skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Palantir is not involved in the NSA's PRISM program in any way, http://www.siliconbeat.com/2013/06/10/palantir-prism-program....
Show HN: Reminder Hero - Automatic e-mail and text message reminders
They'll never catch me! Muhahaha!

Seriously, though, that's because many people have put many hours of work into reverse-engineering protocols and writing libraries, which is fantastic.

This wouldn't be a two-hour job if so many people hadn't open-sourced their work.
47 Top Technologists Submit Comment on NSA Spying
+1 for buildr. It admittedly takes awhile to learn the DSL, but it seems like all of these DSL build tools take awhile to learn.

(I think that was one really nice thing about Ant--you could scan their manual/list of tasks and understand it very quickly.)

It seems a little odd using Ruby to build Java projects, but ironically I actually prefer that over Groovy.

This is horrible for me to say, but I'd like Groovy to gracefully go away--it lost the Java.next race (they were stubborn about dynamic typing for way too long) and I feel the only reason it's still around are for the admittedly nice frameworks it sprouted: Grails and Gradle.

The language itself is "meh", IMO.

...although it bothers me to no end that a dynamic language like Groovy had compile-time AST translation way before other (similarly mainstream) static languages like Scala.

Anyway. Gradle's momentum is impressive. Perhaps I can unlearn my Groovy bias.
No Big Deal; Bitcoin Price Recovers After Silk Road Bust
its is always dot com days in the world of government contracting.
He says people will have less motivation to improve performance because they can afford losing the job, you disagree. Then you go on and say that people will have less pressure to comply with unethical demands because they can afford losing the job...
">* I can't leverage the last 10 years of my career; it would basically become a lost decade for me
I don't believe there's nothing you've learned that you couldn't apply to programming (not to mention software/application design).
I've applied concepts I've learned in biology class to programming! Also, a lot about programming is management, too: managing memory, managing data, managing workers, threads; just to name a few. Nothing we do in life is a lost to us! :-)"

While you are right, i believe he is also right saying he can't leverage the last 10 years. His experience will be useful, but when applying to positions this won't make a difference. Companies hiring developers look for a very precise set of skills (This lang+That Lang+This DB+That pattern+etc...) and while his last 10 years might be a plus in particular cases, most of recruiters will just ignore them (especially if they are from the HR team).
> Both the original creator and the current developers are typically against re-implementations, with good reason.

That is not true. Gavin Andressen supports alternate implementations. Take the following quote [1]:

"Diversity is a good thing. Diverse, inter-operating implementations of the Bitcoin protocol make the network more robust against software bugs, denial-of-service attacks, and vulnerabilities. There are several projects re-implementing Bitcoin; if you are a Java or Go or Python or C programmer who wants to see Bitcoin succeed, you should consider helping them out by reviewing, testing, or contributing patches."

He then goes on to list several alternatives, including btcd.

[1] https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=204
Yeah, I think they were a bit unnecessary. The original author was using pygame for event notification (a queue would probably be enough) and a thread to receive the events. I just switched it to call methods on a different class, hopefully it will be more useful to people now!
The meaning of life is to be happy, make friends and learn as much as you can so that you can give back.
Ask HN: Source of extra income, no programming involved?
Do you folks have a source of extra income which does not have anything to do with programming? It could be a non-tech job, or a non-tech business. How well does it pay off, and are you happy doing it? I ask because I'm also looking for ideas. I feel like I'll never make enough money just working on my full-time job (in tech), but I'm worried that getting freelance programming work will make me stressed and sick of writing code.
Yeah, exactly. My normal scale was missing the big picture of how my weight fluctuates month-to-month. I do need to implement some smoothing, though, as the raw daily value isn't as useful.
Java syntax did not change that much since late `90s :)
I'll be on the lookout for lots of great Swiss bands to hit the scene around 2017 (if this gets passed).

Also lots of alternative art shows, post-feminist poetry readings, etc.

Should be fun
Demystifying Products Clothing Store
Maven stores all of the artifacts that it retrieves in one big local cache so that you don't have to pull the same dependency down.

NPM, by default, will store the artifacts into a directory local to your project.

The maven way sounds nice, but it's easy to possible to screw things up between different projects. (Especially if you have mvn 2 and mvn 3 projects, ugh).

With NPM, everything is nice and separated.

Ivy is like a mix of the two (a global local cache, but pulls down to the local project), which IMHO, has the benefit of neither while getting the drawbacks of both.
...some of your larger companies, your Twitters, your Googles, your Amazons, these are things they do to be able to scale up, scale down their servers as needed to handle the traffic. I'm not exactly sure what's in place in terms of the federal government infrastructure...

If only Amazon provided some sort of "Web" services, or Google offered some sort of application "Engine". Imagine, if new projects could rent computing resources from these companies, and make use of their scaling expertise?

