skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is it possible for anyone to use that reflector to calculate the earth-moon distance?

Sure - anyone who has a strong enough laser and sensitive enough detection rig to measure the returned signal. What could prevent them?

> What kind of laser is used for this?

These: http://ilrs.gsfc.nasa.gov/network/stations/active/MDOL_sitel...

It's actually not all that powerful (probably still strong enough to be subject to all kinds of regulations though). The most cost and effort seems to go into the optics (read: telescops) for targeting and detection.

> Do we know the precise location of the reflector?

Of course: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo_tables.htm...
Break The Wrist And Walk Away: Responsive Design And Bootstrap 3
Ask HN: Who Needs a Remote Worker/Freelancer?
As the title says. I'm currently shifting my focus from working on my own projects to working on other people's. I don't contract that much (maybe once a year when something interesting comes along) so I don't have an active network of people I usually work for.

I'm a generalist in the sense that I'm a problem solver above all else. I'm tool/language agnostic. Having said that, I have a lot of experience with Cocoa, Python (mostly back end stuff) and more recently Node/Meteor/Mongo.

I've worked on desktop, mobile and web projects in the areas of geo, image processing, social, e-commerce, productivity, crypto and most recently Core Audio (poorly documented C api, threading, codecs, audio formats, oh my!).

I can pick up a new imperative language in a day or so. I qualify that because I have yet to go full bore into functional languages though I have played around with Haskell a bit.

My rates are competitive and I usually work within aggressive time-frames. Short projects are ok but like I said I'm interested in building on-going relationships with people who need stuff built.

My professional blog is here: http://lattejed.com and a good example of clean, well documented and tested code is here: https://github.com/lattejed/LJSelectionView/

If you're in the Bay Area and would like to work together remotely as a trial run I am considering moving (back) to SF or thereabouts. I'm not looking for someone to move me or a visa (I'm from the US), but would move back at this point for interesting work.

My email is m (or matthew) at the blog domain above. Thanks!
I love the fact that the scrolling text is 'contenteditable="true"'. Fun to keep typing during the animation. Very cool.
I was using PHP frameworks between 2007 and 2011. Have you been watching what has been happening with the Python-based frameworks in the past 10+ years?
You have to be careful with using Array() to transform a non-array into an array. Suppose for example you wanted an array of hashes:

>> Array([{:a => "b"}])
=> [{:a=>"b"}]
>> Array({:a => "b"})
=> [[:a, "b"]]

It doesn't work as you might expect with a Hash. I'd probably recommend sticking with something like either of these unless you know you aren't going to be getting a Hash:

a = [a] unless a.is_a?(Array) # option 1
a = [*a] # option 2
Is there any advantage to using OO in a language that doesn't have classes or inheritance? Does declaring a method on a type give you something that declaring a function that takes the type as an argument doesn't?
Obligatory link to http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...
> (1) The moon is spiraling away from Earth at a rate of 3.8 cm per year. Why? Earth's ocean tides are responsible.

What a terrible explanation. I've done a physics course or two so I understand the physical process of how ocean tides are responsible (I think). But for your average person that's just silly.

Q. How do trees grow? A. Nuclear Fusion
In what way does this demolish the various conspiracy theories? When confronted with evidence of man-made items on the Moon, the tin-foilers just say they were put there by robots.

