skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So in this case letting Google analyze the data really is wiretapping [1].

I understand there can be tremendous benefits in letting companies analyze all sorts of data on us, and then letting them spit back useful services for us. However, if we're going to go along with all of this, then we'd better have some very strong national and international laws to protect us against government abuses in simply lifting data of millions of people at a time, or simply targetting various people, whether nationally or internationally, without very strong oversight and a clear record of what happened, who did it, and why they did it.

Otherwise, companies like Google, by collecting so much data on us and keeping it for so long, are just making it extremely easy and trivial for governments to abuse their power.

[1] - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/02/technology/google-accused-...
Are you saying you are against: democratized wealth re-distribution, democratized theft, and charity at gunpoint?

How did you "see the light"? Was it Rand or someone else?
>female driver

Fixed that for you. Also I'm not sure why you're so mad over that story. Most news doesn't enhance your life or your understanding of the world, it's just news. You have to put it in context to extract any meaning from it.
Ask HN:Would you hire a seasoned Devops Engineer to WFH from an African country?
I am a reasonably experienced devops engineer working for a leading US cloud services provider. I am looking to relocate to a UTC +2 to UTC +4 African country; which coincides with US night time. It's incredibly hard to find local opportunities so I am open to opportunities elsewhere. Would you be willing to hire someone to handle your night ops?
From the form, it seems you can "subscribe" to any HN handle, not just your own...?

I don't know if you can use the same email for different handles, but with gmail for example you can produce an infinity of different email addresses.
Base64 doesn't compress, it's a way of encoding binary data with just ASCII characters. It takes roughly 1/3 more space than the original data.
I worked hard on it, but sadly it totally breaks on android and windows phone.
I hope to at some point remedy this though it is difficult, since I don't have access to testing on those easily.

If you are interested in this, I found hand.js which seems to do a good job of solving my problem.. I plan to use it eventually.
http://handjs.codeplex.com/
>If you wouldn't like to be told by the government what foods you are permitted to buy for your family, why should you feel good about imposing those restrictions on anyone else? //

The difference is that when one is receiving charity it's expected that the giver is free to apply conditions. If I see you're starving and give you money for food and you instead spend it on a weapon so you can rob people then I'm going to next time buy the food first and give you that.

As food transport is costly and solved within the markets already food vouchers make sense.

I would prefer to be given food than to starve. Indeed I think an identity linked card with food credits would probably be best, then the vouchers can't be stolen.

Of course people could barter away the food ...
Putting in weights to directly favor specific policy proposals is very different from putting in weights to penalize the kinds of means that people dislike. For example, if we dislike police detaining folks without charging them with a crime, we could count such events and penalize them.
there are examples of apple flops, but the apple tv is actually not one of them. we're now adding them in conference rooms as it kills the fucking projector cable mess once and for all. printers are airplay enabled, work great. will there be projectors with airplay soon?

as for real flops - very often it's services. remember ping? does anyone really care about newsstand, passbook?

they had a pretty good run hardware wise though. the cube might be a candidate. some nano iterations. but else?
Yep.

And if you have virtualbox, just make an image with a host only IP, and point them to that IP - problem solved!
Proving once again, machines are several orders of magnitude better at calculation than humans. This is both awesome and a bit disheartening at the same time since I still haven't been able to solve mine for the last year or so.
I'm confused, are you accusing the idea that multiculturalism doesn't work as being racist? There is ample evidence that it in fact doesn't work: that an underclass is inevitable and that status applied to an entire culture is immensely damaging.
I wonder, do the Rust guys have any intention of supporting AMD's HSA or Mantle API in any way? I know Mozilla wants to make Rust take full advantage of multi-core systems, and AMD is doing that, too, so I wonder if there can be some synergy there, or if that's outside of their goals for Rust.
To find out how and why we are here, to lessen suffering for everyone while we find out how and why we are here, and to help as many people as possible to survive and be well so they can join in with the effort to find out how and why we are here.
"...Even though in this type of setting the development teams are using what you might call agile methods, there's still a huge layer of requirements and review and sign-off..."

Aieeee! Brain explosion.

If there's a huge layer of requirements, review, and sign-off, to the point that it's impacting value creation, then they're not using agile methods.

Agile doesn't have a unique, firm definition. Best I can come up with is "best practices around iterative and incremental development"

There's no best practice I know of that requires spending tens of billions in new IT infrastructure to service 350 million Americans with some fairly simple data needs. Sure, they may be using _some_ agile methods, like having nice chairs that have those cool ergonomic options, but they're missed the forest for the trees. Reminds me of the old joke "Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how'd you like the play?"

I found the article most uninformative. Nice example: "...These projects so big is that there is a very rigorous security oversight involved and layers of audit, layers of rules. The kind of thing that small start-up companies who are just winging it [don't deal with]..."