(Actually, AWS is the default for federal contracts now.)
Maven killed some great open source projects, i.e. Apache Cocoon
Yes, you should go back, but the real question is how.

I don't think it is a good idea to throw away all of your experience as a project manager. It seems to me you would do best to look for a hybrid position. Find a job where you would do some project management and some programming.

I'd look for a job at a small company, where their developers are used to wearing a lot of hats and don't require a full blown project manager. A place where the company could benefit from some reorganization as well as a programmer who can provide support to other devs by helping put out fires, put in code hours on projects falling behind schedule, and maybe build some prototypes.
For all we know the PRISM interface is a horrid buggy mess itself. It's not public though.
I'm not really familiar with the situation in the UK. My very vague understanding is that the native Britons are so bad, with their chavs and yobs and twelve-year-old moms, that no group of immigrants, no matter how poor or uneducated, could make things worse. [1]

However, it seems to me that you feel so strongly about the issue that, even if immigration did create big social problems that wouldn't otherwise exist, you still would be accusing anyone who pointed that out of being racist. Basically, "that's racist" is not the conclusion of your argument, but rather the premise, and you're using it as a thought-terminating cliché.

Or at least that's my impression as an uninvolved observer, even though I'm more sympathetic to your position.

[1: I hope the British hackers don't get too offended, that was largely tongue-in-cheek.]
An increase in the marketable value of the land is considered an increase in income in such a model. (In fact, it -is- treated as an increase in income, just like the federal government in the US treat the distribution of restricted stock [which generally cannot be sold] as income.)

Your statement about productivity might hold true, if it weren't for the fact that (at least here in my state), the tax value of land is based not only on unrelated market factors, but also on improvements and use of the land. Therefore, if you remodel your kitchen, the taxes on your home will increase. (Yes, they often do here - you have to pull permits to do this work within the city, and the county assessor monitors permit issues.)

However, I do generally agree with the concept that property taxes are better than income taxes (which is one reason why I live in a state that utilizes this model), however, I can see that it creates downstream problems, especially for renters. That is to say, if I am renting a property, I would be foolish to not charge a margin on all costs - therefore a 5% tax to me becomes a 5.5% cost to you - I would charge a margin for fronting the taxes for you, and to compensate for periods where the property is un-rented.
"it seems NASA has no choice but to implement this despicable law"

They had the choice of taking a principled stand and deciding not to go ahead with the conference. Either the event is open to all nationalities or to none.

If they had cancelled the conference, not only would it have generated lots of publicity, it would also have put this discriminatory law under the spotlight and brought it to the attention of the wider public.
Getting CPUID info in pure Ruby
Yea, this is one of those things where that argument gets tricky.

On the flip side one could argue that diversification of implementations is key to the long-term success of Bitcoin. If, let's say, there is a serious issue with bitcoind that shows up somewhere down the road that causes a fork and it is the only implementation everyone is using, there will be a network-wide problem. If there are a number of implementations in the wild, the fork would be contained to a smaller subset of users, and managed accordingly.

Getting to this point of diversification safely is difficult, however, which is why I imagine some of the core devs might be against it. I remember Amir Taaki got a lot of flack when he came out with libbitcoin.
That's an enormous assumption. Google, Apple, and Microsoft already have closed source, incompatible CDMs.
Excellent work. How accurate is the weighing with the averaging that you seem to be doing?
Servers.com domain name to be sold in bankruptcy auction
I guess my question is this.. Why is not okay for 'Roosh' to talk about 'Pussy Flow', but perfectly okay for 99% of rap artists?
This assumes a static proportion of "lazy" or unethical people. I think the counterargument is one of moral hazard: if you reward laziness, more and more people will decide to be lazy.

There is also a motivational issue -- many people (I suspect) will find it harder to work for a living if they sense that their hard-earned money is taxed and given away to freeloaders.
I think this is a really neat (small) study of how a product makes it to market. Truth is, I would probably buy this razor if I could, I dont need a 97 blade extravaganza I just want something to scrape the extra hair off my face.

As far as using Indian students from MIT - thats a neat way of trying to lower development costs, while still targeting the specific needs to the ethnic group targeted. It didn't work perfectly, because it couldnt test for local use cases, but its still a neat start.
Oy vey. I don't know what George Carlin has to say on the subject of idiomatic constructions in English, but if we lived in a world where phrases could only be used in the most literal understandings of the literal definitions of their component words, idioms like "toe the line" wouldn't exist in the first place. The handy thing about it being an idiom is that it works even when the literal meaning, the context, and the history are forgotten. The difference between "toe" and "tow" is nil in terms of how it affects the meaning of the phrase, since the meaning of the phrase is not derived from adding together the meanings of the words.
I am not convinced that that's the way to go. I know nothing about robotics but it seems to me that research into a chimp-donkey hybrid might have more potential for success and also for producing lasting results and solve real, elementary problems that will be relevant for future generations (also with a better chance for civilian / medical applications). The intelligence of a primate to allow it to obey simple commands and follow his master and the agility, biological power source and millions of years of evolution of a donkey or some other sturdy quadruped that can negotiate rough terrain.