Or aliens.
One thing I don't entirely understand is whether having an EU-based server provided by an US company (Rackspace, AWS, Digital Ocean, you name it) makes any difference at all.
2.7 originally. Django became a big focus of my early contracting days and support for 3 wasn't in yet.
Reforming the NSA
If I remember correctly, the crawl converged in a point at about 1/3 rd from the top in the original while in this one it scrolls off the top of the screen (at least in the default view). That's a pretty big oversight.
So you're saying that their music isn't actually outstanding, they just got lucky? If so, I'd be grateful for a list of artists who makes as good stuff as Daft Punk or Prodigy does, but who didn't make it because of "timing, culture etc.". They can very well be my next facourite bands.
Exactly..take Symfony2 for example, which creates clean and maintainable PHP code using very modern methodologies. You have package management, ORMs, ODMs, Template engines, coding standards and a huge community that produce high quality Bundles (like plugins) that you can integrate into your project.
Id even argue its better than Django or Rails nowadays.
Wasn't this covered in an episode of Big Bang Theory? AKA the fount of relevant scientific knowledge..
PHP-FIG is a committee of members hailing from a broad splash of frameworks. There has been very little leadership in the PHP community regarding coding standards (all frameworks have their own "coding guidelines" for contributing to core/building packages) so this group establishes standards for that.

They have branched out and there are efforts towards establishing common interfaces too (logger, http client, and so forth).

PSR-1 and PSR-2 are generally accepted as being authoritative on how to write "Good PHP".
Tide goes in, tide goes out. No miscommunication.
Does it really? I'm not being pedantic. My experience has been that coding guidelines/style and personal standards are what encourage good, maintainable code. Not the language itself. I've seen beautiful PHP, just like I've seen horrendous Python.
Scott Hanselman just posted his experience with Snap Circuits. They look awesome and there are plenty of kits to keep curious kids busy exploring and building stuff.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TeachingKidsElectronicsCompute...
may not being the key phrase. Thankfully for the NSA, they can add to his profile this how-to on how he's managing his data moving forward.
Didn't even bother with another dynamic language * , went straight to the JVM and discovered Scala (framework-wise, enjoying Play)

* not totally true, 6 months on Groovy, followed by 6 months of hell (AKA pre-2.0 Grails)

Can't speak for Python other than a couple of months of Django (out of the box CRUD functionality is indeed nice).

After a couple of years of Scala can't imagine going back to a runtime only language (other than Coffeescript/LESS via GruntJS for the front end)
Were you really? Because saying things like "There is package management in PHP but I never found any code bases in the wild" or getting excited by writing RESTful APIs paints another picture.
There is a quite straightforward patch[0], and since fail2ban is python, you can apply it on the installed package. Not the best for maintenance, so use your best judgement (and a few tricks to keep yourself safe and up to date), but it's certainly better than being exposed.

[0]: http://www.fail2ban.org/wiki/index.php/Fail2ban:Community_Po...
Since you're current in college, you can actually use that to your advantage with certain people. You can now reliably cold call certain people all by saying "Hi $COLLEGE alumni! I'm currently in $COLLEGE" and people will talk to you. I'm sure there's a lot of people still local around the school. How do you find the people? LinkedIn or through your college, they always have things to connect with alumni.

You can then ask 'if they will warm-intro you to business owners who fit the general profile of "People who could conceivably write very small [+] checks."'
Re: other global "observers", I think most of us are assuming that the NSA is the most capable and powerful among them. While in general this may be true, I wonder how much we don't know we don't know about other agencies.
Dependency management in PHP is generally done through Composer.

http://getcomposer.org/

There is no analogue to virtualenv, and dependencies are loaded into a directory rather than somewhere in the operating system.
Related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6389626 - How

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6389745 - More details and video

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6392183 - Live stream

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6392263 - Live stream

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6392477 - Live stream

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6392661 - Outline and video
> On my Android telephone (whoops…) I am using the Kaiten IMAP client.

Check out: http://www.ubuntu.com/phone

Devices supported: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices

Currently, the Galaxy Nexus seems to be the best option; see its hardware support progress here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArLs7UPtu-hJdDZ... (column "Maguro")
everyone actally suggests caffeine app or something... but anyway, im pretty sure there are custom shells for windows that work around several annoyances with the price of ...well, having extra applications doing what your expensive os should be doing.

anyway, im just flamming here. thankfully im not subject to either of those.
Belgian main telcom provider hacked, spy agencies blamed
Facebook doesn't really make it difficult either: https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account
And this is why Silicon Valley has a hiring problem.

