skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
hn commenters: Look at all the world problems us tech folks can solve!

bay area employees: Look how good we are at pushing ads on people!

If you're less concerned about supporting yourself, you can spend time on problems that are important but aren't profitable.
An App That Saved 10,000 lives
Hardly. The NSA's techniques, as described thus far, appear to be your basic computer security fodder. The same techniques that any modest black hat could do.

The difference is in the scale and dedication.
" In the U.S., razor makers spent decades on marketing centered on a close shave, adding blade after blade to achieve a smoother cheek." I cannot believe the article said this as more blades are worst for your skin. You are right about DE, especially when I purchased 100 razor blades for $19 at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002CE3518/ref=oh_details_o...
Well-researched feature. The best part of the fastdom wrapper (https://github.com/wilsonpage/fastdom) is that a timeout stub is introduced even for browsers that don't support native animation frames. Good job.
I think it's fine to be curious about a non-programming side job. Sometimes we want to be of financial utility without looking at a damn screen.

I don't have much else other than ideas for myself. Closest would be that I'm a songwriter and have released a 7-song cd recently. But even though the songs are good, there's no real reason to expect they will go viral beyond family and friends. I've sold about fifty cds so far. I'll release digital versions soon and will sell some more, but I don't have any expectation of making the money back that I spent on making the cd.

I'm also curious about getting more into electronics - arduino, etc. That's a good stepping stone away from programming, and there's the possibility of inventing something quirky that could make some side income.

I'm also starting to learn about remote control flying. There are ways to make money at hobbies.

I guess the old standby answer is real estate. I know lots of programmers here are into that.
He is just great
Eh, I have a beard and I still have to trim around the edges, leaving some work in the morning. And I couldn't grow a proper beard until 30 years old anyway, like many men here.

I'm a fan of the beard as much as anyone, but this is the wrong evangelism point.
Say, what's the etiquette with scraping Hacker News? I thought it was forbidden, and I've seen HN-based tools that closed down because they got blocked. But if this tool is going to crawl HN regularly, presumably they've got that figured out.
Oil-rich countries that do provide an equivalent of basic income for its citizens (Saudi Arabia, UAE) do not seem to have a thriving robotics startup community, but do have a wave of temporary foreign workers living in nasty conditions

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7985361.stm
Inside The Grace Hopper Celebration, Where Thousands Of Women Are United By Tech
Private GitHub gists are pretty handy. Version controlled, your choice of language, use them as datastores (write your own client) or something more like markdown interlinked documents, etc...

An actual repo would have even more features, like: https://github.com/blog/1601-see-your-csvs
In two words: Maslow's hierarchy. [1]

The best places I know have people who are working from higher-layer motivations, and corporate cultures that encourage that by treating people as adults, supporting them, giving them wide latitude to get things done, et cetera.

The worse are the opposite. The people there are desperate for money to survive. The corporate cultures are disempowering, controlling, contemptuous.

It's commonly thought in the US that these are just two different sorts of people, the high-class creatives who should be given latitude, and the low-class proles who must be controlled like surly teens if they are to get anything done.

But that's not true. For example, Toyota's great success comes mainly from treating factory workers with deep respect. [2] And it works here, too. This American Life tells the story [3] of Toyota turning GM's worst plant into one of the best. Same people, just a different culture.

So if people are receiving a basic income, jobs will have to shift toward the model that motivates people through the higher end of Maslow's hierarchy. Money will be part of why people show up, but it would not longer be the only reason.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
[2] Liker's Toyota Kata is a great book on this.
[3] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/403/n...
It's showing all right now!

Drupal can be a b*tch with its cache sometimes.
I don't see why HN people are so dismissive about this just because it costs less. I'm from a middle class family (considering my pa's income) but I make well more than $2000 a month (which is considered very good here). And I live in a posh area as well. Think about an equivalent of something like the heart of New York. That's where I live in.

