skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for replying, much appreciated.

I don't know...I guess I'm sad that my parents were against dorming since I lived so close. I try to get over the fact that I commute because I feel like I can do something for myself even if I am in this situation. I'll go through these periods in my life where I feel inadequate, dealt bad cards, and didn't take the chance to leave even when my GPA was fantastic. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate myself but all I have are grades and some great conversations with professors. Still...

Mind if I ask where you went to college? What are you doing now?
> Every time we have this choice, and every time the conversation is dominated by a fight between Conservatives and Progressives, it’s a shame, because fundamentally, both sides agree on the same things. Nobody thinks it’s awesome when houses burn down. Nobody thinks it would be better if computer security on the whole got worse. Nobody thinks correct nutrition should be harder. Nobody, if you get down to it, thinks anything should be harder to use, that life should be less pleasant.

Blanket statements, out of context. Perfect writing again.

I can make blanket statements the same way too. We all want to be loved. We all want to be healthy. We all want to be rich. We all like things to be easy. So, fundamentally, we agree on the same things, right ?

WRONG!

> Nobody, if you get down to it, thinks anything should be harder to use, that life should be less pleasant.

There is pleasure in doing HARD things. There is pleasure in learning from scratch and mastering something difficult. There is pleasure in exploration and understanding instead of digesting something pre-made for you.

Not for everyone, maybe, but in the hacker crowd you will find lots of people who are precisely like that.
> But surely we can all agree there exist circumstances under which some lawful intercepts are justified: child pornographers, terrorists actively planning murders, missing persons, etc. The problem is Lavabit was not designed to facilitate intercepts under any circumstances.

That's not true, though. Levison could and did help the government with intercepts before, and offered to provide the same service again; this time, the government was not satisfied with the offer (from the New Yorker, emphasis mine):

"The documents, and Levison’s comments to us, suggest that although he is a skeptic, he was willing to work with the government: he offered to write intercept code himself to capture their target’s metadata, and acknowledged that the government might have a right to the person’s information. He was willing to turn that information over, as he did in a case involving child pornography; Lavabit’s archived site in fact explicitly states that one of the reasons its most secure services are available to paying customers only is so that if an account “is used for illegal purposes that money trail can be used to track down the account owner.” But the government refused Levison’s offer. It wanted the keys to everything, so he gave it nothing."
http://archive.org/details/201309_foursquare_dataset_umn
Pretty-printing of JavaScript landed in Nightly just a few weeks ago: http://bugzil.la/762761
As someone in the business of measuring aptitude, I can tell you with some confidence that it is. (If it weren't, we could save ourselves weeks of effort each batch reading applications and doing interviews, and instead just choose randomly among the applicants.)
72x image resizing speed-up using Joyent Manta
#3 solves all your problems then :-)
Yeah, the CA version (https://www.coveredca.com/) had so many visual glitches and various problems (404s and 500s), I threw up in my mouth a little when I found out that Accenture charged the state over 180M to build it and another 174M to operate it for four years. I don't know how that's possible.
The article mentioned only one side of the problem: the acquisition process. The government must follow the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR - http://www.acquisition.gov/far/) when contracting purchases of equipment and/or services. The FAR is not agile and is so strict that you CANNOT already know what you want, you must make the contract as generic as possible. Especially on large contracts (over $5M). For example, you can't say that you need laptops with Intel Core i5 processors because that would unfairly exclude other processor vendors from competing.

The other side of the problem, arguably the bigger side, is that most of the people in the acquisition process do not know how to write a contract that is flexible and really gets the government what it needs. For such a large project as the health care website, the people at Health and Human Services most certainly did not know how to articulate what they wanted. They could've hired a company to help them determine their requirements and write a proposal, but that's a significant (and long) undertaking itself.

In short, government systems will never be user friendly, scalable, or secure because we don't know how to acquire such a system.
People who build stuff tend to think a lot about the flaws before they do anything. If you pitch them your wonderful, shiny, new idea you'll immediately see the gears inside their head spinning away trying to figure out how to break it, why it's a bad idea or, worst of all, who has done it better before.

This might be bad for your ego, but it can also be tremendously useful.

Why post anything to hackernews? Do you want a bunch of ego-validating fawning?

"WOW!!! That's the greatest idea ever!"
"Brilliant!"
"I could never come up with something so ingenious!"
"This is going to sell like hot-cakes and you are going to be rich!"

These are all great comments to hear, but utterly useless. If you only receive opinions like these you might spend your precious blood, sweat, and money making something that nobody wants. Slightly more useful comments can let you zero in on why your idea is good, so that no matter what else doesn't make the final cut, the good stuff will.

"Good idea. I particularly like how it..."