No, lots of startups deal with high-security situations. These are known problems and have hundreds of existing players with known solutions. The real issue here is the way the environment for the work was structured, not the nature of the work itself. Such comments are misleading at best, duplicitous at worst.

The problem here is that this is a reporter talking to some industry schmuck all too willing to make apologies for "that's just how things are" instead of actually answering the questions. Since the reporter doesn't know any better, there's no context or follow-up.

My money says the reason there were problems is directly related to a large political system dividing up the spoils of new work and insulating itself from being blamed for any disasters. Since lots of folks made money, and nobody in particular is to blame for any of the issues, looks like the system performed as it should.

The real lesson here for startups -- and it is an important one -- is that you can't use people to solve problems that are so far inside the existing system as to have created lots of excuses and barriers for why things have to be done a certain way. Identifying risk is fine, giving up and saying that there's no other way to accomplish things is not.

The larger problem here is using reporters and MSM outlets to analyze how large groups of people perform complex tasks in nuanced environments. Most of the time they're the wrong tool for the job. They're great for telling stories, how one person perceives the way things are, but not so much at analysis. Most of the time what passes for analysis is simply an assemblage of stories, either on deep background or assembled piecemeal from phone interviews.
Free basic income would be inevitable in a highly automated country. The owners of the robots would essentially corner the market on labor. The entire premise of our current social system would be thrown into chaos. Large swaths of the population are not going to starve quietly. We only need to look at history here: once income inequality becomes severe enough and it can't be hidden anymore, redistribution happens. It'll either be by decree or through violence, but it is inevitable.
This is great advice, and very difficult advice if you have a ego that dislikes not knowing the answers. It's also something that is doubly important for devops - don't let production issues sit idle because you're afraid to ask how to fix something! I know that I still struggle, but I'm getting better and am much better than when I started.
It was a man, it says so right in the title. "Man sets himself on fire on the National Mall"
I've spent significant time in #3 (Morocco) and #4 (UAE) and would be hesitant to return. As a solo female these places are hostile once you leave the confines of the westernized areas. If you are just hanging out the business districts and make heavy use of taxis you're fine but what's the point..

#15 Portugal on the other hand? If you can work remotely and can get a visa, I'd put it at the top. Amazing country, affordable, fantastic people and the language isn't complicated to pick up if you have any Romance knowledge.
What is inherently virtuous about a build tool being pure-declarative and having no imperative impurities?
I tried to put my e-mail address and "bambax" as HN Username, it returned "bambax is already a registered user of HN Notify."

So you can't use it if the person you want to "follow" is already registered.

Now, I tried "pg" and it subscribed me. The result of this is that if "pg" wanted to subscribe, he wouldn't be allowed.

I tried to unsubscribe. Unsubscription is e-mail based and not handle based. i.e: You can't unsubscribe from just one user, you unsubscribe from all the users, since you're taking out the root (e-mail address).

Now I have to subscribe again to get my own replies.

PS:
Been notified of your reply by HNNotify :)
Your Addon has been updated
It depends. For tracking released versions, just let the Makefile download (wget,tar) and build (./configure,$(MAKE)) it. For tracking repo revisions use the VCS (git-submodule,git-subtree).
This is truly super!

I did something similar for RSS feeds and twitter: http://update-me.herokuapp.com - it is an RSS reader via Twitter. It DMs you post updates to feeds you subscribe to.

Could I request access to your API? I'm thinking of adding a HN subscription feature to @updt_me, something along the following lines:

1. User sends a tweet subscribing to thread ID, e.g. @updt_me START HN 6499036

2. @updt_me pings hnnotify with a callback to setup a subscription for the thread.

3. hnnotify pings @updt_me with thread-updates via the callback. POST payload, I think?

4. @updt_me DMs update to the user's twitter inbox! YAY!

I'm sure there's a simpler process than the one I outlined above. If you have any ideas, I'll be glad to hear them! :)
Yes. That's among many reasons why bitcoin is nice.
Unreadable Text on Google Nexus 7 About Page
[Cincinnati, OH] Differential Connect: Startup Jobs Matchmaking Service
I wonder if Boston Dynamics understands how intensely viscerally creepy their prototypes are.
That's very true, but Mongo has both a different product and dramatically different price point which should at least give them a fighting chance. You can't take on Oracle with a similar product that sells for 10% cheaper. With that statement, I'm really just parroting some of the tenets of the Blue Ocean strategy, but for the most part that book just makes sense and has validated what I've seen in competitive situations in the various industries I've worked in.
Ask HN: Coming to San Francisco - what to do, who to meet.
I'm arriving in San Francisco at the end of October for a couple of weeks, in preparation for navigating the US immigration system.

I'm a developer of 11 years, and head up a team of PHP Developers at an advertising agency at the moment, and my girlfriend and I are scoping the Bay as a place to move to. We'd have to apply for H-1B visas, gulp.

