skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The patents are disclosure in exchange for state granted monopoly. Or they should be - you do something amazing. No one can figure out how to do it - you tell them and they cannot use the tech for X years.

But right now people patent the end result. That is wrong.
I wonder why the episode isn't available on Joe's RSS feed.

http://joeroganexp.joerogan.libsynpro.com/irss

Edit: It appears to be episode #256.
The whole thing's just awkward. All of these agencies understand and know that this is going on. But when concrete evidence is given to the public they have to call in ambassador's and do this whole "this is terrible!" song and dance. Then it's back to normal.
> So if he wasn't trolling, why didn't cryptomaniac use his real account to say this?

I did not make this claim, so feel no need to answer your question.

> It's very sad that these kinds of drive-by accounts are so successful (he got at least two upvotes) for what seems like a personal attack without any data to back up the claims.

I don't think he meant to express it as a statement of fact, but meant to suggest it as his strong oppinion. I just think it was worded badly. Lots of people don't sign up until they decide to make their first comment.

> And it doesn't really make sense to my why a startup would lose face if they shut down a service that wasn't viable. They are expected to experiment. It happens all the time and nobody minds. Sure, it probably makes the decision easier to shut down if there aren't a lot of users, but let's not jump to conclusions.

Many people are embarrased when their companies fail.
What's your one song? Jack started us off at SUS13
Jack Dorsey gave us the one song that supports and inspires him. What's your one song?

I've created a shared playlist on Spotify.
Yeah, I had the same idea while reading the title of the post, having only seen MRI machines on TV. So yeah, this isn't rocket science. They're just not focused on that aspect.
Stop comparing Windows, a desktop OS, to mobile-first optimised OSes like Android and iOS. Even Windows RT is not technically mobile-first optimised like those two.

Windows Phone 8 vs Android/iOS would be a fair comparison. Because WP8 has undergone the same treatment and has been optimised for high battery efficiencies whilst still retaining the Windows NT kernel at its core.

WP8 has always had support for high-resolution displays and Nokia et al have not had issues with it. WP7.x was a different story but that was a different OS kernel (WinCE not NT). During this time Microsoft was busy creating a minimised edition of the Win8 kernel that would be suitable for use on a smartphone, much like the work Apple did to OSX in order to create iOS.
> When language designers opt against the inclusion of generics in the year 2007, then you can be sure that they don't do so because they are too stupid to see the benefits of "generics", but because they also consider the downsides.

Authors of Java didn't include closures and generics despite the fact that they were aware of them. They thought that these features are too complicated for ordinary developers. Look what this lead to, we now have generics and closures, but they made the language much more complicated and hacky than it would be if they would have integrated into it from scratch.
Text (actually markdown) files: ~/docs/idea-someDescriptiveName

Obviously automatically backed up.
We didn't have millions of users, but were making decent profits to cover costs on the users we had, and growing. If someone outside the US wants to run a privacy VPN service for consumers, or if the lavabit case is resolved successfully, I'd probably say it's a decent business (boring, but decent).

The financial issue was the potentially huge liability due to a legal action or battle, not the (small) costs of operating the service; my cofounder and I are both not really able to take a lavabit-style stand (I do DoD/USG consulting work, so I have additional special considerations in doing anything which isn't absolutely legally compliant in every appearance which Ladar et al didn't have...).

We're still working on similar things, now without the revenue from the privacy vpn service.
>There are plenty of other security features, that I'd argue are more important than secure boot, which don't result in a watermark being displayed when disabled.

Um.. Okay, Name 5?

>I'd say people in those two groups are highly likely to know what secure boot is and don't need a reminder about it.

>Also, let's say your average user somehow sees this message. They are not going to be able to solve the problem themselves. They've most likely never heard of secure boot let alone know how to enter the BIOS and enable it.

Okay, good, your arguments are valid - BUT - only if your premises is valid. I see - "likely" , "most likely" , "highly likely". How have you established this to be the case?
Debian/Ubuntu extend the dominance in the Linux web server market
You should add a pricing page ASAP :D because this "seems" way simpler than good old launchpad
HealthCare.Gov Needs Five Million Code Lines Rewritten
I think most of the advocates for OOCSS would agree with you that preprocessors make them better. But the principles they're proposing are made better by preprocessors, they're not invalidated by them. Preprocessors let you get the benefits of reusable components without polluting the DOM with classnames. Which is better than plain OOCSS in most cases. But OOCSS allows you to have those reusable component benefits without tying you into a specific preprocessor (or any at all), and that is a benefit as well, even if you personally don't think its worth the semantic tradeoff.

Basically

OOCSS with preprocessor => reusable components + minimum DOM impact

OOCSS without preprocessors => reusable component + potentially messy DOM

CSS without OOCSS => potentially clean DOM + potentially non-reusable CSS
Evernote. Trello. Google Docs.
Three top tools I use / have used for this purpose.
If there's a validated metric on the 'benefit' side, sure. What I'm skeptical of is making up some unrigorous numbers to do quantitative cost-benefit analysis when a system isn't well understood enough to be quantified with any degree of confidence in the numbers, at least at present. Assuming anything we can't measure well yet is ~0 is also not a very rigorous approach.

