skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The HackerNews crowd notwithstanding, it is depressing to report that the average person today is still utterly unaware of the Snowden revelations.

Please tell your barber, sister-in-law, coffee buddy, or next-door neighbor about it. Tell them why it's important.

EDIT: To the comments below that say that the average person knows but doesn't care: I think you've been speaking with significantly better informed people than the average. Really, my experience has been that the average person has never heard the name Snowden, let alone knows about the revelations. (I might even try an informal poll of people I meet up with, and report back.) That they might not care once they hear the story is a sad, but separate issue.
Also to compare: the bailout apparently totaled around 30 trillion USD at the end of 2011, two orders of magnitude more.

And the cost of Katrina was less than 1% of GDP (80 billion < 150 billion)

http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/top-5-most-expens...

Do you find something as big as Katrina "not something worth of National Security?"
It's been said a few times in this thread, but you have to remember to make this calculation on equivalent properties. In a perfectly functioning market, there'd be no difference between "rental" inventory and "owner-occupied" inventory, but in practice there are often qualitative differences between the two, and if you value certain characteristics you will likely have to buy.

EDIT: Also, don't forget to change the "marginal tax rate" option under "Advanced Settings...Other..." Mortgage interest deductibility is (rightly or, as I think, wrongly) a substantial ownership subsidy, particularly for high-earners.
Aside from the ACID properties others mentioned, if you're using a relational database (and most people are), there may be non-performance related benefits. Some data is inherently relational, and it can be easier to manage it using relational abstractions such as SQL.
FogBugz: New Screenshot Addon
So true. It's simple - playing aroung does open ones mind. It's that simple and that hard. But it requires passion - no one will be able to force himself for side project and even if he do, no lesson will be learned. I observe it all the time across my coworkers - those, who like play around with related technologies, are getting better all the time.
Good point! I moved to NYC for love and am writing my diss here when I'm not wasting time on the Internet (like now), or doing real work-for-money work.
Ask HN: How to securely and safely blow the whistle?
There are many injustices in the world and people wanting to blow the whistle are probably holding themselves due to a lack of knowledge on how to proceed.

I am a supporter of responsible whistleblowing and I am looking for articles, tutorials, platforms or anything to encourage responsible, safe and secure whistleblowing.

I believe HN is the most open place I can discuss such topics in and I am hoping to see a positive and enriching discussion.

Thank you in advance, HN.
One of my fears about the meta data collection is that when coupled with research like this it will enable monitoring and control of a small number of important people (important in the sense of spreading information, effecting change). In the same vein you take it a step further and detect those who self police, they can be effectively ignored. I am sure the machine is trying to efficiently figure out who the "do the right thing" boyscouts are so it can remove them from the system.
I've seen a lot about Raft lately. I've recently built a Python library for stream processing that uses multiprocessing to manage the stages of the data pipeline and the thing I'm most interested in next is figuring out the best way to distribute it across a cluster of machines and am curious using something like Raft would be beneficial in managing the cluster of processes in some way.

Also remember seeing Google's Millwheel which is of great interest considering my current project.
I'm Norwegian, and worked for a US company years and years ago. Three of us went to Santa Cruz to visit the rest of the team. First morning there the local news was all up in arms about a storm. We looked out: There was a light drizzle.

We walked to the office without umbrellas, in light clothes, and hardly got wet. It was well over 20 degrees celsius, and a pleasant enough 15 minute walk despite the light drizzle.

We got into the office to find people in what looked like full survival mode, with raincoats, and hairdryers to get dry and warm. These were people who had driven right up to the office door.

When they saw us they were horrified and worried we'd get pneumonia and wondered how we could have chosen to walk 15 minutes through the "storm". Of course it did rain slightly more some other places - causing mud slides that closed a couple of roads and cut off the gas supply for a couple of days. But for us it was all terribly amusing.

After we went swimming in "only" something like 22 degrees in the water the following weekend, they got equally shocked (some of them asked if we'd used wet suits). I pointed out the coldest water I've been swimming in was 12 degrees, but I'm not sure they believed me.
Programming is not all that much different than other disciplines, and if you spend time in corporate IT, you will see just as many programmers doing their job just as a job, despite not being in love with it, as you will cooks (not chefs) who don't adore cooking, but do it because they're good enough at it to make a living that keeps them happy.