So, I was wondering where I should go are and who I should meet with. I'm hoping to arrange a couple of cups of coffee with some people. Any advice would be appreciated.
I am not an economist, but this sounds like a recipe for massive inflation. At some point, the spending power of the basic income, regardless of the actual amount given, will approach zero. Free money, health care, food, and unicorns for everyone sounds great, but these models are notorious for not working out well.
Neat! If you want to go further: http://www.stickaz.com/en/studio
You can draw your model (or import it) and buy real stickers.
It's much more likely artifacts are tampered with at the remote repository rather than during the transport phase.

MITMing the public wifi at some coffee store is much easier than breaking into the official Maven repositories. At least I hope so. That's why RPM and DPKG packages are signed.
Or... it's more like makefiles with a lot of shell scripting sprinkled throughout.
This article has some interesting insights about the process of developing a product, and the problems of working in a lab away from the people who are going to use the product.

But I can't help feeling disappointed that we have yet another disposable thing, instead of a better handle for double blades.

> The takeaway: In the U.S., razor makers spent decades on marketing centered on a close shave, adding blade after blade to achieve a smoother cheek.

Haha! My bathroom looks like something from a Tarantino movie after I finish shaving. Blood everywhere. Honestly, I'm surprised I still have both ears. Some days I just stop half way through if I haven't cut myself, quit while I'm ahead. And they keep adding blades - you might as well just give me a cheesegrater and get it over with. At the moment I'm using a double blade and Merkur handle, and I really really like it. Initial investment, but much cheaper over time. The ritual of shaving is nice.
Their parkour is superior.
The development on Siri started two years before the first iPhone was released.

Product pipelines are tricky, and not everyone has a Steve Jobs to pitch the final release.

http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1nptvv/susan_bennett_...
I wonder if they purposely design that in. Imagine one of those, with a gun, chasing you.
Have you seen the comment I was replying to? I don't feel like discussing what "some people" would say when you have someone right in front of me showing that even hackers (the one class that has everything in their hands to build whatever they want for free!) are inclined to think that having more money means "hellz yeah, now I can buy more stuff!".
In many enterprises we work for, Maven is still in the "to adopt" phase.

Having said this, I am also an Ant guy for simple projects. Too many scars from an Ant -> Maven migration. All pom.xml files ended up more complex than the original build.xml files, as Maven did not have proper support for the way the build was working before.
I live in Algeria (4th cheapest country.)

Some of you may giggle at it, but I am wary to tell my friends and family that I make around $3k/month, working remotely as a Software Engineer, fresh out of college. For many here, it may not sound a lot, but it is the most I could find, doing what I love (C programming on Linux/Open Source project.)

In a country where the minimum wages are $180/month, such salaries could be made by senior execs in large companies. At the age of 22, I don't know what to do with that much of money, except helping my parents and investing in housing (a sure bet here.)
Ok, so obviously it needs work! I just subscribed while making the parent comment BTW, and find the service useful.

It would make a lot of sense to allow handles to be monitored by many different people; some users are super popular and I guess many people would like to "follow" them...
Hmm, fragile in what way? For me, VMware Player has had only a couple minor hiccups in several years, and even VirtualBox has been (buggier but) very usable. (My machines are non-gaming.)
Hi,

I am running Linux mint at the moment so this is unfortunately not really an option. Besides, these programs don't really lend for data malleability, if you will.
Yeah, for two months I thought wildcat was just a really, really loud weed-wacker that was used every single day.
> I would say auto-sharding, replication, indexing, and complex schema-less querying are not.

Agreed; that was part of my point. Distributed KV stores are a genuine novelty over classic RDBMSes and open an important line of attack for some classes of problems.

> Relational databases are great but not all applications need full ACID or transactions.

Also agreed. As a relational bigot, however, I only begrudgingly give up those guarantees. My point about MongoDB striking at a very particular moment is important: if SSDs had been widespread in 2005, I believe NoSQL alternatives simply would not have anything like the momentum they do now. Very fast random access is a seismic shift in the algo-economics of database systems.

> even when you put SSDs under MySQL, it's still MySQL.

One of my pet peeves is that many people take the limits of MySQL for the limits of RDBMSes. It's a bit like taking the limits of small cars as the limits of all wheeled vehicles.

It so happens that I am working a project where the central model is a graph; so even an arch relational pom-pom waver like me is considering picking a NoSQL solution for it.
I wish we could deport people who throw around the "racist" label casually. There is nothing racist about believing that big, complex, interdependent societies function best when people share basic values, beliefs, and culture. It's the difference between multiculturalism as practiced in the U.S., where e.g. asian immigrants to the west coast have assimilated the basic values of american society while remaining distinctive, and multiculturalism as expressed in the U.K., where e.g. many muslim immigrants refuse to assimilate to the point of wanting to be governed by separate sets of laws.