Not to mention that with a biological "robot" you also have a very low cost of producing subsequent units if you manage to create a non-sterile hybrid.
Project management skills and business experience are valuable for any developer. Your time was not wasted.

Regarding recent coding skills, this is not an insurmountable problem. Retraining of skills is something I've had to do a lot of times over the last 25 years that I've been doing programming. The way you overcome this problem is: 1) look at what kind of job you want. 2) Do independent work that you can show off to recruiters and developers as a point of discussion. So, for example, a few years ago, I wanted to get a job working with Hadoop. I did a bunch of things with it so I could show and discuss it. Before that, I wanted to get a job working with C#.

Even developers who have been coding every day still need to retrain themselves to stay relevant for more than a few years. You can do it if you want to: go get em!
I agree that it's core research, but it isn't published anywhere. Their control algorithms are not public; even plenary talks from Mark Raibert don't go into the details.
I haven't been following Bitcoin very closely. This looks great, but I'm confused why the authors went to so much trouble to duplicate the existing daemon down to every last bug. It sounds like their architecture improves on the design of the original implementation quite a bit, which is awesome. But if they don't want to cause a fork in the Bitcoin community (by adding features, fixing bugs, etc.), what's the point of having a well written one over the poorly written one? Isn't the thing more or less a "locked" piece of software?

* I don't participate in the Bitcoin community, so I'm sorry in advance if this is an ignorant question! Congratulations to the authors - I think this is a pretty significant accomplishment regardless.
Also take a look at http://dorcousa.com/ which is about 33% cheaper than Dollar Shave Club. Dorco is the wholesaler to Dollar Shave Club
Are you talking to me? I don't think I said anything like the first half of that.
Instead you subscribe to Netflix, wait a few months to watch what you wanted to watch, only to find it was taken down.

Most subscribers would still subscribe to a DRM-free Netflix, because it's considerably easier than maintaining a failure-prone array of hard drives to store everything you want to watch.
I saw this mentioned the other day: https://www.predictious.com/
As a member of the EU, how do you keep people from other EU countries from just moving to Denmark and claiming benefits?
Buy a safety razor.

http://www.amazon.com/Astra-Superior-Premium-Platinum-Double...
I would suggest:

- do not look "programming" as an end, just as a tool to accomplish an objective.

- do not focus on recruiters, focus on what really motivates you and see which companies/startups can benefit from your skills and motivation, then write them directly.

- Having an updated programming background is good, even better if you can show in an open source way what you have done or what you are able to do. I mean with this open a github account and start having fun.

- Does not matter what you will do next, its important you refresh your programming skills now .

- Listen to your intuition.
Sure, do you have $50,000?
Yeah, the product discussed in the article is safer than a safety razor - that was part of the point.
Denmark does not have a basic income.
This is one of the arguments against Basic Income and related topics i find most biased against lower income workers.

If your goal is to make everyone work, you have to fight wealth accumulation.

You sold a company for 5B$ ? doesnt matter, you should be taxed until you have almost no money, so you have to keep working.
Your parents made rich money? tough luck. No inheritance. Get to work.

But I have yet to hear someone propose something like that. Why would you put higher strains on poor people than on rich ones.

My 0.02$
Yes, because the cheap disposable Indian razor department gets to call on all $140B in assets in a Pyrrhic quest to crack the 12 cent foreign razor market.
You could consider "Bring Your Own Database."

Meaning give developers the nice UI and added features but connect to the database of the developer's choice to actually store User data. That might address security and what if you close shop issues.

A SaaS app that does something similar conceptually is CushyCMS -- you give them your FTP information and they provide an interface without storing or hosting your content.

https://www.cushycms.com/en/static/faq#tech_host
I'm only doing histogramming, so, as long as you don't move a lot, it's pretty accurate. The most frequent value will have 100 samples logged and the second most frequent will have 20, so that's quite the difference. I will compare it to my normal scale when I get back home, but it seems to consistently have a +1kg from that one (a Tanita something).
I would say just start programming in your spare time and then look for a smaller technology consulting company to begin working at. We've got a lot of senior folks who make really good money as "architects" who use project management skills along with coding, spending their time about half and half. It certainly isn't a lost ten years, you've gained some awesome skills and frankly programming is like riding a bike!
This is the perfect time to do this. These days they're training people with 6 week Rails courses and those people are getting jobs. Not senior jobs, but jobs.