No, you hire someone who can code C and read the GC literature. The problem space is well understood. You are not breaking new ground, just applying known algorithms.
CompetitorLand - Full Competitive Analysis and Reporting System
Check our new startup. The software is a set of tools to track your competitors' websites and manage the process of competitive research.
That doesn't sound trite.

At Purdue CERIAS, the philosophy and linguistics departments are official granters of its Information Security masters degree, along with the technology school.

http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/site/education/graduate_program...
Be Honest With Your Developers
Isn't most hunger due to distribution issues, not supply issues?
I'm also a happy Uberspace user, but they don't offer any VPS. They're more like a standard webhosting provider with shell access.
If you think the USA is alone in their desire to surveille you're going to have a rough time around the world. The USA had the means, but the will is there worldwide.
They did it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e5CtbbZL-k
It always puzzles me that most people think that only Armstrong and Aldrin went to the Moon, although 12 men have walked on its surface.

May be it's me but I couldn't help thinking that the title of this article seems to help spread that idea: only Neil & Buzz went to the Moon, and it happened only once.
Why So Many Mobile Apps Rely on Foursquare Integration
The Best Economies in the World - 24/7 Wall St.
For who? None of our customers have even voiced concern over the NSA let alone foot the bill to migrate their data to the eu. I think HN in particular has tunnel vision over this situation.

Unless shown otherwise I'd warrant a guess that outside the tech community the overwhelming majority or people and businesses don't care about what the NSA does.
Petzold's "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" aids in the understanding of how computers work at the lowest levels.

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...
Very nice writeup! Anyone have tips on similar write-ups for other frameworks? Angular?
I've been trying out http://www.exoscale.ch , and while slightly more pricy than similar offers, they seem to offer a pretty good service, with high focus on privacy and security. Also, they're hosted in Switzerland.
Here's an idiot who works for a company that makes its money taking money from gamblers and he's whining about what "a wonderful world we live in."

Are you fucking kidding me?

Rule #1: The house always wins.
"My webhoster (WebFaction) receives mail for all my domains. My Synology retrieves mail every 5 minutes via POP (you can set this up via Roundcube on the Synology) and deletes it from WebFaction."

but even if you can delete your mail from your mailhost after downloading it to your private machine, isn't the point that the NSA probably collected the email before it even hit your mailhost?
List of hex colors for WebCraftspeople
Great post. Appreciate all of the details of how to leave Google vs just a rant.
Microsoft's not included in the silivon valley good ol' boys club.
I have a HP ProLiant N40L and couldnt recommend it enough.
Much as I'd like to see some kind of "tidal wave of people doing this", purely in the interests of sending a message to somebody somewhere that data sniffing = not cool, I don't personally know anyone who's taken the time or energy to move all his data off of bugged U.S. servers onto bugged European or Asian ones or attempted to host it himself in less-efficient email clients, etc., nor plans to, nor do I hear very many people online talking about doing this, nor planning to, nor have I done this myself, nor do I plan to.

There's a lot of pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth going on right now in the blogosphere, but strikingly few people actually doing anything, and the actual movement looks more like a tiny ripple in an otherwise calm tide pool than it does a 100-story wave.

I suspect that until better, easier-to-use services come along than the ones being skewered in this post, most people are simply going to stay right where they are.

And once those services do come along, and attract a large enough user base, I'm pretty certain they will in turn attract agencies like the NSA (or whatever the local government equivalent may be, if not in the U.S.), showing up with hands out and secret court orders up.

If privacy was paramount to people, no one would be on Facebook (I'm certainly not, and haven't been for years). Yet, Facebook, much as everyone constantly complains about its blatant disregard for users' privacy, seems to be doing just fine, with its billion or so users and its $80 billion valuation.