Now that we have my financial background clear, to avoid ad hominem attacks, I would easily vouch for this razor. Not only it's really smooth to shave (very good ergonomics), it also lasts longer. Believe me, I have used a single blade for about 6 months (max), with no deterioration and any sort of skin irritations/side effects, on the condition that I take care of preserving my blades by placing them into the air tight bottles to avoid rusting.

However, my average with a single blade of this razor is usually 3 months. It's also really cheap. You can get 5 blades for an equivalent of $1.5 bucks USD (80 Indian rupees). The razor itself is cheap too. So, it's a good product that get's the job done for most of us. It's much better than what my father has - A three blade motorized, vibration enabled Gillete razor whose blades alone would set you back for $10 minimum for a set of 3 or 5.

I hate it when people automatically go into this "if it's cheap in price, it's cheap in quality" mode without giving the product a fair chance.

Just to be clear, my other HN account has 2000+ karma and I'm not a troll/marketer for this product. I'm a genuine customer who just would like to share my experience with it.
I don't really think of razors as high priced. I have a 4-blade razor from Gillette and I can shave for several weeks on one blade before it dulls out.

As an american audience member, my takeaway was around "knowing your customer". I also thought that they were focused on cost savings.

I am not sure what exactly you think is contemptible about this. That there is PR involved? That the price of razors is too high?
If you look at the general course of Apple, they've generally been quite consistent in their road map. I think the incredible success of the iPhone might cause a slump for a while, but then they'll just continue what they've been doing for a while: releasing good, high-end and profitable products and comfortably occupying multiple niches.

Alternatively, they might create a few more iPhone- and iPad-like successes and continue ruling new and existing product categories.

In both cases, they'll keep 'shining' for quite some time. If that stops, it'll suck for people like me who are fully invested in their ecosystem. That said, I switched to a Nexus 4 recently and it was surprisingly painless.
> today, most employees have a choice between complying and starving

Really? What's the grand total number of starvation deaths in United States or Switzerland?
Ergonomic Keyboard hack for your Macbook Pro
Maybe I don't know how to use them properly, but I cut myself way more often with safety razors than Gillette style razors.
As a Danish male Roosh's "Danish Experience" made me immensely proud.
If you want an upper class lifestyle, say modest 3/2 1200 sq foot house in the peninsula, and want to support a wife that stays home with your kids, you'll likely never make enough as just a programmer. You need minimum 250k+ salary to support that lifestyle. Sure some programmers make that much, but most don't
At the end of the abstract of your paper: "We recommend changes to route selection design and implementation for Tor. These changes require no operational increase in network overhead and are simple to make; but they prevent the attacks we have demonstrated. They have been implemented."

So the NSA was unable to independently discover what's in the above paper. Or they discovered it, but it was at a higher cleared level than this leaked paper.

The "Locating Hidden Servers" paper has a .mil author too.
Perfect Paleo recipes
This is a good book about Paleo meal recipes, that will be really useful for everybody!
Great work. I am going to dive into this.
How-To Track GTA5 (Amazon) Prices with VisualPing.io
This is a simple enough misunderstanding

I don't think that you own a digital ocean or ec2 instance - you rent them the same way you are renting the service this thread talking about. Given that chrismonsanto, is taking an even more hard line approach to controlling his stack than I do, I'm assuming he agrees (I know - dangerous).

When I talk about my servers I'm talking about things sitting in my racks (possibly in my server room), that I can rip components out of and upgrade. I'm talking about very expensive things, if not in terms of purchase price, certainly in terms of care and maintenance.

--

And to tie it back up to my other comment, I think there is value in owning your own servers, and in coding your stack from top to bottom, and having no external dependencies. But I think these are both very expensive choices - and the kinds of choices, most startups don't have the time/money for.
This seems like something that should be solved by the dom api, rather than this (quite clever) workaround.
But why would you equate "lazy" with unethical?