I think part of the reason this thread is generating "programmers are different" comments is that it's easy to believe you're different when yours is the only field you know intimately from the inside (wow, that came out wrong).
I remember that the Windows version of Call of Duty 1 worked perfectly on Linux using WINE.
That second question is kind of dirty. Pretty much all algorithms to find the median will perform a partial sort. Without any sorting at all, the only thing I can think of is some kind of statistical approximation based on sampling.
One bit of additional info on this topic. To understand how and why neurons are independent, you need to understand how a baby's brain grows into its body by producing an overabundance of neurons and then "pruning" the ones that aren't used. So neurons are subject to natural selection as we grow:

http://mxplx.com/Meme/922/
It's ironic this attitude comes from the same country that tells you to "man up and walk it off" for just about anything.
Care to list a few of the things that are flat out wrong for those not as knowledgeable?
Verizon won't activate new Nexus 7 on their network
Is this the correct use of the term "Growth Hacking"? I thought it was a person who works on side projects to increase their personal development outside of work.

As far as the meat of the article, I feel like this is spot on. The challenge I think is that a lot of people, including PG, have said they want to see 10%+ growth [1]. Customer acquisition is a very easy thing to hack if you know how to play the social game, but in the end, it comes down to product.

[1] - http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
This looks like the same set of points Patrick has been making since before the bubble burst. They're all great rules of thumb. And all bubbles pop eventually, but the problem is that it's very hard to predict exactly what pops them and when it will happen.

So in retrospect, it would have been a terrific idea to buy a house in SF in mid-2009 and then sell it now. But if you followed Patrick's advice, there's no way you would even consider doing so. And bluntly, if you're a hacker, you probably should follow Patrick's advice. SF is the land of perma-renters.

Paying too much rent now and moving when the current bubble pops and/or sticking around long enough for the Ellis Act to make your apartment a bargain both seem like better strategies than speculating to me. Focus on what you're good at to pay the rent in the short term.

It's the people whose brains are wired into local and national real estate markets who stand a decent chance of knowing when to buy or sell, many, not all, of them realtors. Now if you can give people a better finger on the pulse of this market, go for it. Zillow, Trulia, and Redfin need not apply - their attempts at property valuations are wacko.
Creating custom view - HipChat integration
Not the people who have lots of friends. They will be removed from the set early. Only people with few but diverse friends remain.
Onefinestay, The Upmarket Airbnb, Expands Its ‘Unhotel’ To Paris & LA
Not really - its finding those who connect most networks - the routers if you will.

From the article they remove those who have the most connections first. Lets say that if more than 10 of your LinkedIn links have photos, then you will upload one too. So they find everyone who has >10 friends, order them and remove the top 20% of most connected individuals. Then repeat. Stop when you have a group of people none of whom has >10 (extant) friends.

This group of people can then be given a virus (behaviour/whatever). Now put back the most recently removed group of people. It is guaranteed that each of those new people will all have 10+ friends all of whom exhibit this new virus.

Its pretty clever. Now I need to grab graph-tool and start playing !

Also:

> Lastly, we find that highly clustered local neighborhoods, together with dense network-wide community structures, suppress a trend's ability to spread under the tipping model.

That matters and frankly is the future of the internet. We shall most likely see geo-physical mesh neighborhoods. Always on, mobile or not, connectivity to the people around you. It probably will make a resurgance of democracy and community, likely to solve enourmous caching problems, and utterly destroy loads of business models. And yes ! its Maths and Science that proves its !
More time online does not mean more "friends," quality of engagement while online does.

Troll for 10 hours and not interact...0 new friends.
Interact for 1 hour in a quality way...2 new friends.
> Isn't it true that the geniuses of this world have very often been afflicted with mental abnormalities?

In a manner of speaking. People who prefer conformity, who think everyone should be the same, can't resist labeling smart people as "afflicted". This is a practice with a long history. The most recent, wildly popular effort was called "Asperger Syndrome", one that's just now being abandoned because of the damage it caused.

To someone who thinks everyone should be the same, anything that sets one apart in a behavioral sense is a "mental abnormality". But evolution by natural selection requires diversity, so in a more basic biological sense, it's the people who want everyone to be the same that represent the abnormal state of mind.

> Take the most brilliant mathematicians, engineers, scientists; so many of them faced such problems.

The problems faced by bright people are mostly caused by their dumb neighbors' belief that everyone should be like them.
The happiest programmer is the one having the most fun. And in the case of this article, the best programmer is portrayed as the one who started out having the most fun.

This isn't just pedantry; I've known a lot of programmers that absolutely loved their work but wrote code that was mediocre or worse, or wrote decent code but couldn't structure a project to save their lives.

"I have so much fun doing this" doesn't immediately imply "I know or seek to know all of the intricacies of this subject."
The joy of Letraset
Backbone.js Deconstructed part 1
I think "expensive areas" relates to comps--your house is valued in part based on recent sales of similar houses in your neighborhood. So... well, I don't know. I sort of see that there could be a linkage but as I ponder it, it becomes less clear how the mechanism could play out.
Faith cannot be rational, but this does not matter. Many things inherent in and/or vital to the human experience cannot be rational. If faith is to be simply dismissed, you need a better reason for doing so than "lack of rationality".
I did not intend to say that the blog should work simply because we threw it on a large instance, we have been running our site on AWS and have successfully handled much larger load. We never needed to move beyond a larger server for the main site, of course with horizontal scaling. What I meant was, when you are swamped with so many things you don't want to spend too much time on things like maintaining your blog.

