skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is about a collection of previously classified documents spanning most of the twentieth century about advice to various United States presidents on secret surveillance programs in the interest of national security. The article was a more interesting read than I expected when I first saw it on my Google News page. President Franklin Roosevelt was advised to violate a specific Supreme Court holding about intercepting telegraph communications with persons outside the United States.[1] The history, across multiple administrations, has often been a history of security concerns trumping individual liberty concerns.

But on the whole the history is also hopeful. A key idea from the article that really connects to me is "just as the book shows how that apparatus has been built up, it also tells a second story: of how public outrage, loud and sustained, can tear it back down." Countries have been in danger from external enemies before, and countries have been in danger from their own leaders and complacent citizens before. When the people mobilize, they can still rein in the government.

[1] From the article: "In his opinion, Assistant Solicitor General Charles Fahy had little hesitation about validating the president’s authority to intercept electronic communications to parties abroad. There was just one problem: The Supreme Court had explicitly held that the Communications Act barred such a move."
Abnormality
http://waltherpragerandphilosophy1.blogspot.com/2013/09/abnormality.html
The key here is that he got in early and sold at a great time. Right now asic miners are not profitable unless the price of bitcoins goes up substantially (1.5-2x). Then you have to factor in the fact the there are a lot of people out there willing to put down serious money on asics regardless of the current profitability. They have and will driven up the difficulty.

Buying ascis is very much a gamble at this point imo.

I made around 110 BTC mining primecoin, about 60 BTC of that is profit. I got in early and went hard. I consider the fact I did that well to be little more than luck.
Do they require custom drivers? I see no reason you can't have all-key rollover with that, unless the OS refuses to do so.

Not that I'm saying you're wrong, I really don't know if normal driverless keyboard input is capable of this. I certainly hope so. I just see essentially all 10-key rollover (or more) keyboards using PS/2 and citing that it doesn't work through USB.
I would be interested to learn more about how people use Trello for personal use.
Besides that, not anything significant (as far as we know).

http://answers.webmd.com/answers/1195061/can-you-live-withou...
Firefox OS Development: Web Components and Mozilla Brick
With the recommendation and consultation of the representative for the district and the two Senators for the state. Who clearly have something to do with this. How else can you explain east texas being the venue of choice?
No humor at all, it is real and frankly, I am worried for my children. http://y2038.com/
denver is a terrible airport. it's a 40 minute drive outside the city. it's huge and sprawling. it's seriously lacking in amenities. it's wifi is of the annoying boingo variety
I was working in Ireland until 2011, under the older work permit scheme. The major downside to this scheme was that the permit was tied to the employer - lose your job and you have to start all over. This is what happened to me right as the housing bubble was bursting, so we decided to leave the country rather than try to find a new job and deal with the time, expense and hassle of new paperwork. The Green Card sounds like a nice upgrade. I wish it had been available when I was first applying for my job.

Paperwork aside, Ireland is a fantastically beautiful country. I suggest you leave Dublin and head West to see the postcard Irish countryside. Get off the Motorways and onto the backroads. It will be well worth your while. :)
People here told me that I could make money by teaching myself some code. After seeing a lot of these posts, I am really starting to doubt it. You have so much experience, expertise, and you're a successful freelancer. And you have to ask about jobs? What am I getting myself into... I am 31, I might as well go try to be a professional golfer or something else hilariously impossible. Seriously, I think my life is going to be over soon. There is nothing I can do.
I don't feel this as "poison" but point taken, thanks.

