skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The solution was built in 2/3rds by Accidenture, who got awared a $400m contract (out of the total of $600m awarded) with the bulk of the remainder going to IBM and the 50 other contractors.

If I know one thing, and I say this from firsthand experience, it's that Accidenture is absolutely the worst choice for any kind of contract.

Accidenture isn't an "outsourcing" company. They're an oversized roleplaying project, where the overlords (controllers) have the power and whim to kill projects and just pay the termination penalty, and where everybody strives to become a partner because it's up or out. Any problem inside Accidenture is seen as a nail, and every solution is a hammer, meaning a combination of ISS, MSSQL, Sharepoint, Windows Server and copious application of ridiculously overpriced "consultants".
RDBMSes need to check for primary key violations, hence read before write. Random access is slow. The fastest you could do is "no read-before-write, append-only writes, compact later" (Cassandra way).
Even if Google weren't currently sucking up this information, it would still have been a wise decision to remove it. They can change their JavaScript at any point without you noticing and start logging it. Malicious intent not required.
ENG prof corkscrews light to move more data faster
How are kids currently writing their documents? I suspect Microsoft Word will be with us for a very long time.
Why Does Windows Have Terrible Battery Life?
Well the answer is that government sites will determine subsidies. That includes verifying income and checking with numerous federal agencies. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/09...
This is just a power law applied to the distribution of inbound links. As time progresses, the gap widens.

Moreover, very frequently a little guy has content on bigger sites and enjoys traffic from being integrated into the bigger site ecosystem. Reasoning about search engine result pages is hard because it is a very complex system with multiple various parameters that are factored in.
Turkuaz.
All you wanted to know about your App users
It's obviously impossible to know that, so instead of nitpicking, let's graciously interpret it as acknowledging that he (et al) did contribute a great deal to the foundations of free software we have today.
Agreed and I'm somewhat supprised (UK peep here) that no data protection act is in place. UK had first version of the act in 1984 (oh the ironic choice of dates, govermental humour maybe).

With that I'm amazzed there is nothing in the USA, must be something beyond class action suits?
The Android platform is open source under Apache/BSD/MIT licenses -- it's no harder to get that than it ever has been (not hard at all). Look at products like Kindle Fire for examples of "uses Android without Google Apps".
The Trajectories of Government and Corporate Surveillance
Anecdotal example of broken queries != broken search.
I already use RequestPolicy and NoScript.

My concern was that he made the security/privacy worse than it needed to be, for other people, by including Google Analytics on the page.

He has now stated that he's seen that the room name is in fact being leaked to Google Analytics, and so has removed it. But even if he hadn't seen this, you still shouldn't include any third party hosted scripts on pages like these because you've no idea if/when they'll change in a manner which compromises security/privacy in future. No malicious intent required.
The best is not to ever need it by using an architecture with no SPOF (even temporary). Master switch is a huge pain - there are simply too many nasty ways it can fail miserably. I'd stay away from databases needing it, if high availability is the primary concern.
Word of warning, though. While this article looks pretty decent it's skipping over lots of tiny details that are covered in LYAH, which may lead to annoying gaps in your knowledge/understanding later.
Except that being poor taxes intelligence:

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-29/national/41584...

So in fact, it is more likely that people from wealthy backgrounds are able to better utilize their intelligence, and thus retain their wealth and status, whereas people from poor backgrounds are at a disadvantage when it comes to escaping their position in life.
FUNDEC Promove Curso de Controlo de Sistemas de Abastecimento de Água
Challenges in Distributed Systems (Andy Gross, Basho)
Emacs config. Latest versions of cabal cabal-install. A work around for the brokenness of the Haskell platform on ubuntu 13.04. Threadscope. Proper cabal setup for testing. Jenkins setup for CI from the start.

Also investigation dockerizing Haskell services too.
How Big Data Can Help Discover What’s Really Going On With A Patient - Video
Script on a site like this should not be minified. It should be easily readable and well commented, so that people can audit it properly.
Good read. It has me asking quite a few questions of what I consider to be best practice.
20% - 30% used to be the standard down payment for a mortgage. I'm not sure exactly when the %5%, 2%, and even no-money-down mortgages started, but they are a big part of why housing has been in such a mess the past decade. They sort of set the general expectation that you could buy a house with no personal sacrifice or investment, and thus made it easy for people to rationalize walking away when the payments became difficult to manage.
I think the problem might be also things that look like syntax to somebody who is not used to Haskell, but are just usual functions like ($) (<*>) ($!) and whatnot.
Dev says, We protected our copyright because Total Biscuit has no right to make advertising revenues with our license.[1]

Then why they gave him a key in the first place?