You want to focus on the product, fix bugs, look after feature request, produce high quality content. And then your blog crashes and things get derailed.
>You say that the legal system only works for the rich and powerful, but don't back it up.

I cited from the article that $50000 is required to hire lawyer and fill the required paperwork to defend the case.
As i said i'm not from U.S. so i don't know if it is actualy true.

I could probably give you another example... if i'm not mistaken there is very high rate of cases in U.S. which end with some kind of settlement without ever getting to the trial. Often fears of financial expenses play a big role in those settlements which seems hardly fair to me.
I have discussed the issue with my wife, my mom, and my dad. They all understand the issue, understand the potential implications (especially my parents, who as immigrants from a muslim country are a little anxious about profiling), but none of them have a problem with what is happening.

I think the average person does know about the Snowden revelations. I think the average person just doesn't care.
You never get fired for choosing AWS.
Google acquires Bump, a startup that enables devices to wirelessly share data
Edward Snowden is in the running for European rights prize.
"Interesting problem and read (if you're able to get past the Frenglish)."

His French is just as bad. It's kinda refreshing to read stuff that isn't passed through PR consultants for polishing. OVH brutal honesty is very rare.
I guess this "no installation fee" thing is killing their bottom line because for well-managed shops with automated software deployment there is hardly any disincentive to replace a rented server with a new one if prices or specs change.
Other similar projects:

Otto (JavaScript interpreter):
https://github.com/robertkrimen/otto

Twik (Scheme like):
http://blog.labix.org/2013/07/16/twik-a-tiny-language-for-go
One of my favorite Wired articles ever was back in '08, "High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas"[1] which is about the Titan Salvage crew saving a massive sinking cargo vessel off the coast of Alaska. Titan Salvage is one of the lead teams on the Costa salvage operation today. It's a really thrilling read, with some great insight into the technical aspects of ship salvage.

[1] http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/ff_s...
This is my first Android app. I'm notoriously bad at responding to text messages if I don't respond immediately, so I decided to solve my own problem and make sure I never forget to respond again.
The biological model also explains why people can get confused about it.

The chicken or egg problem shows that at some point you lose the connection to the predecessor and the process goes around in endless circles.

Then you might wonder how it ever came to be when the first thing depends on the second and the second depends on the first.
Firefox 24 for Android gets WebRTC support
Because the NFL explicitly allows over-the-air broadcasts in-market and explicitly denies illegal, unlicensed global internet streams.

When your internet stream places a PHYSICAL antenna IN-MARKET that only you can access, then you have grounds to call your internet stream equivalent to Aereo. But the fact is, I rent a physical antenna from Aereo to enjoy local broadcast content, while you utilize a (likely foreign and obviously illegal) internet rebroadcast of licensed content.

The amount of cognitive dissonance it takes for you to dismiss basic licensing is fascinating.
The last part changed. I just renewed a .ato.br domain and had the option of up to ten years with a progressive discount.
>Even Facebook, that great time suck of FarmVille, not farmers, seems to have suffered a head injury and is now imagining itself as Mother Teresa.

After reading the FB propaganda, that's a fair statement.
From Rocket Science to Porn?
i'm still waiting for some way to tangentially connect this issue with NSA backdooring.
I believe a well written 'Job Post' also plays a pivotal role in attracting the right kind of talent.
If you think through, it is not _that_ obvious; it can't be turtles all the way down. So, where did the first binary software come from?

The answer is that somebody punched in a program from a computer's console, probably somewhere in the early 1960s, but possibly earlier. That program was used to make it easier to enter other programs, etc.

Given that copying working code is so simple, chances are that most of the currently running hardware can be traced back to a few persons entering a boot loader by hand.

That might even be one person. For example, Windows NT was initially developed for Intel's i860 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Development), so chances are that it was bootstrapped from a Unix machine. Because of that, it may trace back to the same initial boot loader as, for example, Mac OS X.
Finding the group and interacting with it inherently means they change the dynamic of the group. That's why this is such a hard thing to do and why the sensational headline is silly and wrong.

"...Solve the Fundamental Problem of Viral Marketing" Nothing is solved. This is just another tool to use for a while.
Why? (I mean, why in JavaScript?)
Lisp? it seems like a marketing trick. See some Lisp notes here: http://chart.ravenbrook.com/credits.html but the title is confusing.
GM aims at Tesla with new, long-range electric car
7 Social Media Pitches To Get The Conversation Going
> CalculatedRisk changed his opinion as the facts changed (he is data-driven, and one of the best blogs out there).