We didn't use the clause though and didn't use (as far as I remember) any code which did.
I got in on it back when bitcoins were around $1 each. I sold 10btc at the first $30 bubble, and made enough to buy a new video card, and I still have somewhere between 60 and 70 btc left. Haven't touched it or payed attention to it much after that, besides checking the price every once in a while.
No. Tech-savvy people already understand why they're ridiculous. The non-techies are still generally scared of or intimidated by tech stuff, and would simply view that as acceptable punishment for 'hackers' ('hacker' being defined as someone who uses a computer for more than facebook and angrybirds).
Power Quotes, may peace and kindness go viral: John Lennon & Jim Morrison
Just tried this out, and I must say, this is really freakin' cool! Simple controls, intuitive layout. I don't feel like I'm fighting the debugger to get it do to what I want anymore.
Bitcoin is a major intellectual breakthrough, in that it is a "heuristic" for Byzantine consensus that can scale arbitrarily.

Moreover, Satoshi understood enough about economics (not, not social engineering, economics) to set up the correct incentives to get tons of people to participate in the concensus algorithm (mining).

The reason it took forever to come up with a viable digital currency is the obvious one: deep insight into both economics and crypto and major, creative intuitive leaps were needed.

Bitcoin is one of the single most impressive works of computer science I've ever seen.

Gwern's article stoops to an unfathomable level of intellectual masturbation.
The Law Belongs To Everyone, We Tell Standards Organizations
Users of BSD software still need to follow the BSD license. This mean for 4 clause BSD that you must including the line "This product includes software developed by the <organization>." in All advertising materials. If you are using the Revised BSD License, you still need to include the BSD license in any documentation or "other materials" that is shipped.

So if you like to be in full control over your advertisement, and your documentation, bsd do indeed "poison" the project. It clearly adds restrictions. I would however not use such derogatory term when describing the BSD. Is it really that hard to avoid using derogatory terms and simply use language without it?
I would like to see your project take off - but I would prefer to see such projects as AGPL3.
Girls DIY Come True
Locally there have been only two businesses hiring senior Rails devs that I saw, where the intention of the position involved coding full-time. One of those positions was a team lead, the other a dev manager.

There are LOADS of Java senior dev positions. Don't want them though.
Where did the Boomer women go?
I mined in mid 2010 from my CPU. I was not a hardware guy, so I gave up in about 6 months. I have managed to keep every bitcoin key I've ever owned, with the exception of one small mistake that cost me 1 bitcoin. During this mining period, they were worth $0.06 up to $1. It took me those 6 months to have my first epiphany about the value of Bitcoin. But it was just one of several more monumental epiphanies to come over the next 3 years.

I bought in to the BFL pre-order during the first few days of the announcement. It took me 12 months to receive the hardware. During that time, Avalon beat BFL to market and destroyed my expected difficulty. Fortunately, the $1800 I spend on the hardware has paid me back over 10x in dollar amount. It will take me about another 6-9 months to break even on the bitcoins I spend due to the massive rise in value since I made the pre-order. Fortunately, I bought a good number of bitcoins at the same time so I've made out on both investments.

I have purchase a BFL Monarch during the first few days of the announcement, but I do not expect to make the money back in any reasonable amount of time due to the flood of new ASICs and coming changes in difficulty. Fortunately, I do not have power costs.
A friend of mine who's a patent lawyer explained it to me once. Some time back the chief judge started putting patent cases at the top of his docket so his district became known as a having "rocket docket" and began attracting patent cases from across the country. A cottage industry sprung up in the area and the rest is history.
why (AGPL3) ?
To paraphrase Hanns Johst, "whenever I hear 'culture fit', I remove the safety from my Browning."

Whenever I hear that someone has been fired due to culture fit issues, when I really try to question the motivations behind it, it almost always comes down to a politically correct version of "we didn't like hanging out with him/her". It is such BS.
I wish I had learnt long ago that sometimes it's not me, it's not them, sometimes it is just us - sometimes people do not gel and all the HR friendly "no such thing as a bad student" is only so much horsecrap. if it is not working and cannot be fixed easily, quit trying and find other people to work with.

in large companies which are really lots of small companies in same buildings this did not look like firing / hiring on the cv but generally was the same thing..
IS THIS THE NEXT SPICE GIRLS?
Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?
There have been two such threads in the past few years (links below) which I've found incredibly useful and interesting. It would be great to hear some new success stories or updates from previous posters.