The Internet is living, breathing, functioning proof that, at least to 99.9999% of human beings, utility > privacy. Unless the U.S. government starts skimming off the top of people's bank accounts, I don't think there's going to be much of a mass exodus any time soon - the motivation simply isn't there.
How to Make the Earth in WebGL?
> as long as my endpoints are safe and I'm using encryption between them, they have to work for it, so only real baddies will be seriously targeted.

This technical barrier is getting weaker every year (or month or week?), we cannot be sure that encryption is still holding up, or at least: that it will always hold up. And besides that, endpoint security may be acceptable for real experts, but never for the layman (probable backdoors in Windows, MacOS - maybe even Linux OSes).

If we as a society decide to accept what the NSA does, then we accept the total loss of privacy - it's then just a matter of time. And without privacy, democracies will die and corruption will flourish.

To think that...

> only real baddies will be seriously targeted.

...is a grave mistake.
This is an absolutely ridiculous comment. Writing a GC for a dynamic language like Ruby is not just a question of knowing C and reading some literature. It's a massive problem to solve. This is not something that you double your burn rate in the hopes that 2-3 years down the line you can double performance of your application cluster. It's simply not worth it. Startups have immediate problems to solve or they die.

And BTW, the reason we have a hiring problem is not because we are too picky about specific experience, it's because when it comes to software engineering some people have it and some people don't, and the ones who don't are the ones whose resumes are consistently out there filling up inboxes, and the ones who do are rarely looking for a job, and when they are the Facebooks, Twitters and Googles of the world are throwing around $200k + benefits like pocket change.
I think its cute that this guy thinks that running his own gear will keep a nation state out of his email.

YET ANOTHER SELF-ABSORBED NSA BLOG POST.

I bet in all the ensuing conversation that covered how to use double blind file system encryption an GPG encrypted toast that no one said..."we should get involved in the political process and do something about this!"...because you're stupid and you just want to circle jerk about it...
Dirac Lecture Videos (1975)
Thanks. I would love to see more "experience reports" with testing Angular and Ember apps. Especially with regards to end-to-end tests.
Implementing GC rarely seems as simple as "reading the literature" and implementing the algorithms they tell you. One problem is that you're working with an existing code base, and you can't afford to make mistakes in your GC. Sure, there are plenty of (good) GC algorithms out there that are public knowledge, but implementing it alone may be difficult, implementing it efficiently is another order of magnitude more-so.
Definitely true that estimates can be improved from some hypothetical floor of quality..

Estimates still come with a cost in themselves though. They're not an end, merely a means. So we should consider alternatives.

An alternative approach I've heard from some teams, though haven't had the pleasure of trying myself, is to break your work into similarly sized small chunks and measure team speed over time in terms of these chunks. This sounds a lot like relative point based estimation often seen on agile teams. However, the difference is that once you establish this sizing rhythm during analysis (with the help of estimation early on to hone in on sizing) then you skip estimation altogether.

I suspect this needs to be calibrated from time to time ("our stories have gotten too big") and exceptions need to be made (e.g. "there's just no way to split this work up and keep it releseable") but those scenarios are exceptions, not the norm.

A world without estimates sounds great to me.
If there really is months more worth of information I wonder if the public, US or otherwise (as we find more countries with intelligence agencies working as accessories), will experience outrage fatigue. I guess it will depend on how bad each revelation is but I could easily imagine a lot people picking the one revelation that really bothered them and then framing all others relative to that: "they're doing Y too? What's the point when they are already doing X?"

My armchair quarterback opinion, reveal the rest now and hope for a critical mass of outrage.
Isn't this what they did on the Big Bang Theory? I remember an episode when they shot a laser at the moon to ping it.
There is a Mythbusters episode about moon landing hoax conspiracy theories where the hosts visited an observatory to test the lunar retro reflectors.

The laser they used was pretty big (don't know/remember the numbers) but the more impressive part was the detector. Despite the huge laser, just a handful of photons make it there and back and twice through the atmosphere.

