skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But how does that make it a "publicity stunt"?
Just know that if you're approached by NSA or similar, after a course like this, you have a 90+ percent chance to be doing "cyber-hacking" of other nations (allies or "rivals") rather than "cyber-security" for US.
>>But, something he said really shocked me. It goes like this — “Oh, my sister’s kid is just like you. He’s got a $10,000 grant to go build a business and he’s in the 10th grade. My sister asked me what she should do. I told her to ask him to focus on finishing his college first before doing anything else.”

I don't find this particularly shocking. Without knowing the particulars of this kid, it sounds like pretty sane advice to a 16 year old - finish your education. School, strangely enough, gives people a lot of free time too, probably more than a full-time job does. It's possible to get an education, and dabble in entrepreneurship, and find friends who gel with you enough to make you might want to take on as partners. Someone with the aptitude for entrepreneurship will likely find a way to do all that while getting an education, but it's not irresponsible for a parent or guardian to encourage kids to focus on their education -- Just because some kids turn out to be successful dropout-entrepreneurs doesn't mean that dropping out at the first opportunity is a well-defined path to success.
Am I the only one that thinks this article is extremely similar to this one?

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505143_162-57368011/why-to-do-li...
Probably because Jon Postal batched up requests and entered them all at the same time, rather than entering them as soon as the requests came in.
Why was stargate.com registered in August 5, 1986, and what was that for? The movie and show didn't come out for another 9-10 years.
> Look at it another way. If you are the security services and you need to get rid of someone, making a murder look like a suicide is a good move. However, a suicide normally requires depression or some linked emotional trauma. Without that, the suicide is suspicious. If the suicide is linked to an accidental sexual game then the victim looks like a pervert, is shamed publicly and the "suicide" is much difficult to question. QED, murders through sexual misadventures are much easier to pass off than depressive suicides or straight up murders

Or, you know, people do just kill themselves in large numbers in the UK. Men aged between 15 and 44 have the highest rates of completed suicide. While GCHQ is an Equal Opportunities employer it's likely that they employ many men because of the electronic and computing work.

(http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/subnational-health4/suicides-i...)

Mental health services in Gloucestershire are provided by 2gether NHS Foundation Trust. But there have been changes over this time - the 3 primary care trusts merged into a single trust; money from the budget of 2gether was taken to bail out one of the financially failing trusts; IAPT and PCAT have started; 2gether have done a lot of work to improve times for specialist community based psychotherapy (the wait used to be well over two years, it's much quicker now but they're still working on it). Suicide prevention hasn't been a national priority for very long.

> In summary, many of these deaths were suspicious

Really? Why? People die depressingly often by suicide. There is a known mechanism of "contagion" with DSH and suicide, and so we expect to find clusters of suicides.

I'd suggest the Marconi suicides (which used a number of bizarre methods) are much more suspicious than a death including suffocation. (Bags are sometimes used to preserve "dignity"; or to prevent need for cleanup of vomit.)
Well there goes my web design job...
"If I remember correctly, Chaum's original paper didn't deal with offline double spending. It was blind signature based online e-cash that depend on the bank keeping a list of spent serial numbers(which isn't much easier keeping an account balance). So it's point was mainly anonymity."

The point was anonymity and the assurance that double spending is hard. Let's put it this way: how do you know that the attacker cannot create tokens that the bank did not issue, but that the bank will believe are valid? The point of Chaum's original system is that you can prevent such an attack and allow anonymous spending. If the only concern were anonymity, the system would not be hard to create: the bank would just accept everything and the spenders would just create random strings instead of using the withdrawal protocol.
Serving Compressed Assets With Heroku
>The economic reality is that most apps offer next to no value to people. They might say otherwise when asked about, but their actions speak pretty clearly: A cup of coffee is worth more than almost every app on the store.

Two things.

1. That's probably true for a lot of apps, but I don't think it's fair to say "most." Perhaps "many". There are a lot of apps out there that provide huge amounts of value. Of course, I don't think a cup of coffee is worth anywhere close to the price of a cup of coffee and I make my living selling apps. I might be biased.

2. Starbucks made 7.5 billion last year. Apple alone paid out 5 billion to devs for apps. If you include advertising revenue and Android revenue, I'd guess that people actually spent a similar amount on apps as they did coffee.
Thanks to the blind hate for Java that runs in HN, yet many startups end up switching to it, when they need performance.
Well, this is also a terrible perspective. Programming can be like being a professional chef. There are some that become Gordon Ramsay's and others that get stuck in a greasy diner at a forgotten highway off-ramp.

Cooking professionally can be ugly, filthy, horrible hard work. There's the television version of the rich and famous cook and the reality of the actual work being really hard. And, yes, you have to do a lot of stuff you don't really enjoy doing. And, yes, it isn't all creative and wonderful.