The negative comments that make it sound like your idea is trash? Well, sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong. You'll probably find yourself wanting to grab the authors of these comments by their short-hairs so you can shout into their face why they're wrong. If you can't think of anything past the physical violence, they just might have a point.

Some things that pop up here spark less than useful conversations as a side-effect of how HN people approach things. Take Apple's new fingerprint scanners. They are being sold as highly secure when all they really are is highly convenient. This hits that "easy to break" nerve builders have and is then reinforced by the contrarian urge to bash the big guy. It might be annoying to read if you're an Apple fan, but it's a natural result of the kind of thinking that goes on in HN. It might even be useful if you're considering using biometrics of some sort yourself!

In short, HN gets it right more often than not. People should keep bashing brilliant and stupid ideas alike because that's how everybody learns. If your ego gets hurt, take a break.
Cassandra binds to posix_fadvise to do exactly this when writing out new SSTables:

https://github.com/apache/cassandra/blob/trunk/src/java/org/...
Putting aside the vague term reasonable for a moment, we should really examine that the fourth amendment states "... and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

I think we need to analyze "persons" or "things" in an electronic light... could things be roughly analogous to "a mailbox" and could persons be "a person's electronic mail account"?

You can't just state on your warrant "I want all of the things!", you must stipulate that "I want Ben's mail account and logs of all his activity on your service." If there is no way of extracting that information without compromising everyone else's privacy, does the law state "in cases like this, the constitution should be violated to satisfy the terms of the warrant"? or does the law state "the terms of this warrant cannot be enforced without breaching the constitutional rights of at least one other party and thus is illegal"?

It's my guess (and I'd like to emphasise the word guess as I really have no idea), that any reasonable judge (that wasn't on the payroll of the NSA or FISA court) would deem this is an illegal search warrant because it's in violation of every other Lavabit user's fourth amendment rights.

Anyway, that's all by-the-by. The judge who is attempting to enforce this ridiculous debacle (and I use the word ridiculous in the sense of hilarity because every new development is a source of mirth) clearly doesn't give a shit about anyone's fourth amendment rights, and he's pissed at Levison's continued contempt of court so he's stamping his feet like a spoiled little four year old who's just been told he's not getting Dunkin' Donuts for dinner, while getting a schooled by an internet Hero... with a capital H.

</rant>
Someone mentioned that this doesn't support purchasing of digital products/services, so if when you write "Subscriptions" you mean "SASS app subscriptions" I think the answer is no. (Happy to be corrected)

If that is what you are looking for a service that supports SASS login/subscriptions, perhaps you might be interested in my startup http://authic.com
I totally disagree. People have the right to have private and secure conversations and we shouldn't have to give up that privacy to ensure that the government can spy on our conversations in order to catch bad guys.
I guess my Windows bias is showing through. Let's split it and call 2MB pages large, and 1GB huge. (Yeah, I know 1GB pages only have real hardware support in really recent processors.)
Dead link. Their source seemed to be http://techivian.com/samsung-galaxy-round-5-7-inch-curved-di... anyway.
> Particularly one Twitter screed that said I only successfully raised venture capital for Pando because of how I look and who I know.

Gender issues aside, Why exactly did Pando raise money, and how are they spending it? AFAICT it's a tech blog like many others
Somehow it doesn't surprise me that the Twitter board is a men's club.

If this was merely a chance phenomena, that would be one thing but this is platform that has something of a history of being a mob-enablement tool in a bad way.

That's not to say Twitter hasn't done or couldn't do good. But a company like Twitter or Facebook is doing two things - making a significant amount of money and changing the world "social terrain". It seems reasonable that Twitter should be aware that they're doing this and should send signals showing they considering their impact. Now, the number of women on the board is probably a pretty poor marker by itself of whether a group is aiming to be sensitive. But one's willingness to send even a poor signal is different matter.
I actually know someone who has worked for the VA in medical coding contracts. He still has Cobol programmers on his speed dial because some of the live code is still written in it.
What country are you operating from?
That is total bullshit. All you should really have to have in order to keep a conversation private is the intentions. Even if it's a plain text email, only myself and the recipient of the email address should have the privilege of it's contents. If you want you can agree to let the provider use an automated system to scan for keyword for ads or whatever, but no one other than the recipients and agreed upon thrid parties should have permission to read those messages and anyone else doing so should be punished by law. We need to add an amendment which augments the 1st to say this clearly.
I think large sections of the community think emotively and large sections thing logically.

Emotive thinking I think goes without saying is worse since it's not logical.

But emotive people can still be quite good at their specialities and if the topic is not pushed by emotions.

No idea on the solution, have a Vulcan filter on emotive threads?