I should have emphasized this point myself. Also, the CR comment board used to be of HN quality, but for economics and housing. (Lately, not so much.) If you follow one econ blog, I'd heartily recommend CR: http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/

I will note though for the topic at hand: CR has commented that there is little correlation between interest rates and house prices[1]. I believe he has neglected that most of the data from which that statement is derived had interest rates (and borrowing standards) out of range compared to where we are now.

[1] http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2013/06/house-prices-and-m...
What about Kik? My colleague's daughters seem to use that.

And another one.. They use facetime or Google hangouts and just leave the camera on. Is that a common behavior?
My money is on Austin. Low taxes, reasonable rents, plenty of culture (SXSW, "Keep Austin Weird", lots of nightlife, etc.), and a history of tech seems like the perfect combination.
In one reference, a critical threshold is described in generic terms, in another it's described as s certain number of acquaintances that put you over the threshold. They're not incompatible -- one represents an example of the other with a specific number attached.

It would be like my saying, "25% is sufficient", and in a later sentence saying, "eight out of thirty-two is enough". They both make the same statement.
His case is/was extreme: He was prescribing extreme high doses for extended periods of time to a small number of patients because some believe it works against extreme cases of Lyme disease, despite total lack of evidence.

It's rather shocking that he's been allowed to keep practicing as long as he has.
Tiger Global Ups Investment in Creator of WordPress
Yes, new and shiny things catch people's attention, but when the factor of newness wears away, people will use internet for work.
Again, just as in the base64 program. It is proven correct only in a world without cosmic rays, oxydation, failing capacitors, etc.

The 'only' difference is one of scale (orders of orders of magnitude.)
Key signing enables keys to be exchanged in a hostile environment. Compare web-of-trust to x.500 directory services, which are dependent on CAs.

It also isn't necessary to use Facebook for key exchange in order to adopt social networking functionality to enhancing a web of trust.

The bottom line is you have to design a secure system to avoid having to trust cloud services. While Facebook may be the poster child for untrustworthyness, you can't trust your own machine in the basement of your house not to get hacked. What you can trust is key signing, because it requires stealing a number of identities all at once.
OKCon live streaming (with video archives)
I don't believe this to be correct:

"the renter - if willing and able to save his money - can buy a house outright in half the time that a conventional buyer can pay off a mortgage"

I don't think this is taking into account the rent that a renter pays. If a renter can just afford to pay a mortgage, then using the figures given (3% pa to rent, 8% pa to own) - that's 5% of the house value they're gaining p/a. At that, they can buy outright in 20 years.
Is a typical mortgage 40 years?
How I am teaching a 9 year old to program – Part 2: The cheese ray
The bootloader can compile linux before booting : http://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html
I have no experience with hadoop at all and it may be slightly off topic but this reminds me of a post titled "Taco bell programming"[1], after reading which I started learning and using Unix tools and commands much more than before instead of writing silly Python scripts for almost anything that needed automation.

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20110220110013/http://teddziuba.c...
I would say the housing bubble was driven by supply and demand, just not traditional home-buying supply and demand. Houses were being treated as day-to-day commodities, which is bad for people who wish to actually live in houses and not make money off of them.

I was in Vegas during the start of the housing bubble and all I saw were investors buying houses to flip immediately for big profit selling to other investors who thought the same. Anyone who actually wanted to buy a house to live in was required to get caught up in a risky mortgage option that left many of them in serious problems when their house was suddenly worth less than half of what they owed on it.

We looked at a house at the start of the decline and offered $50,000 less than asking. They laughed at us and we stopped bothering to look. Less than a year later the same house was for sale for more than $100,000 less than our offer. The realtor who showed us houses later moved out-of-state so she could earn a living.

Someone I knew told me about his friend that bought a house, did bare updates to it, and sold it within a month for nearly a $100,000 profit. He was gleeful at the idea you could do such a thing. I told him that was good for his friend but incredibly bad for everyone else in the city. About a year or so later I was shown to be correct beyond my worst doomsday predictions.

I'm seeing the same things I saw in Vegas starting again.
Please stop linking nytimes.com. I understand it's simple to subvert the paywall, but they shouldn't be encouraged regardless.
To add to your point, I live in a suburb/city that effectively bans rentals by making property taxes extremely expensive if the property is not both owner-occupied and a primary residence (homestead taxes). This is coupled with widespread HOA agreements that explicitly ban renting/subletting to not-close-relatives. The unsurprising effect is that higher income families live here and the cost of running the schools is consequently low. There are some other suburbs, but in that case you're committed to private schooling of your kids.
Buy when people around you say the market sucks.

Sell when people say it is awesome.

This goes for real estate and basically anything else.