Why am I making an analogy to cooking? Because over the last few years I've ended-up doing a lot of cooking for my family. I've studied some and really enjoy the creative process. However, I've also found myself completely and utterly fed-up with it at times. I used to be the designated cook when we went camping. The last time we went camping I drove out as far as necessary to go get take-out.

So,yes, programming, depending on the choices you make, can be like sausage making.

If you are the creative type you need to make an effort to find the right job for you or start your own business. Still, as someone else pointed out, you are going to have to stomach the idea that you are still going to have to do things that you will not enjoy. This is true of any job.

I always told my employees that I'd never ask them to do anything I was not willing to do myself (or hadn't done before myself). Examples of that were things like washing the pile of filthy coffee mugs in the kitchen area ('cause it seems that adults are pretty bad about cleaning after themselves sometimes) or getting in our Haas CNC machine to clean it. The point wasn't that I expected them to actively do these things but to realize that all of us ought to understand that there are things you don't enjoy doing that simply need to be done.

As a programmer you need to seek out work that really turns you on. How do you know? Because you can't stop thinking about it and you can't stop working on it. You want to talk about it all the time and you want to learn how to do it better. In other words, you are passionate about it.

In general terms there's a lot of mobility in the CS world. You need to take advantage of this and actively hunt for work that is really engages you while fully understanding that utopia does not exist.
Google has long been able to crawl pure javascript pages - I actually think their their crawler is just headless Chrome.
Don't Copy Silicon Valley
I don't see anything sad or ironic. As pointed out, these examples are outliers. How many others failed to make it and were so indebted that they could never dare to venture again? The concept of personal bankruptcy does not exist in India. Being an entrepreneur in India is much harder than in the US.
15 minutes is a worthless trial period for all but the most trivial apps. The standard trial period for any serious software (IDEs etc) seems to be 30 days.
Spore: My View of the Elephant
I would not be surprised if many non-US government agencies are evaluating running their own security-oriented Linux distributions. Hopefully this will result in a critical mass of vendors and technologies for running networks that have at least some chance of keeping communications and data storage secure.

Sadly, I would also not be surprised if many governments continue to rely on US vendors for a lot of network and voice infrastructure that have already been compromised.
But it's called "Google Web Designer", so many of us web developers probably thought we were the target audience. I first thought it was a Dreamweaver competitor with better support for JS libraries and HTML5, which would be great.

Instead we have "Google Ad Designer" targeted at designers and marketers. OK, I was still interested at least to play with it for a while and see if I could recommend it to my designer friends, but no Linux support and worst of all, they use PC as a synonym of Windows and Mac as a synonym of Mac OS X. Sorry, but this isn't the 90's anymore, go back to your time machine.

So, I agree I'm not the target audience, but you have to admit the announcement can be perceived as misleading and off-putting.
How to use podcasts to supercharge your blog with information and techniques
This is great. I'm honestly going to go over this with my 11 year old to complement the section of her Language Arts class on the media and advertising. Lots of great things to learn to watch out for in the news and general media, not just in Wikipedia.
Chrome - Implement Font load events
This will die a quick death just for its deceptive name. It should be called Ad Designer.
You could always try to run it in WINE (I've seen people running Windows only apps this way in Ubuntu, e.g. MS Office, Noetpad++).
The 3 Grenades
To stay in business, casinos need to be a bad deal for customers _as a group_.

Did I say casinos? I meant insurance companies.

Seriously, insurance is a bet on something bad happening. Usually it only makes sense to buy insurance for the equivalent of long-shot "lottery jackpots". Like a catastrophic health problem. Or like the damage you might do to other people and their property in an auto accident --- but probably _not_ the damage to your own car. i.e. Insure for personal liability calamities, but not collision damage if you could pay for it out of savings.
Intel - nodejs logging that plays nice with console.log
All I see are data for the location and size of the rectangle and some extra code added by default to allow their scripts to work.
Emergent gameplay is always fun. For all of the huge space battles between armadas and great train robberies of EVE Online, that MMO supports a flourishing economy of many different roles that one wouldn't expect:

http://massively.joystiq.com/2008/07/14/eve-evolved-freeform...

Makes sense that in a open sandbox crime simulator, players would try to make a killing in the stock market. Too bad you can do insider trading to get involved in white collar crime.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with the idea that you should look at the root cause of why your tests are slow instead of trying to "fix" the tests. I just feel that what you demonstrated is bad design. So you ended up with bad design and fast tests.
Twitter Founder Reveals Secret Formula for Getting Rich Online
Consider your example in the context of a HN topic.

^ All Cretans are liars
7 points by Epimenides | 5 minutes ago | flag | 2 comments

Consider your audience: Programmers, startup entrepreneurs, in other words people who deal intimately with logic on a daily basis.