1.http://steamcommunity.com/app/242800/discussions/0/810938810...
No, unless the language evolves substantially. I love Go. I've written a fairly widely-used, large-ish application with it. Go shines in the following respects:

1. They got concurrency right. Writing ostensibly blocking code and letting the runtime yield in the background is The Future.

2. Implicit interfaces and formalizing "composition over inheritance" is the right way to think about reusing functionality.

3. Deployment is stupidly easy with zero-dependency binaries.

4. The cross-compilation tool chain is dead simple. (excepting CGo)

5. The tooling around Go's handling of code (godoc, go vet, go fmt, etc) is superb. Enforcing a one-true coding style makes foreign code easier to understand.

That being said, Go is missing the expressiveness that you expect coming from higher level languages like Haskell/Python/Scala. In many cases, it is a unnecessary step backwards on the thought-to-code spectrum. Not having things like generics and list comprehensions makes my code more verbose and more difficult to understand.

Certainly Go will evolve, although the authors often seem perhaps a little too resistant to change. I suspect that Go's popular successor ten years from now will have stolen Go's best qualities and iterated faster to include the higher-level language niceties that we expect.

I have a longer blog post to expand on this later.
This is the latest thread I have been following,

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-nuts/2Xluuq6h...

It is quite easy to see how welcoming some in the community are to those ideas.
I'd be more than interested to see what you got. I want to introduce Haskell to our production soon, but am still not sure about the whole process of managing it at scale. This would definitely help as an info if nothing else.
Writing Smarter Fabric Scripts: Telling the Difference Between Local and Remote
Also as someone who doesn't know Haskell at all, I have great difficulty reading Haskell. I dont think I would have that kind of problem reading a language with a more traditional syntax.

Right, but then you'd lose the benefit of Haskell being a very different language. To implement Haskell using C-style syntax would make it extremely awkward to make liberal use of Haskell's powerful features. In particular, Haskell's syntax is optimized to make fully/partially applying functions as quiet as possible. This really shines in conjunction with the ability to define your own operators -- including their fixity -- so you can wage an all-out assault on parentheses!
How to attract girls to the tech industry
I can confirm that that is a realistic average for a frontend guy. Keep in mind too that most larger companies will offer you a salary that is significantly below the median they offer Swedish applicants because they believe they have a leg up on you. You are in a worse negotiating position and they expect you to be used to work for a lower wage.
Getting Started with Ghost
I expect this will skew results.

Germany, France etc. will be turned-off or even insulted by the grouping and feel less impulse to represent than the named countries where a little nationalistic pride will be a motivator.

The reason for this turn-off is somewhat justified by your language - bother, pile, tedious etc. You must be American - jk!
Sweden just isn't made for a high income, high spending scenario. For instance most of the benefits (unemployment, sickness, parental etc.) have a cap. Taxes have also become more progressive in recent years.
Learning a functional language is a great idea especially if you never intend to use one after you've learned it. It's like speaking a second language. Has a great effect on the understanding of your own language.

At university the first thing everyone had to (in programming) do was a Haskell course. Felt weird at the time, but in hindsight it was fantastic. It meant everyone had to throw their preconceptions about programming out the window.

It didn't occur to me until recently (10-15 years later), that functional concepts are actually a good thing to apply in any language; that it makes code parallelizable, modular, maintainable, testable, and so on. I just thought functional was functional (i.e. elegant but hard) whereas imperative was imperative (inelegant but easy). Much like the difference between algebra and arithmetic.

So go learn a second language, or even a third. Even if you intend to speak english and Java for the rest of your life. I'd choose Haskell and Spanish.
Well, no. Some devices have a compass in them, and Google Maps uses it if possible.

If your device has no inbuilt compass (think iPhone 3G, from memory), there's nothing Google Maps can do about it.
> because people sometimes disagree?

Because the majority may disagree. The majority will choose to infringe upon the rights of whatever minority there is if they disagree with it for whatever reason. Sometimes it's just the loud that push it and the majority don't care and stay quiet, but the result is the same.

Protecting rights is an aim every good government must have but it can not be the only aim. It must also recognize when to step in to put a stop to the majority infringing on the rights of others. A government exists for the good of the society as a whole as well as the good of the individual.
Wow thanks a lot for indiscriminately lumping together Western Europe in a single, confusing category.
This is what bankruptcy is for. If you really get underwater you file bankruptcy, your debts are discharged by the court, you pay cash for seven years, and start over. Just informally leaving unpaid debts outstanding is not a good idea.
Convert rich text to markdown
Hey, I hope things improve for you soon! Don't give up!
5 Email Marketing Lessons You Can Learn From Tumblr
These stories about mitigating DDoS-attacks often comes up, but there is seldom any actual details on how it was done. I guess it's because there often is a manual process, analyzing logs and banning IPs and/or IP-ranges.
But for these more automated mitigating services, what technics are used? I guess some of the techniques are based on complex machine-learning algorithms and considered company secrets. But there must be some general, more well known, automated mitigation techniques / indicators? For application-level attacks is it enough to ban the offending IPs in the firewall? If so, how do one best identify these IPs? Assuming one have access to the access-log, I can come up with a few ideas:

