter and as you mention "we are not developers. we are med people", isn't there a possibility you misunderstood the devs? They did explain in their replies that the reason the site crashed for two weeks because of conflicts with the previous site which took a long time to resolve. And from what i understand, you "stopped trusting them" after this incident. I assume you figured it only worked on their servers by some scam and isn't gonna work on your servers. So i hope you see that this suspicion was very baseless.

As for your paying of 75% of the payment, i assume that was AFTER you approved of the site on their servers. So they must have said "see? it's complete. now all we have to do is deploy to your servers" so it made sense to pay them. And so i am not going to blame you for paying them. What i do blame you for is not trusting them.

But yes, generally it is best advised not to pay in advance (but i assume you only paid after seeing a working site).

Either way, blaming this on freelancer.com doens't make any sense what so ever.
> i agree and am also a big believer in the notion that your product usually needs to be 10x better to displace the competition.

Do you have any evidence whatsoever to back this notion up?

Without much effort, I can think of a lot of markets in which this isn't the case. One example: eDiscovery software for law firms. There are young companies gaining traction in this market and they're absolutely not "10x better" than the competition as far as technology, usability and overall sophistication go. Some are actually less robust than the competition but are able to compete on price alone because there isn't always a need for the Cadillac offerings.
Designs where information is haphazardly tiled on the screen without organization or any coherent visual flow are hopefully not the future of the web.
These types of articles are depressing to me because they mask what could be a good moral and legal question behind claims which border on dishonest.

Saying that the Feds are charging Barrett for the crime of "posting a URL" is like saying that the Norwegian police would be charging Breivik for "pulling a metal lever" hundreds of times. I mean sure, he did that, but that's not what the claimed "crime" is.

Imagine a guy gets passed the key to a storage locker by his friends, and is told that the storage locker holds stolen trade secrets, credit cards, etc. This guy had nothing to do with the theft itself, but he knows about it.

Let's say further that this guy duplicates the key and mails it to a gang to do with as they will. If providing that gang access to that locker is illegal then homeboy here has certainly "aided & abetted" in that behavior, even though he did nothing more himself than a) duplicating a key (normally legal) and b) using the mail (normally legal).

The author brings up the point that newspapers have to deal with this issue, but it's not really as much of an "issue" for them at all, as being passed classified data is not inherently illegal, and newspapers still make an effort to avoid printing information which would be dangerous if publically-available. Even the NYT/Guardian's recent reporting about NSA capabilities with regard to crypto didn't spill all the beans, and what links were posted by the newspapers were to documents that the newspapers screened for safety instead of a link to "all the goods".

But certainly the papers wouldn't publish credit card numbers of victims of an identity theft scheme, would they?

Likewise our intrepid, noble and completely objective storywriter uses the maximum legally-possible sentence as a FUD factor without so much as a single reference to the sentencing guidelines which would be used to determine an actual eventual sentence.

There is a question to be asked here: Should these types of forcibly-exfiltrated secrets have any special inherent legal protection? If no, then posting a link to that data should be fine (assuming no other legal protection category applies). If yes, then posting a link to protected data would certainly be a no-no.

The answer isn't obviously "no" either, by the way, otherwise our current protections against identity theft could hardly apply, not to mention the Privacy Act of 1974, medical record protections, etc. But it deserves a better answer than what we have now, which seems to be "throw whatever vague law might fit at it".
IMHO: Schools should be no different than grocery stores, you should be able to shop knowledge and get what you need from any school, teacher or professor. They should not force you into learning something you will never need and waste a billion people's time. They should not teach you anything beyond basics, but encourage you to research on your own for a project, a purpose, a goal that you define yourself.

Schools should build a friendly, personal and nice environment around people, strengthen the weak, speedup the slow and motivate the smart .

tl,dr:Schools should sell individual knowledge, become a more important part of the government, do startup acceleration, be your mentors and community.
> context-dependent grammar makes it possible (and in case of Perl, even very easy) to write WTF code.

Do you really think that a context-dependent grammar will make for easier to understand code? Or more generally, do you really think that a language that is easier to parse is also easier for a human to understand?

...the human brain works very differently from your parser or lexer and code that may be very hard to parse for a computer may be very easy for a human to understand, and in reverse, code that is easy for the computer to parse can be virtually incomprehensible to a human.

If what you say were true, then we would all be using some kind of Lisp, as there's nothing easier to parse, but this is not the current reality. And don't tell me that we aren't because Lisp was inefficient or the AI-winter or anything like that. You can easily express a C-like language in a Lisp style notation. Complicated syntaxes that makes it harder to write parsers tend to be much easier for the human brain to understand, imho. Problems arise when some languages like Perl have rules that are "too relaxed" or "with too many exceptions" and this leads to WTF code.

In fact, looking at the kinds of notations that physicists and mathematicians use (you'd be surprised how "context dependent" mathematical language is, and by "context" I don't even mean lexical context, I actually mean "common set of assumptions held in the minds of most mathematicians about what each notation tends to mean in each context"), I'd say that the human brain is actually aggressively optimized for context-dependent languages!
I don't know if formal code verification is much like hardware verification, but modern hardware like microprocessors and larger FPGA designs undergo verification... and it is so impossibly computationally expensive, the key exercise becomes selecting the most important 0.1% of coverage.

So, if they are similar pursuits, I can't help but imagine complete formal verification of large modern codebases would also be essentially computationally impossible.
It did for my needs. It's super-simple, yet you can choose to use it just via the weekly emails or the web interface.

It's open source as well (in Python for App Engine):
https://github.com/tedpower/snptz

Looking at the code, I noticed it actually supports teams, a feature I've never used but that looks quite functional.
I like a mix of both.
The Internet Must Go
If it's the 3.0 liter 5 cylinder diesel (OM617) - those are considered to be some the most reliable diesel engines ever made :-)
If anyone interested, you can review the full documentation of back and forth between us and Freelancer.com:

http://medgadgetenglish.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/...