I'd expect this article to be flagged into oblivion, both by Cretans who are not liars, and by people peeved by the obviously incorrect absolute in the topic.

Doesn't it bug you at all when people engage in these kinds of fallacies to further a point, when they should damn well know better?

Would it have really have killed the submitter to reword as "Be wary in Crete" instead of knowingly posting something false? Would it really kill someone who's making an absolute statement, (a knowingly false one, mind) to reword it into something that still gets their point across, is actually correct, and won't lead to endless corrections in the comment thread?

To me, it shows a certain disdain for your reader when bait like this is written.
As someone who has done work in lisp-like languages, I would call the clojure code legible but not "clear". It's perfectly fine for a one-off solution, but I wouldn't consider it acceptable for anything I planned on coming back to in a few months.
The Best Way to Raise a Young Entrepreneur
It's not actually Rails that's the problem, often: it's a cultural issue. You can build a Rails app that has a very thin 'rails' layer and has a super well decoupled domain model layer.
Your submission receives no love but my one afternoon hack does... oh the humanity... lol

That is some amazing work, thanks!
Canon has the "Digital Lens Optimizer" which purports to model the optics on each lens so to allow better conversion to raw files/ jpgs. Also lens distortion can be corrected too. Lamentably they seem to correct only decent lens and the file size grows substantially.

Some details :

http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/digital/DPP_v3-11-10.ht...
The main differences between Google and Microsoft in this case are a) Google's dominant position in a broad series of online services (Microsoft doesn't come close), and b) Google's utterly disrespectful attitude.

The second is what really pisses off regulatory bodies. Google's attitude of "we're right, your stupid foreign laws are wrong, so screw you" is well beyond any arrogance Microsoft ever displayed.

Also, European privacy regulators don't need any publicity stunts. The NSA leaks have pretty much ensured privacy protection is top of the political agenda. Their funding is safe for next decade.
Wikipedia Archive Bot
But the videogame had been out for five. Who knows?
Welcome to Open Library
If you are ready to commit "virtual identity suicide," delete your Facebook account, and say good-bye to social networking sites, you are not alone.

Quitting Facebook is hardly "virtual identity suicide". You can have an identity on the web on your own terms by creating your own web site on your own domain. People were doing that long before Facebook or any other social network came along.

Unfortunately, this article doesn't really provide any information, only a link to the original research paper:

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/cyber.2012.032...

The abstract of this paper says:

Social networking sites such as Facebook attract millions of users by offering highly interactive social communications. Recently, a counter movement of users has formed, deciding to leave social networks by quitting their accounts (i.e., virtual identity suicide). To investigate whether Facebook quitters (n=310) differ from Facebook users (n=321), we examined privacy concerns, Internet addiction scores, and personality. We found Facebook quitters to be significantly more cautious about their privacy, having higher Internet addiction scores, and being more conscientious than Facebook users. The main self-stated reason for committing virtual identity suicide was privacy concerns (48 percent). Although the adequacy of privacy in online communication has been questioned, privacy is still an important issue in online social communications.
There's some work published by some friends of mine called "Botnet Resistant Coding" where they combine several techniques to defeat the average script kiddie with a bot and force them to target someone else out of laziness and ignorance. This seems very similar, but if your find their paper you can incorporate more advanced techniques.
One minor reason could be lack of physical media. In old days people received a bunch of disks or a dvd with nice cover art which they can put on a bookshelf.

Now it is all 1's and 0's coming over the wire(less). There is no sense of ownership. People are reluctant to pay for something that they don't touch or own.
If you're making a todo/notetaking app, you're entering a really crowded marketplace. And from my experience, you're probably also doing it wrong.

I mean first things first: does your app sync with anything standard or are you promising me your webservice? Because a quick glance through the non-existent featurelist from the app's website, and the only thing I see is "sync with iCloud".

So you know, worthless. To me and anyone else who has IMAP/WebDAV/Exchange accounts/CalDAV calendaring/Google calendars. Your apps are worthless because they're not that useful to start with.
Lack of support for Linux is a consequence of not being a webapp, and that is what I really don't like (even if this was supported on Linux, OpenBSD and Solaris). Is expecting that Google can deliver cutting edge web-based apps really weird?
Apple already has this tax. It's the yearly developer renewal fee.
Nice work!

Another shameless plug: if you need a curated, hand-picked, carefully designed, paper version of Hacker News (that delivered to your doorstep), there's always the good ol' Hacker Monthly (http://hackermonthly.com).