If you are focused on getting remunerative work, you can do it. Just keep in mind you might have to abandon the status you enjoyed at other jobs.

Your product management skills might make you an exceptionally good freelancer or consultant.
I don't know anything about 'failing fast' or other startup methodologies (I'm here for the hacker part of this community, not the startup part).

Is this product designed specifically for startups? Is it intended to be removed later when you have 'found product market fit'? Isn't it more expensive to be locked in to this platform, which you don't have the source to, and can't modify if it doesn't 100% meet your needs?
You're comparing the GE quad with the BD quads. The video you link to mentions that the mental load of constantly thinking about four feet means the operator of the GE quad has to stop after about fifteen minutes.

Now the BD quads can run around untethered, with a human operator who is presumably doing little more than selecting gaits on a remote and steering it. If I make the least charitable reading of the Cheetah video at hand, it's still a damn long way from being useful, but it's closer to being useful than that giant truck-beast - imagine this a few iterations down the line, married with the results of self-driving cars mature enough to go offroad, for instance.

There are people working on all of the things you mention. And there are people playing with what can be done now. Your attitude seems to be "if I can't work on near-human robots, I'm not interested", which is fine, but do you really need to shit all over everyone else who's decided to see how far they can get with what they've got right now? It took evolution about 1800 million years to get from single-celled life to humans. We've only been trying to build human-mimicking automatons for a few hundred years. Have some patience. Stuff like the folding cubes robot? That's the pre-Cambrian explosion of wild forms. Which ones are practical? We won't know until we've tried 'em.

We'll get there eventually. Maybe not in my lifetime or yours, but we'll get there.
> Do you folks have a source of extra income which does not have anything to do with programming?

Why handicap yourself by ignoring one of your most useful and rare skills?

Use your programming skill to build a side business. Build some kind of service or API or something useful to others that they'll pay money for.

> I'm worried that getting freelance programming work will make me stressed and sick of writing code.

There's nothing wrong with sometimes freelancing - just don't be the idiot that tries to compete by having the lowest price. Double or triple what you think your rates should be. You'll avoid garbage clients and be happy about any work you get no matter how much of a clueless jerk some client is.
> my technical skills are rusty; I'd have to most likely get a huge pay cut and start at a junior-level position

You should check out my school, http://hackreactor.com -- we've had several students that fit your profile. If you take a couple of months to get rid of the rust, you can reenter at a high salary in a senior role.
Dwolla Client - PyDwolla
A machine with an NVidia Titan card is top end? I'd have said overkill. I'm not sure why you'd want that for a gaming rig over a GTX780.
Sorry. I thought you wanted something just to scrape the extra hair off your face.
What does it even mean for Bitcoin to be robust against malicious attacks? Bitcoin has no security definition, just a vague notion of what its users should not be able to do.
They hate us for our freedoms.
There's a huge non-sequitur there. You're assuming that people who aren't getting notified of their replies are thinking about what they're going to say on the topic. I don't think that's true. You see the reply to your comment, then you start thinking, then you reply to it. The time from seeing the comment to writing the reply doesn't change with getting notified or not.
Sounds like a great thing to do over thanksgiving! (or some other upcoming holiday, if you're not in the states)
Any tool can get hold of the full state of how to build the project, then interpret it itself, rather than having to work out what the imperative code is trying to achieve.
> This is one of the hard things about being a tiny startup like P&G

This was during the Vector's R&D circa 2002, Gillette was only bought by P&G in 2005. It's got nothing to do with P&G.
The bit which really tripped my PR filter was:

> To do that, P&G executives would have to attract the nearly 500 million Indians who use double-edged razors, an old fashioned T-shaped razor that has no protective piece of plastic that goes between the blade and the skin when shaving.

...such razors are generally called "safety razors", and unless there's a radically different design in use in India, they're pretty hard to cut yourself with.

But a resurgence in their popularity would be pretty terrible for Gillette, given how much cheaper their blades are, so their PR can't say anything positive about them.
" can't modify if it doesn't 100% meet your needs?" And its even more expensive to spend developer time doing it, then finding out no one wants your product.

That's what meant by failing fast. Find a quick way to validate your product in the market, then fail. Don't spend ages working on a product that will never work.
I'll read this later, and I applaud their effort, but really, the review group is only meant to pacify, and they don't need technical guidance for that.

Feh.
USA's New Deal: potentially millions saved from starvation.

That's the problem with those comparisons: it's easy to point at the precise body count of radical experiments that went the wrong way, but quite hard to enumerate the lives saved due to those that worked out. Kind of survivorship bias in reverse.

I'd guess the establishment and enforcement of sanitary standards (which, at the beginning, was considered quite radical) saved more people than all dictators of the world together managed to kill. But that's as hand-wavy as anything else in this subthread.