- Like mentioned above; banning IPs / IP-ranges originating from countries normally not associated with traffic to the site (i.e. build a statistical knowledge beforehand)

- Simple request counting, per ip, and IP-ban users who are overly active (again based on the sites statistical profile)

- More advanced request counting, trying to create a fingerprint of the users behaviour (time between requests, etc) - and comparing this to the sites average fingerprint.

- Keep a global request-per-time-count and use this to measure the current load of the site - the mitigation techniques will only be activated if the site is under heavy-load / attack.

Any other ideas?
That's probably part of it, but note that the articles point about e.g. Kurdish meshes well with decades of extensive cultural oppression of the Kurds and other minority groups in terms of outlawing teaching of their language, and even for a while outlawing the very name Kurd as well.

I used to know a Turkish journalist who was granted political asylum in Norway (one of many Turks who had to flee over issues like this) after repeated death-threats from the then-Turkish regime (early 90's) because he wrote articles about the situation of the Kurds.
Have some Häagen-Dazs if you really think using "the wrong letters" is illegal in the US.
I've found Scandinavians to be extremely paranoid about crime and (from my perspective, at least) massively over-estimating it, maybe because traditionally it was nearly zero.

Coming from the U.S., cities in the Nordic countries are extremely calm and low-crime, so low that you'd need a logarithmic axis to show their crime rates alongside those of major U.S. cities (L.A., Chicago, Atlanta, NYC, etc.). I don't feel at all unsafe walking around the media-hyped "bad" areas of central-ish Copenhagen alone at 3am, or using a laptop on the train/subway at any hour. The housing projects way out in the suburbs may be different, but if you don't live there, you have little reason to ever be there.
I answered the same question recently on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Startups/What-are-some-cool-tech-compan...

Hello to everyone else from Helsinki, Finland - we should organize a Hacker News meetup!
The short answer is polling. There's nothing better at draining a battery than infinite loops waiting for something to happen. I bet Windows have too many of those, remnant from the days where power consumption didn't matter because your PC is plugged into a socket at all times.
Hey, that seems like an awesome hiring process.

Personally, I think that if you want a brilliant mathematician/problem solver, then that's what you should put in the job listing. Then asking the kind of questions exemplified in the article is likely merited. On the other hand, if you want a good programmer you should mainly look at the quality of the code they produce.
A modern WAFL clone? I've never read that before. The article you link to doesn't assert that either. Can you provide mode information?
Blue glowing 'starpath' could be the future of street lighting
I run my own federated XMPP server from my own trusted hardware in my own trusted building, with mandatory TLS and OTR.

I wont be interested in running web based mail/chat clients until we get to a point where browsers have built in APIs that allow people to write trustable apps.
I think protecting data is a hopeless goal. The penalties need to be for fraud, and the responsibility for identity verification needs to be the creditors.

Hospital admissions and discharges used to be published every day in the paper. People used to have their social security number printed on their checks. Someone's birthday was a day of celebration, not a personal secret.

I want to get back to a place where routine facts about me do not need to be secret or something I worry about. The onus should be on anyone granting credit to verify that the person is who they claim to be, and it should take more than a few bits of public information to do that.
Culture and Empire - Chapter 4 - Hintjens.com
I didn't start buying music online until it became easy to buy it DRM-free. I'm waiting for the same thing to happen to TV shows and movies.
Do you mean in terms of the editing interface, or the content that's produced? Editing on mobile devices is something to address in the (far distant :) future but we want to get it right on modern browsers first. If you put your email in at the end of the initial tour you get a more detailed demo that only works in Firefox, but shows you in a lot more detail how it all works. Our goal at the moment is to build support to launch a crowdfunding campaign to finish it off ... although we could theoretically finish it off with our own funding, we don't want to keep toiling away in obscurity so getting "backers" is basically like getting "validation" right now.

The goal would be: release just the basic functionality we have now with key improvements to deployment and obviously making it work in all modern browsers, then iterate from there according to customer demand with features (including things like editing from tablets and mobile devices) being prioritised by engaging with our user base.

Basically we've just spent too long working on this with absolutely no engagement with our target market (designers/devs) so we want to get it out in the open and see if it's actually worth finishing.