That's already an assumption that could be challenged. We now don't deem someone who's unwilling to work from sun up to sun down in the rice fields as lazy or unethical, but 300 years ago that might have been the case. Why? Because now a few people grow our food so efficiently that most people can afford to be "lazy" and work 40 hours a week in an office job, or at least an air-conditioned job.
* I can't leverage the last 10 years of my career; it would basically become a lost decade for me

Organizations often have issues with different departments communicating. If you have experience in both, that can be a big asset.
Ask HN: time for open source vulnerability discovery tools?
In the light of the recent revelations of Snowden about the NSA using a large library of 0days for its dark purposes, is it time for GNU, EFF and Mozilla (and probably others) to start with high priority projects to create tools for automatic/assisted vulnerability discovery?
Appreciate the insight. We definitely are in a super-alpha state where we don't really know what we're targeting yet. And by "we" I mean me and two others, doing this on the side :-p

Hopefully after a few iterations, we can get a better grasp on what we're trying to do and who we're doing it for.
Lean branding for startups? Looking for your ideas
Hi! I'm writing O'Reilly's upcoming book on Lean Branding for startups and would love to hear your thoughts. How important has building a brand been for you? Has it made a difference for your company? I'm looking forward to quoting some of your thoughts in the book. Thanks for pitching in!
Kai-Fu Lee, Ex-Google China Chief, Diagnosed With Cancer
Oh that's a real shame. They charge so much for it too.
If I should put it simpler, in terms that is easy for you:

You accept military solutions for combatants (combatants or in e.g. logistics) in conflicts with states.

There are often no simple categories as either countries or individuals. There is a big grey area, just consider deniability (e.g. should Hezbollah be seen as another branch of the Iranian rep guard? A proxy? Does anyone know, except maybe the Hezbollah boss?). So there will be cases where military solutions are relevant, even when it strictly aren't any countries involved (at least officially).

In the Middle East, this is especially obvious with more or less clans controlling countries.

For another example, Pakistan grows and deploys terrorist groups as if they were special forces (while vehemently denying it).

So the problem here is you building a moral standpoint of a simplified world view -- X wasn't in a declared war, so it is murder. It just isn't that simple, says 5 minutes of thought.
The virtual machine node uses, V8, is very fast. It was written by Google for Chrome and is much faster and lighter than the ruby interpreter.
The main issue with CSS is that you have to take old but not yet deprecated browsers into account. And even now, you have to take into account different devices, different sizes, different resolutions.

But I agree that's its not the usual language. Instead of writing words at the computer and have it compute it, you have to compute everything yourself in your head and output the script that do the display.

Things like SASS and LESS are a godsend.
Thanks for articulating so eloquently what I failed to communicate in [0]. Great post. Moreover, I feel we may have been horribly misled by Asimov's vision of robots. Come to think about it what we really need is not machines to be our slaves and fight our wars, but rather more intelligent animals. Perhaps biotechnology can deliver some kind of clever ape that can be useful around the house and do some fighting or carry ammunition in battlefield too. Yeah, I know unethical and all that. All these qualms will die instantly the moment a country is able to field a conventional army boosted with such apes. US has already done that as a matter of fact using mine-carrying seals / dolphins in WWII. And I know for a fact that a NATO army has plans to use pigs to clear minefields.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495440
Hi! I'm writing O'Reilly's upcoming book on Lean Branding for startups and would love to hear your thoughts. How important has building a brand been for you? Has it made a difference for your company? I'm looking forward to quoting some of your thoughts in the book. Thanks for pitching in!
Startups for Startups - Useful Tools
Android 4.4 — what next?
This makes me really sad because I really like this guy a lot..Watched some of his speeches for young people..He seems to be a really kind and easy going person.
We thought that is a good RSS feed to show the widget's functionality. :-)

Clicking on the widget title at the top will change it with a widget from a different category.
Deciding Who Sees Students’ Data
Cooperative context switching within a process is just a register swap. It's about the same cost as a function call.
My gut's telling me this tool is going to be successful. But you'll definitely need to grow some thicker skin. Disregard skeptics (unless it's constructive criticism), keep building your product, and keep pushing.