Is HN about learning from other people or about other people or both?

[edit] And will say emotive people also have other great skill sets like motivating others. Just are not good when you what to find the right decision.
The statement is pretty much entirely incorrect apart from the gradual accumulation of "inaccuracies".

Living cells constantly attempt to repair "the inaccuracies" occurring over the course of life of a cell. Reaching a beyond repair stage leads to apoptosis, or genetically programmed cell death; in other news, the cell commits suicide.

A cell turns into a cancerous cell when some of the oncogenes (namely, p53 and, likely, p16) responsible for upregulating apoptosis become silenced, and the cell continues to live in a dysfunctional state as a cancerous cell. We do not know yet what excatly causes the gene silencing.

At any point in life, the human body contains a number of cancerous cells that it methodically gets rid of or neutralises, which is a normal process of life. Not every cancerous cell turns into a tumor and leads to cancer We do not know yet what causes it. Many people die of an old age and do not have cancer.
This. The article sorta pines in the end for smaller "more agile devs", but I'm not sure a small shop could just come in and bust this out. There is SO MANY legacy systems that need to interface with this beast. I wouldn't put it past the designers to have been rate-limited at 50,000 whatevers by one of the vendors of the other systems that they have to talk to. Computers from the IRS have been hanging in there sometimes as far back as 40 years ago. I'm sure systems at many other of the lettered agencies are hobbling along just as well.

I totally agree that the government needs to become more lucrative to smaller more agile groups. I think it could ultimately get better products at lower prices if it opens up bidding. That said, the government has massive needs and massive legacy systems that many small shops may have a hard time reconciling. There's always ways to theorize about how the government could standardize and modernize its disparate stuff, but that requires strong leadership, a good direction, and money. None of these things appear to be in abundance right now. It's really unfortunate.
I don't think that I will ever get tired of articles about gender and diversity in tech.
Capo: Automatic chord detection
Apparently integrating with "legacy" systems was a big bottleneck (e.g. to verify your SSN). I don't understand why this verification had to be done "live" though; the obvious alternative would be to collect all the data, verify it asynchronously/overnight, and then flag up those people that had issues. You enter your birthday, SSN, etc and then the 1% of people that got their details wrong get an email the next day saying "we weren't able to verify your details, please log in and fix it".
It's fascinating how, in an article that's ostensibly about Twitter, Sarah Lacy manages to write so many more words about Sarah Lacy than she does about Twitter.
"because of the punitive taxes Norway’s government levies on cars with big, gas-guzzling engines"

I guess people wanting a fast modern car would have to pay out their nose for one if its fossil fuel powered.
I agree. Talk about a conversation killer.

Considering he was speaking for kelnos at the time, I think your query seems reasonable and actually expands on the concept around what types of conversations should be managed by our government. Shouting "FIRE" in a theater is, and should be, against the law. It's a clear violation of trust, poses significant risk the the recipients, and is being done in a place that is clearly owned by someone. I'm cool with the police being in charge of enforcing rules that prevent this.

Assuming they are also in charge of policing the Internet effectively is another matter entirely.
I think Oslo consistently comes in each year as the most expensive city to live in -- so at $110,000 it may also be Norway's cheapest car.
No, we all should not give up our right to privacy. There should be lawful means to investigate crimes with proper judicial oversight.

For example, today, and for much of the history of democratic society, the police have the power to search your person under certain circumstances. I hope you would agree that you still enjoy a "right to privacy" in our society.

"Right to privacy" has always encompassed a body of law governing privacy. It has never been an absolute.

By comparison, the same is true for "free speech". We should not give up our right to free speech. Nor should we all start shouting fire in crowded theaters.

Of course there are no guarantees that abuse is impossible. That's what the fight for free speech and privacy is about: proper and just oversight by the citizenry -- not the abolition of lawful society.
Yeah it isn't down for me in Australia
Have you considered that some of it is just mad cabin fever? Sounds like you've been in the same house for at least 6 yrs. Why don't you take a term or two off to work and travel, starting this Jan or next summer?

Let's suppose the equation is

(baseline commuter alienation)*(personal response factor) + (cabin fever) = ):

First term is difficult to change (moving on campus might not make financial sense or that much of a difference if it's still your hometown); but dealing with the second term can be super doable both logistically and financially. Just make sure you have a structured plan of what to do, that you'll be around other people, and that you have a fixed date & plan for coming back to college. You're not dropping out, just ducking in and out really quick for some air.

In addition, you might be surprised, 5 terms of college isn't necessarily too late to transfer. It just depends on the target school in question and how the credits work out.

Good luck, unknown internet buddy!
I posted this in another comment, but do you have any ideas as to why that information has to be verified in real time?
Let's assume PandoDaily will never make money, and in a few years will be back for another few million in funding.