EDIT: If what you're referring to is the content being produced, then the fact that the markup and editing experience is so highly structured and the fact that the user is unable to put any presentation logic (fonts/sizes/styles etc.) arbitrarily in with the content unless you, as the designer, have explicitly allowed them to do it, the format is so reliable that repurposing the content to different devices is very safe and reliable -- ie. it doesn't really matter that the content editor can't preview on multiple devices, because you know that whatever they enter in, the format will be so predictable you can make it look good on any device.
I wonder if mostly anyone from "cold war Eastern Europe" countries identify as an Eastern European any more?

Estonians and other Baltic states don't, Poland doesn't. Czech Republic probably doesn't. What about Slovenia, or Croatia, or Macedonia? Or Hungary?

Also maybe Russians identify as Russians and not Eastern Europeans.
True, updated. Thanks
Yeah, it depends on your occupation to some extent. If you're a software engineer, the rent:income ratio in NYC might be better: more expensive apartment, but you can pull down huge piles of money programming for a finance company. But if you work in a large range of regular jobs, Scandinavia is a lot more affordable. The rent:income ratio in NYC if you're working at a grocery store is terrible, while it's somewhat better in Stockholm or Copenhagen. People who work hourly-waged jobs can own apartments in Copenhagen and live middle-class lives, which is virtually impossible in SF, NYC, or most other major cities.

Compressed salaries basically, so the high end is lower and the low end is higher. I generally like that, since it means I can have friends in different occupations without huge socioeconomic gaps between us. But it means the income at the high end doesn't buy the same lifestyle. It's nonetheless enough to buy a good lifestyle, imo: as someone around the 80th percentile in Copenhagen incomes I live "somewhat better" than the median income earner, but the median is already living a pretty decent lifestyle.
Ridiculous to include PNG.
You would want to be filmed at all times, and have that footage available to everyone? That's insane and I suggest reading Dave Egger's "The Circle".
> but worried about the difference between the project "inside" the plex vs the view of it outside the walls. Personally I think that bringing some more discipline to that was one of the better things Larry has done as CEO so far.

Wasn't that the point of Labs? To allow experimental projects to get used by people outside Google?
I don't see how a new id number will solve anything. We already have a de-facto national id number, the SSN.
Go lang will reach a tipping point when a good book becomes available for newbies to learn this language. Yes, fewer programmers read books these days, but a good book does get a lot of readers, and helps spur adoption of a language.
Oh, certainly, I am not the one to disagree on then necessity of departments.

The problem is that Rectors seem to push for "interdisciplinarity" but without any reward for it in any way. So, it is just grandiloquent speech as far as it goes on like this.
So it appears that they are de-siloing their different stacks. I'm curious how well this will go. But I'm amazed how much they have open sourced!

Frankly, the amount of technologies in Java are remarkable. How does one know where to even start?!?
The issue has to be engineering. Is it a case of too much distance between the HW and SW people?
> Otherwise this does make it seem like you can't rely on any Google product that's not part of their core offering.

Given history, yeah, you don't want to be seriously dependent on anything non-core.
Difference between DOM based and image processing based cross-browser testing
I wonder if Maverics will widen the gap further. It has that app suspension thing when some window goes invisible.

Also there are some decent performance improvements that would mean less cpu usage (or bursts of them, which is more power efficient).

Are there any benchmarks? Or is it still behind NDA?
I'm curious to know how the latest Linux fares on a Macbook Air.
I wish Go was not just a "server language". I know you can write command line apps and there are opengl bindings and SDL and other GUI and client-y things, but that side doesn't get enough attention and in my experience has been very inconvenient (good luck if you're on windows).
Please stop it with the massive fonts on web pages
Depends on your definition of "smartness". In my book the ability to assess the importance of things and their relevance to given task and ability to prioritize accordingly is very important aspect of being smart. The guy who 'does not like comments because they slow the PHP interpreter down' does not seem to be that smart.
Best people I know don't even give or take interviews.

They generally have a long history of awesome projects they have worked on, and they've built years of reputation through working on such projects.

And they just don't pick up any other project in any other company. They are pretty much clear about the best kind of problems they want to work on, and they don't wish to waste their time other than that.

Every time a company boasts about having a process to hire only 'A' candidates I chuckle. The 'A' or even 'B' candidates aren't even up for hire. The interview process begins with 'C' people.
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see duckduckgo and bubble
>> Is it a case of too much distance between the HW and SW people?

The article points out the Surface 2. Software and hardware developed by MS and it still has bad battery life when compared with Nexus 7 and iPad (it has half the battery life of the Nexus 7).
That's an awesome article! I love reading Rachel's blog. It's almost always interesting.
I don't think using "the wrong letters" is illegal in the US. What I've meant was it is as wrong as claiming the usage of "the wrong letters" is illegal in the US.