Good luck.
Forks are a pretty big deal especially if they require action on behalf of all the people mining.
As Tech Startups Surge Ahead, Women Seem To Be Left Behind
I've tried on many occasions to make Maven work with Eclipse but Maven nearly always finds a way to mess up Eclipse's excellent project management abilities. I'd say that if you just write code in an editor then Maven makes a lot of sense, if you use a powerful IDE like Eclipse then Maven becomes an unwieldy and unnecessary challenge.
As a front-end guy, I would say recording events, video editing, designing, 3d modeling, getting into printed designs, etc.

Writing a successful blog, writing a book.
Or we could eliminate this as an issue and decommission them.
Doesn't this open up the possibility of race conditions?
Slide #7 is my friend's museum in a tiny little South Texas town (Wharton). I was surprised to see it on CW.

If you have some interesting stuff taking up space in your garage, send it to one of these museums. If you miss the old junk that you've thrown away, go visit one of these museums.
I agree with your point. It seems insane to me to not have someone with a sharp mind and a friendly demeanor just go and travel around rural India for a couple weeks. Hire a guide once you're there. This would be in addition to any formal trials and focus groups. I am constantly amazed at how little importance is place on general, informal acquisition of domain knowledge. You never know what tiny fact is going to be important.
You should look into using replacestate()[1] from History API[2] instead of changing the hash on each pixel change.
This will remove the problem of not been able to use the back-button to get to the previous page (instead of the previous pixel)

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17507091/replacestate-vs-...

[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/API/DOM/M...
If you are a freelancer doing one job a month, each one accounts for less than 10% of your income. Where do you draw the line? Do you do a shitty job for a few of them?
Cool thanks. I'll check it out.
I still remember the $4899 price tag on IBM T-series. Everything today compare to that period is a bargain. Xeon and Ecc is what developer should use for stability(VMs) and decent speed.

$200 coding machine is not a bad idea, but I just cannot figure out where to use it.
It doesn't matter. Don't get caught up in the "what's best" HN hype. Don't use technologies that you're not familiar with. Go with what you know or switching costs will be high for your team. Go with a language that has a large supportive community so you can find answers to questions without jumping though hoops.
Isn't that exactly what proponents of basic income hope will happen? People will be free from the shackles of employment and will be free to pursue their own ideas and interests?
Seems like this could be improved by simply adding 5 more cameras to the mix... each for a side of the cube. Doesn't look like it'd be too difficult to add it to the existing rig either. Perhaps that's a future plan for this project?
If one of their many contractors can leak details to the press for idealogical ends it's pretty safe to assume that much worse secrets have already been leaked to other nation states (China, Russia etc....) for financial gain.

Especially as the agency in question appears to have no compartments or levels of access. I've been wondering how a comparatively junior contract worker could access so much information...
> Price of goods, especially digital goods, aren't based the cost of those goods. The price of something is instead based exclusively on willingness to pay for it.

There is a lot of misconception surrounding this principle.

To oversimplify, in the short term, price is determined by the interactions of supply and willingness to pay.

However, in the long term (in a competitive market), new suppliers will enter the market if existing suppliers are making supernormal profits, and existing suppliers will exit if they are making subnormal profits.

This means that, in the long run, price will converge to the average total cost of production, in a competitive market.