Overall it didn't look like something you do on your back yard with off the shelf equipment, but it might be doable by a motivated hackerspace crew with a lot of time and some money on their hands.
Well, technically, you could argue that the Apollo astronauts WERE aliens while they were on the moon.
Unibox, the People-Centric Mac Email App, in Public Beta
You've taken the wrong impression from those statements. Have a look at my CV if you wish.
Every appropriate reference says "Apollo 11." Since they were the only two Apollo 11 astronauts to walk on the moon, I think the title is appropriate.
I had the luck of being taught by Prof. Meira - who is one hell of a professor - while this book was in draft stage. Here you'll find not only a great toolkit of techniques of data mining, but more importantly, a very comprehensive arsenal of concepts to properly analyse your data and the results of the techniques applied.

As grizzlon said in a sibling comment, you'll find the chapter dependencies on page 10, in case you need to look up/learn something specific on demand.
I think you're right. Even moving your mail or web server to another country won't help deter the actual collection with prism.

However, I think responses like this create tension between the companies agreeing to give their information, and the government. If google, yahoo, and facebook start to lose money they might potentially fight legislation like this going forward and may advocate in reverting these policies.
I keep wondering if Go couldn't have gone further in getting rid of the cruft that has accumulated around OO. Go doesn't have an implicit "this" pointer. It doesn't have members that are private to an individual object nor members private to a type. Encapsulation exists only at the package level.

Yet Go keeps that old OO concept of method receivers. Why? I never found it very plausible to have one special case parameter with its very own syntax, but with type level encapsulation it did at least have some justification.

Without this kind of encapsulation, the only remaining purpose of the receiver is method dispatch. But why dispatch based on the type of one parameter and not the others? Multimethods would have been the logical conclusion of the OO cleanup that Go's designers apparently intended to achieve.
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.DS_Store
The title is misleading as it's abbreviated from:

"In Surprisingly Bold Move, Sweden Offers a Home to All Syrian Refugees who already fled to sweden"

I'd also think that this helps only the upper layer of syrian society, those who could afford to travel to sweden.
Http://aem1k.com/world/
> This begs the question: you really need async in the language?

I too have applications that do a lot of stuff relying of asynchronous toolsets but without much explicit asynchronicity. However, I did a simple experiment a couple weeks back - I coded one of our simple but very asynchronous programs in Go. Compared to the Python original (which uses Twisted), the Go version had 70% of the lines and was much more readable and understandable by even team mates who had never seen Go.

I believe that's the point of having async operation elegantly merged into the language.
One of the most common problems people have when they get to know Go is to not embrace its approach to programming, but try to enforce what they already know in Go programs.

This is a clear example of that. Implementing “polymorphism” with Go interfaces is abusing interfaces! Seeing embedding as inheritance misses the point of both embedding and inheritance. Comparing packages to namespaces isn’t that bad, but just delays you getting to know Go for real.

I’m not saying that these old concepts are bad or Go’s new approach is superior. (I believe in that; but that’s not the point here.) I’m saying if you’ve gotten used to these concepts so much that you can’t think or program without them, then there’s a problem. Don’t design a solution around polymorphism or inheritance and then try hard to force that into Go. Design your program with that your language is giving you.
OO does not have to use classes and inheritance. OO is about encapsulation of data and behaviors. Declaring a function on a type lets you specify the behaviors of the type. In particular, in languages like Go with interfaces, it allows you to have a contract of behaviors independent of implementations. You cannot do that with plain functions.
Why a Killer Twitter IPO Could End Up Killing Twitter
Most Ruby implementations started with awesome numbers in a ridiculous short time. Remember the time when MacRuby was 6 times as fast as MRI? Those times are over after they implemented Ruby proper and ran real world programs.
Python coding standards
> Is there any advantage to using OO in a language that doesn't have classes or inheritance?

Like Self or javascript?
5 Data-Driven Ways To Send Emails Your Customers Won’t Trash