Lets assume that PandoDaily will continue to write articles about VC funded tech startups, now why would a company that stands to gain potentially billions of dollars from positive press of its portfolio companies invest in a money losing business like Pando? Especially if Pando can't continue operations with out more funding?

Do you ever wonder why companies you can't buy anything from advertise on CNN?

I have no idea whether this is true, but if we're making up conspiracy theories, this seems at least plausible.
Another nail in paypal's heart. I hadn't seen the new pay via amazon either, that's great!
Concurrent, perhaps. But a thing like this? You're going to see spikes of many, many times more than that opening [insert time period]. See also: the Slashdot Effect, the Digg Effect, et cetera.
Tips For Managing Remote Workers
Bandcamp is going to hate this.
To what degree is the sheer complexity of the underlying government legislation responsible for cost, delays and complexity in the IT systems government pays to have built?

No wonder we are going broke. It's nothing but special cases, all the way down.
[EDIT]: Also, talk about the pot calling the kettle black. This is the NYTimes Board of Directors

http://www.nytco.com/company/board_of_directors/

Quite the diverse bunch, aren't they? (I'm focusing on the NYTimes, where the original article appeared instead of PandoDaily because PandoDaily is our standard tech industry rag that tacks on three pages of superfluous rubbish onto what someone else wrote first.)

---

This is a 100% non-issue. As a person of colour, if I started raising a hue and cry every time there was a tech company (or, for that matter, any company) board full of white men/women, people would go bonkers. No one says "there should be X Asian, Y Hispanic, and Z African-American members on the board" because it simply isn't practical to implement without cast-iron Government controls (which are themselves susceptible to favoritism, corruption, etc.)

If this Claire Cain Miller person on the NYTimes doesn't like it so much, maybe she should be in tech instead of spouting vitriol about Silicon Valley during the day and then going to a journalists' cocktail party in the evening where you would get laughed out and never asked again if you talked about apache v/s nginx. Her ilk of pseudo-intellectuals and outrage artists are making reporting into more of a theatre play.

For an example of a (young) woman who is actually making a difference -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a35XINnYFtA
Looks like you've found a cool sweet spot in the market place! I'll definitely put in a good word with my musically inclined friends.
Compare this with the medicaid "part D" government website launched in 2006. It was designed around an anticipated load of 20,000 simultaneous users so they scaled it to be able to serve 150k users. Anyone who builds websites in 2013 without understanding the spiky nature of traffic or the necessity to build in capacity overhead is incompetent, end of story.

The amount of money spent on building healthcare.gov (many millions) just makes that incompetence even more infuriating.
I meant more for voice recognition stuff that is keyword activated. Presumably with better mic coverage we will eventually not have to hit the button to activate siri/now.
The issue with this is that it appears the site is being hosted in Wilmington, DE. Since this is not a game of skill, it is almost certainly illegal to operate within that state and the states of all of those that bet from the US. Since it is illegal under state laws, the federal UIGEA (unlawful internet gaming enforcement act) also applies. It could move to a futures market model, but as it stands right now, a number of federal or state jurisdictions could press charges. I'd suggest, at least, that you move it offshore. That won't make it any more legal to take bets from US residents, but it will at least slow them down trying to track you and make it much more difficult to obtain evidence etc. If you don't want legal hassles, take it offline.
It's hard to have multiple processes logging to the same file, but using pipes Posix defines writes shorter than PIPE_BUF to be atomic. On linux this is 1024 Bytes. So if log less than 1024 bytes per message from multiple processes, you can ensure they won't scramble their messages.

http://manpages.courier-mta.org/htmlman7/pipe.7.html

> POSIX.1-2001 says that write(2)s of less than PIPE_BUF bytes must be atomic: the output data is written to the pipe as a contiguous sequence. Writes of more than PIPE_BUF bytes may be nonatomic: the kernel may interleave the data with data written by other processes. POSIX.1-2001 requires PIPE_BUF to be at least 512 bytes. (On Linux, PIPE_BUF is 4096 bytes.) The precise semantics depend on whether the file descriptor is nonblocking (O_NONBLOCK), whether there are multiple writers to the pipe, and on n, the number of bytes to be written.
What's not obvious to me is your implicit assumption that press from PandoDaily is a positive signal. If it is understood that PD is sponsored by the very VC companies whose portfolio companies are being pumped, isn't it conceivable that the articles in the future could be a negative signal?
Isn't it also possible the companies at the higher end of the revenue/employee spectrum are outsourcing more of their labor?
Wow.. that's great to know. We will definitely investigate this approach. Thanks for sharing! :)