I would never say people of a minority culture/ethnicity can't be racist against that culture, but I think we often have a more nuanced view of "racism" than people of the majority culture/ethnicity. My family immigrated to the U.S. from Bangladesh, and integration is an important issue to us. We see a lot of immigrants who refuse to assimilate, and we believe that it's detrimental both for them, because it makes it harder for them to take advantage of all of the opportunities of American society, and detrimental to the people who live around them, because there presence creates cultural schisms within communities that cannot be reconciled. I don't think there is anything "racist" about pointing these basic facts out.
I've used melatonin and it definitely works, especially for improving the quality of sleep and sleeping under the sun.

However I've found that just not eating for 6-8 hours before you go to bed helps much more. Even eating an apple can disrupt sleep. This works really well because if you suppress eating before you got to sleep, you also wake up on time and pretty fresh to boot.

The only downsides are that some people get tempted too easily to eat before bed or that if you absolutely have to stay late an hour or two more, you'll still wake up 16 hours after you stopped eating, leaving you with less sleep than intended.
Even TAILS worries me slightly. Why? Homogeneity. The same thing that makes a freshly booted TAILS "clean" and exactly the same as any other freshly booted TAILS also means that it's a "known quantity" to an attacker.

A lot of obscure vulnerabilities that would normally require a "perfect storm" to be used together to compromise a system are much easier to construct once you know a lot about the target system. And it would be well worth the time for an attacker to develop an exploit that would work against all TAILS users.

In the same way the Firefox heap spraying attack was specifically targeted against users of the Tor Browser Bundle. There, homogeneity was a large part of victims' downfall. TAILS is arguably many times more homogeneous.

ASLR and related technologies are a (very very basic) start but we may not have better answers to things like this until we have the likes of binary diversity as described in http://lwn.net/Articles/565113/ being usable (Even then, a final binary compilation stage would need to be taken by an application user before use).

Edit: and yes, you don't need to point out that the TBB vulnerability did heap spraying in Firefox's JIT and so binary diversity would probably have been minimally effective.
First of all let's not confuse the issues here, the one in question is about tagging visitors with cookies, and the one you link to is a terrible decision by a judge about the nature of data processing in the cloud with the potential to adversely affect all tech corps and startups and further enrich leech trial lawyers. Here are some opinions by those who know the law much better that myself:

http://www.volokh.com/2013/10/04/is-gmail-illegal/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/28...

It’s just an awful decision.

Back to the cookie thing, the technique described is not exclusive to national agencies, any black hat with gumption can manage it (although the NSA taps teleco traffic which makes it much easier for them) the attack vector in this case is a vulnerability in the Tor browser that ought not have been there in the first place (rather than any data analysis) and I'm guessing it was already patched seeing as the documents describing it are a bit dated.

It’s not a kickoff point to philosophise about the merits of free services and the legality of hadoop. Also "companies like Google" aren't the ones that came up with terrible laws nor should they stop building stuff because of them.
> The NSA shouldn't just be an attacker it should also provide defence.

Uh, it actually does exactly that. That is the second major mission objective of NSA, is to ensure that the USA's own communications are secure. For example, the SHA-1 hash standard that underpins much of our cryptosystems was developed wholly by NSA as an alternative to MD5 (which was apparently even at the time thought to be weak at NSA).

However there's a difference between ensuring that the theoretical underpinnings of COMSEC are adequate and releasing 0-days. There will always be exploits in web browsers used by people, so NSA is not "helping the citizens" by releasing each and every one of those secretly to browser developers. They can effectively only hamstring them own mission goals by doing that.
Could you expand on the advantages of Estonia over Latvia?
That's cheap, it's a special cube. And it took it 60 seconds just to grok the starting position. I would like to see a robot where you can toss it one mixed-up cube per second, and it solves them and tosses them back.
Or just a high explosive charge. Slamhound?
Yeah. They came in once and tried to sell us on it. Wasn't all that interesting honestly and I believe we'll keep on using Couchbase.
The idea that there is a "poor, uneducated, unacculturate" immigrant underclass in the UK is a racist lie. Recently arrived immigrants often find themselves at a disadvantage, but 2nd & 3rd generation communities are often wealthier, and better educated than "natives".

Five or ten years ago, I would have told you that this kind of politicised bigotry was entirely outside the British mainstream... only practised by a tiny, shabby fringe. These days, I'm dismayed to admit that the BNP and their UKIP mini-me's have managed to spread their filthy ideas much more widely.
You did some sloganeering that was at best tangentially related to the article in question. The resulting discussion? Just what you'd expect.

Par for the HN course these days, but no need to pat yourself on the back over it.
1 point of view is not enough a sample size. But OP argument is worth a try as a hypothesis.