No internet connection required :)
Well I suppose 'better than Flash' can't be a particularly high bar to jump.
The title does not really tell that this is a cloud storage, competing with Dropbox
Yes! I loved doing this. Faction arbitrage, cornering markets, playing the weekend tides. At one point I even had a bot set up to snipe epic items that people were transferring on the neutral AH.
I used to work in insurance in a hurricane zone. Yes, claims hurt an insurance company, but right after the storm is also when everyone calls up and upgrades their policies. I would say its a wash, if not actually a positive. If 5 homes get knocked over by a tornado, it is pretty much free advertising to millions of homes in the region as it makes the news rounds.
Difference between the hobby and the job I find is your control over what and when you do the things you want to do. Both have the type of work everyone loves, its just not as free at a workplace.

I program Android at home and decide when I want to do the boring parts. Sometimes I make it fun by finding some way I can script or generate the boring, repetitive parts of programing games or layouts. Heck, sometimes I just grind at it with a 6 pack and a good playlist. But at work there's often weeks at a time where I'm forced to do the crap work that no one ever really dreamed of. It needs to get done, it has strict deadlines and I'm not allowed to drink. But it pays me well and its part of the stepping stones to getting to the fun parts.

After spending the amount of time I have on HN I must admit that I am blessed with the position I'm in so I can't complain fully about it but its not fair to say that programming is a job to avoid simply because you're tasked with the crap every so often. For one, you need to earn your stripes to be put in that position where your responsibility and accountability are high enough to get the critical components. The guy right out of school onto the job dreams big but its no different from any trade or job in the world: new guy gets the grunt work. Perhaps its because I spend more time talking with fellow geeks or perhaps we do have a small superiority complex but no one should be fresh into a career thinking they'll be the one doing all the magnificent things you see on the web crafted by experts and superstars of their field. Heck I went through that faze too and I'm still very young but its much easier to see once you interact with the next shipment of grads: I don't hand off the critical work because I don't know they're good for it yet.
Political correctness, enforced by a software busy-body. Mind your language people - neo-puritains are watching!
The appearence of typewriters was not the end for book writers. It gave a better and more comfortable tool to do their creative work.

If you think your work is not creative, and all you do are very simple and automatic things that become trivial with this tool, then yes, that work could be in danger.
The amount of code it generates for a page containing just a rectangle is not a good way to judge the tool. They may have some finite overhead because of the expectation that most users will be using the tool to create more complex pages. If the tool is good for the average ad-page that's created, while maintaining cross-browser compatibility, and bad for extremely simple pages, then who is to judge?
<title>n is really bad</title>

<body>we actually think n is good, but we feel it is getting devalued now it is popular<p>discuss</body>
Very cool. I missed the original word2vec software discussion back in August: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6216044

And the paper itelf is a very worthwhile read: http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3781
I tried to open an existing html file and got:

"Unable to open file due to the following error: The file was not created in Google Web Designer."

So, basically, Google is just creating their own proprietary format that's built on HTML. Even if you are just using it to construct ads you'll be somewhat locked-in to this toolchain. Since HTML is inherently open people will be able to build converters but it's still a bad precedent.
Ha, one thing I love about GTA is the witty puns they have in there. Krapea, Life Invader, nice.
Major manufacturers are indeed adopting these techniques for correcting certain flaws. Recent Canon DSLRs will correct for vignetting and chromatic aberration using lens-specific profiles.

http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/consumer/standard_display/EOS_...
Absolutely, the Rails app I'm working on right now is just like this. Still feels like Rails but the complex logic and interactions can run without it.
I wonder how these costs fluctuate by position and country. It'd be interesting to see how these costs adjust for our own companies.
Ad development is the last listed feature, if that is the main purpose of the app then their website is very misleading.
It's a pretty common sci-fi term and books have been named it as early as 1958. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_(disambiguation)?1=1
Reminds me a similar tool by Sensha: Sensha Animator. http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/

Do you know if Google developed the technology themselves or if it is from an acquisition?
I wish I could mod up because fennecfoxen has succinctly stated the crucial point.

We really don't even need the NSA shut down, or for it to stop the mass surveillance, in order to have secure and confidential communications. Mass wiretapping is evil but it is not such a threat as long as we are legally and practically free to work around it.

The latter freedom is what the government is now attacking. Th US currently has no statute prohibiting "encrypted-hosting service designs [without] a backdoor for the government and the service provider", nor is there any statute commanding individual 'A' to enable the government to cryptographically impersonate 'A' online to deceive 'B'. But now, the USG has practically effected these policies by secret orders approved only by secret courts, with threats of prison for even revealing the existence of such orders, and preventing the subjects from challenging the legal basis in public courts according to Constitutional principles.

This really has profound implications. Do you have a right to run software of your own choice on your own server, to provide a service that enables the fundamental human right to confidential communications? This is an important measure of the descent into fascism, totalitarianism, police state, or whatever you want to call it, and further trashing of the rule of law.
Microsoft took quite a while to start paying attention to this hippie / academic Internet thing. They were pretty late to the party.