Of course, Netflix is not operating in a perfectly competitive market, but that distorts the price in a different way. It's not quite technically correct to say that price is based exclusively on willingness to pay for it; even in noncompetitive markets (true monopolies, as opposed to monopolistic competition), one can just as easily say that price is determined by the quantity that the monopolist wishes to sell.
Aren't all CPAN modules free? Just curious how it brings you income
We've been rocking the withings scale since January 2012 and it's made a world of difference for my wife and I.
Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem
How growth hack your startup to get at least 1k users
Bugs in the Bitcoin protocol cannot be fixed while remaining compatible; that's why they have to duplicate them. They're not trying to preserve implementation bugs.
I recently got a Samsung Chromebook, set it up with Crouton and absolutely love it. I ended up not even using X11 in the chroot'ed linux partition. I just use crosh + tmux + emacs and its a great little dev environment. I was even able to get clojure+nrepl working! (using the new arm7 hard-floating point jdk build). Probably the biggest issue is the small amount of local storage, so you have to commit to doing dev work on remote servers over ssh for larger projects, but I was already doing that anyways. I was initially just going to use this laptop as a short stop-gap while I saved up a bit for a new macbook air, but right now, I don't feel any need.
What are the flaws and how would you fix them?
Daily weigh-ins can be very consistent if you weigh yourself in the morning at about the same time after using the toilet, and before eating/drinking anything.
Popcorn by itself actually smells good - it's just fried corn. It's the ridiculous amount of butter Americans put into it in movie theaters that makes it smell terrible.
You can't know how it's going to play out or it's not an experiment...
A "fork" of the blockchain is devastating. If you are unaware you have forked from the main chain you risk double spend attacks on all of your transactions (and mined block rewards become worthless). Thus any implementation needs to follow the exact same rules (including "bugs") for determining which transactions are valid.

That doesn't mean every bug needs to be implemented. It's possible there are DOS or remote code execution bugs in one implementation but not another. Diversity between clients is a good thing. If such a bug is discovered in one client it won't take down the entire network (except currently the vast majority of full nodes use the original bitcoind implementation)

Various different architectures may have benefits too (e.x. I like how btcd is splitting the blockchain and wallet pieces into separate processes)
Mover.io - moving files over the cloud
this has been the de facto animation shim for a few years now. the best part of the wrapper is that it mitigates reflow. :)
Well, it looks like they vary by -+0.5kg, since this is what I'm doing here: http://www.stavros.io/misc/weight/

That's why I want a smoothing algorithm, but the one I found here[1] is giving me a bit of a problem (I can't see why the data points are being squeezed).

[1] http://www.swharden.com/blog/2008-11-17-linear-data-smoothin...
While I'm on sabbatical from corporate America I've grown a short one and not shaving is amazing. Especially since my hair is stiff and wears out razors quickly.
Maybe it will be added to the DOM in the future.
CPAN modules are free. But commercial replacements for XML::Edifact start at $100k not including the required consultant to implement it. So it was cheaper for them to pay me for consulting and maintenance.

The Perl Module is bug free for ages. But the UN/EDIFACT standard improves twice a year, while XML::Edifact comes still bundled with a 1996 version of the standard. Its easy to replace/update it, but those companies always have custom code list extensions, and merging them is basically my maintenance.
But the rest of us pay the efficient farmers for that food. That's the difference.
It's usually even butter flavored oil. I agree that butter flavor tastes something like butter, I don't think it is the same. Pretzels with butter flavor are similarly awful.
Ah, okay I get it. Thanks for explaining.

Of course, there are levels of dependence, and I think hosting on amazon or DO represents a much, much smaller risk than outsourcing your user management to a startup (or even a well-established company, for that matter).
I didn't deny that privilege exists, I said that in the context of this accusation it is meaningless. And I was not unable to recognize a sexist comment as sexist, because it was not a sexist comment. You have no "entropy," you just have two misconceptions.
West coast? My wife loves beards and so does nearly every woman I know. Just look at how all the guys in Hollywood have long subble theae days. I feel like close shaves are very 1990's.
What stops you get your basic income and fly to East Europe every month (cheap flights available for less than $100) where you can live pretty well with this money?
There you go again, being sexist and privileged in your reporting of reality.