2012 thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603

2011 thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567487
I stand corrected. Image is the testimony. Submitter is the court clerk who corrected misspelling in his transcripts for the sake of grammar. Commenter corrected the transcript to include misspelling for the sake of authenticity. I corrected commenter's version for the sake of grammar thinking he agreed with image grammatically while he was talking authenticity. Either ways, I stand corrected.
Religions that appeal to and demand fealty to a false/unverifiable authority or concept as the truth, rather than encouraging rational discussion and criticism.

Religions that push rules based on those appeals to authority into the political realm, and attempt to force others to live by them...

Believers who seek to proselytize under the flag of a false/unverifiable authority (typically explicitly supernatural) to non-believers...

Parents who pass down the mind-virus of such religions to poor defenseless children...

Labeling criticism of any of those bigotry is a panicked attempt to invoke the strong cultural taboo against narrow-minded discrimination, but the criticism and discrimination against those is hardly narrow-minded.
We all know there are three ways to ensure something gets done: (1) Do it yourself. (2) Hire someone else to do it. (3) Forbid your kids to do it.

But I'm surprised that this surprised the LAUSD. They chose to pit their intelligence against the collective cleverness of a high school's worth of teenagers that wanted their Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, Angry Birds, and Minecraft.

LAUSD: Did you know that if you put a little hat on a snowball it can last a long time in hell? (Yes, I stole that line from a Dilbert cartoon. That's what this whole episode resembles.)
These are very different databases, PostgreSQL is a transactional database, while Redshift (aka: ParAccel) is an analytical database. Each of these databases have implemented much different design decisions, which improve queries on certain type of workloads.

PostgreSQL is optimized for blazing fast record mutations, inserts, while maintaining adequate query response times on medium to large size data. Redshift (ParAccel), or your other analytical databases like Greenplum, Teradata, or Netezza make optimizations that make sense for queries that pertain to the majority of a tables data (full table scans).

For example, Redshift stores stores a tables columns in separate locations, allowing you to not only skip reading columns which don't pertain to the query, but also allows for easier disk parallelization. Keeping your columns separate from each other slows down things like record reconstruction, since you're performing n disk seeks, where n = # of columns...this is bad for databases where you need a single record. Databases like Redshift are meant to compliment your MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, not replace them.

Shameless plug (I work at Cloudera): For reasons unknown, the article dismissed Hadoop without listing any reasons. If you're interested in having a secondary system designed for doing ad-hoc queries over your large datasets (billions of rows), I suggest trying out Impala. You can run it across a few servers you have sitting around... http://rideimpala.com/
The 18 year figure was just illustrative of the fact that I thought he was an order of magnitude off. I didn't mean that a company needs to remain consistent for 18 years exactly - but it is years of consistency that count, the more the better.

As far as Apple's performance - the iPod range is 12 years old at this point. Apple has been producing consistently branded Macbooks since 2006, this line is clearly continuous with the iBooks which go back to 1999. The iPhone range is 6 years old at this point. Consumer OS X is 12 years old - they've only just dropped the cat name motif, and Mavericks is still recognisably a progression from 10.0. Etc.
"Zing" in English has negative connotations; to "zing" someone is to make a witty but hurtful remark to them.

So "zing" is both the kind of term that COULD be taken over by a social media service (like "tweet" has been taken over), and at the same time is a negative commentary on what you're actually doing when you use that social media service.

I assume that that was the meaning intended, since the author is writing in English.
I believe it said Roosevelt was advised against the wiretapping but went ahead with it anyway.
I'm more comfortable with Google scanning my mails than the NSA or my government...

Google is just using it for ads, but the government can construct whatever paranoid stuff from my mails.
Store a hash of each file you already have. If too many items from a single website collide, throw up a warning/error/flag for help/use some fuzzy method of identifying clashing URLs.

If that's too slow/space-intensive, try a bloom filter.
Gracias sir.
I'm not sure what this fear of rejection is. Usually if you're bumming a smoke you're already a bit pissed.
Good point. I guess you could look at map as a count of how many people need to share a 2 bedroom if you view it that way.
Thermojet Render
New Rendering Product with properties other renders DON"T contain.
www.thermojetspray.com.au
But the semantics are silly if you can just host your own server.
Somalia might fit your bill. They have a non-functioning government. No working law enforcement. Not sure about the health infrastructure though.
"Before I started the project I freaked out and wrote down a list of every idea I could think of. Sometimes I feel like I'm going to run out of ideas but I usually get inspired by what I've been working on."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6097456

Wow. Kudos!
They do "hacking" etc in mouse models but it is expensive and time consuming. You might have about 700,000,000 genomic variants to choose from so we need to do other studies to try things.

For the time being one of the most effective means of studying a disease is to sequence a pedigree of individuals some of whom have the disease and analyze the inheritance patterns until you narrow it down to the point you can be sure.

You can also do studies where you just sequence a ton of people with and without the disease but those can be more problematic statistically because of the number of possible variants.
I wrote specifically "BSD-type" not BSD. We didn't use BSD license itself, as far as I can tell and the project contains surprisingly small amount of _any_ third party code.

I do not consider "poisonous license" a derogatory term. English is not my native language, may be this is why.
It could also be that they were simply difficult to work with. Not because they were lazy or incompetent, but just because their style didn't fit with the team.

For instance, somebody who is only productive in absolute silence and prefers working from 6am to 2pm, will have a very difficult time working with somebody who needs to listen to heavy metal at full blast and likes working from 1pm to 9pm.

Especially if they have to work on the same team and need to closely collaborate to get their work done.
It's a good point; the British government was the root source of the thievery. Perhaps we started as a nation of mercenaries.
Ask HN: What iOS 7 framework should I build?
I want to build a framework developers need, such as AFNetworking, be it based on a feature that can be improved or one that isn't part of the SDK yet. Any suggestion?
>So if you like to be in full control over your advertisement, and your documentation, bsd do indeed "poison" the project.

The real trouble with the advertising clause is that it breaks compatibility with several other common licenses. Some of the BSD advocates actually like this because it causes trouble for people who use GPL code (the usual holy war justifications), but the net result is still that you have two otherwise-useful pieces of code that become mutually incompatible for political reasons.
> it almost always comes down to a politically correct version of "we didn't like hanging out with him/her"

Startups run on morale. This is a pretty important feature of a startup employee. Even if that's what "culture fit" means that doesn't invalidate it as a reason to fire.
First of all, some star athletes are statistically far more than 10x better than the average. For example, the average NHL player scores less than 50 goals in his career [1] whereas Gretzky scored 894 [2] and Mario Lemieux scored 690 [3]. And that doesn't even count their assists, leadership, defense, name recognition (bringing in fans), etc. And I'm not even comparing these guys to other pro hockey players, such as the minor leagues and leagues outside of the US.

However, not all sports have "points" that scale the same way, so the 10x number is not as easy to apply. For example, Usain Bolt is not literally 10 times faster than the average professional sprinter; his best 100m is 9.58 [4], where as any moderately fit male can easily hit sub 20 seconds, and I believe any professional sprinter will go under 11 seconds. Nevertheless, I'd guess that in the 100m sprint, a difference of 1 or 2 seconds represents an order of magnitude (or two) difference in ability, even if it's only 10-20% of the time. What kind of odds would you give him in a race against an "average professional"? 10:1? 100:1? 1000:1? Usain is roughly as far above other pro sprinters as Gretzky and Lemieux were against other pro hockey players.

I'd also mention that "fame" is a bit of an x-factor. The world is not a perfect meritocracy and there is so much luck and so many external factors that go into being famous that it's not necessarily true that only famous scientists/musicians/writers are the only ones who are 10x. Of course, the famous folks are the only ones I can reasonably use as examples, and fame likely correlates with talent, though that talent may just be at being famous :)

[1] http://www.quanthockey.com/Distributions/CareerGoals.php
[2] http://www.nhl.com/ice/player.htm?id=8447400
[3] http://www.nhl.com/ice/player.htm?id=8448782
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men's_100_metres_world_record_p...
The last paragraph suggests that it is ideal to fire within the first two weeks or even the first day. I understand the importance of culture in a startup, but I'd be wary of a company that fires in such a short timespan. This may maximize efficiency, but hurts people who relocate families, give up other opportunities, etc. I don't see how an employee could pass interviews but be such a terrible fit that you'd fire on day one. It suggests that there is something wrong with the hiring process or the culture of the company.
They do it just to work with any amount of menu items usually. I don't like this approach personally... hiding primary navigation behind a click/touch drives me nuts.
No, let me paraphrase what you just said.

'If you can store infinite information outside of a system, then you can achieve infinite information density inside the system if you use outside the system as 'context'. I hope that paraphasing makes it clear enough the problem with this line of thinking. You have to include all the information when calculating absolute density. In your case, the context has to be stored somewhere too.
Bluebloods & Billionaires
I don't think it's BS at all. There's no objectively correct way to build software, or a team, or a company. Personal inclination and temperament play a large role; people can be more or less compatible in those respects, and when they're less compatible and it's making the work worse, that's a poor fit.
I run a smaller consultancy, currently 5 people. I'd love to chat too.
>There are a LOT more file-extensions that you'll want to ignore.

It'd probably be a good idea just to whitelist filetypes that you actually want to crawl, rather than trying to blacklist all the ones you don't.
It's 2013 and there are tons of programs that can generate a decent HTML based presentation from a text file. Heck, I've encountered one just today while looking at the slides for "fedmsg - The Fedora Infrastructure Message Bus" [1]; the tool is named hovercraft [2]. Another nice tool is landslide [3].

[1]: http://threebean.org/presentations/fedmsg-flock13/

[2]: http://hovercraft.readthedocs.org/

[3]: https://github.com/adamzap/landslide
In theory firing fast is the way to go. Sometimes you really can tell within a few weeks that a person is just not working out. However, at least in my industry, doing this repeatedly will likely earn your company a bad reputation. Fired employees who don't agree with your decision will spread rumors and it'll earn you a black mark, reducing the flow of qualified candidates.

The ideal situation is for both employer and employee to come to an agreement that it's not working out. An employee that understands why they are leaving and why it's a bad fit will often remain a vocal supporter. Unfortunately, in my experience, this takes time and energy far beyond the point of noticing the issue... I wish I knew of a solution!
If you don't try, you'll certainly fail.
It's a little disappointing that Techcrunch doesn't mention any of the controversy / dark pattern-ness of their subscription model, except in passing.
I'm currently creating a touchscreen voting application in HTML for low vision and blind users. AMA.
> I still can't get over the fact that American textbooks also come in teacher editions with the answers to exercises provided so that the teacher doesn't have to work them out.

Pointless busywork is pointless. If they can't find the answers, you're better off addressing the root cause, not driving anyone semi-skilled away from teaching. And just how many times have you graded 50 1st grade math tests, anyhow? Especially when they come up with a new edition every year.

Very sad when we should be able to do more in the way of open source textbooks (and exercise generators), but your gripe is not well-thought out and insulting to decent teachers, of whom I have known many.
Specifically what NAT traversal methods did you use? I'm always interested to hear about new ones I may not know about.
Amsterdam Schipol. Done.
Another screenshot showing it on the website, a simple black and white version.

http://dev.bitmono.com/tarsnap/tarsnap-website.png

PS: Created in Inkscape, font is Deja Vu.
So then which one gets fired?
Awesome resource, thanks.