One cautious approach could be to try to come up with lower and upper bounds on benefits, e.g. that with high confidence, we can conclude that academic physics research, or academic geography research, or whatever, has had at least $N but not more than $M impact on the U.S. economy, taking into account direct and indirect effects over a period of, say, 30 years. I suspect the space between those bounds would be large, but we would at least be able to say for sure (for certain values of "sure") that quantifiable benefit lies within a certain range. I'd be interested in that research, if there is any, but these kinds of estimates are notoriously difficult to establish, given that history isn't an experimental science.
Typo on your home page: publically -> publicly
There's more to this than just painting the machine -- one of the primary concerns of hospitals (and thus medical device makers) is whether the equipment is easy to clean. So just slapping some paint on there isn't enough -- the design has to be embedded into the plastic (which commonly has silver ions in it to help kill germs), or as a single plastic decal that has similar properties.

To reduce the noise, I wonder why they haven't investigated active noise cancelling like the engine mounts used by some auto makers. The computer introduces waveforms that are the inverse of the frequencies they want to reduce. Or at least added mass to panels that conduct noise, using material like Dynamat eXtreme (common in car audio).
UPDATE: I've been able to log in, but "like" and "share" are a little erratic.
I say the same thing about software and hardware patents, though. What incentive will any company have to innovate if they're constantly getting copied?

IMO too many people let their emotions dictate their thoughts about business -- Company X is big enough, so it doesn't deserve patents. Company Y sues everyone in the sun for using their technology; what a horrible company! For every high-profile case like these, though, there are stories of small businesses and new inventors getting screwed by distributors who outright steal product ideas and resell them for cheaper. We need to make sure that whatever system we have can allow for invention but also not stifle progress of entire industries.
I am looking to expand on your work by having a server component in the back, most likely nodejs. I thought that the app could be really useful if other people could connect to it and add new songs or rearrange the playlist in realtime, as well as being able to control the music controls remotely. Only the host would be playing the music though. I will let you know if I finish it :)
CISPA Is Back and 100% NSA-Approved
How Learning to Hack and Learning Guitar Taught Me to Do Work That Matters
I think the point he is trying to make is that MS falling into irrelevancy correlates with something else replacing their products, thus, the alternatives in this scenario are better.

It's a nice thought, and not en entirely pointless one. The more population that migrates to alternatives, the better those alternatives become. Of course it's not linear, but right now it's all likely positive gains.
I wasn't aware you could have headphones! I would have asked.

To be honest, the only time I had to go through this, I was not scared about anything else than the possible result of the scan, but the noise was disturbing at best.
Writing a Post Mortem to try to resurrect it from the dead. And submitting it again to HN, hoping that second life would be better.
> "Some schools, often girl-only schools, simply don't offer ICT [information and communications technology] at A-level and the girls wanting to do it have to go to a nearby boys school to learn it," she says.

For what it's worth, I went to a public magnet school for computers, AND a private school in which every person had a laptop. I learned nothing of tech in either school, and I taught myself everything I know. (They wouldn't let me take the classes I was already studying at home)

> And among girls who carry on and study science at university, two out of three don't go on to Stem-related careers.

How many people actually get a career in what they got a degree? Probably half of the people I know do something different than what they studied in school.

--

This kind of article has me thinking more and more about assigned gender roles and societal expectations. A lot of people are really concerned with getting women into the tech industry. Years ago, people were probably really concerned with getting women into etiquette school, or getting them to learn a trade such as seamstress. How is our modern imposition of what a particular gender should do any different than the old impositions?

People claim to be pushing for these "new" gender roles as a way to fight inequality, or because women need help getting into the industry. But how necessary is it? For nerdy/geeky people who are really inspired and curious about the stuff, there is little stopping someone from learning online via tutorials and books geared towards beginners.

That said, I think there is an urgent need for more female-centric online help. The male-dominated chat, mailing lists and forums can be horrible for anyone to browse, though they're particularly hostile towards women. But I don't think this is an industry thing, I think this is a general cultural thing. Find American boys or men anonymously online and they'll probably be doing some really horrible shit, a lot of it directed negatively towards women.

I think we all want a quick and easy fix, so we look at just the tech industry. We decide that we only want to fix our own little corner of the world and ignore the larger problem. But realistically, the lack of women in tech is probably a larger societal issue, and it won't ever be resolved until you address the bigger picture.
Evernote / Trello
What DNA Testing Reveals About India's Caste System
Don't count Germany out. Merkel has preserved German strength at the cost of South Europe's pain. The Euro is managed to protect Northern economies, not mitigate the Southern pains. "Bailouts" and rescue plans are heavily biased towards preserving the North's separation from the fallout. All of this strengthens Germany and the northern countries at the expense of the EU as a whole.

As the worldwide balance of power continues to shift over the next decade or two, I believe Merkel's Germany is poised to be extremely relevant, even if it is so at the cost of the cohesion of the EU.

It also reaffirms to me why the UK seems to have very little interest joining the party like their neighbors. Why compete for first fiddle against a self-serving Merkel?

It'll be interesting times but I don't think it's as simple as Europe being relegated to America's extended states.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qui...

Extract:
Initially The KLF's earnings were to be distributed by way of a fund for struggling artists managed by the K Foundation, Drummond and Cauty's new post-KLF art project, but, said Drummond, "We realised that struggling artists are meant to struggle, that's the whole point."[12] Instead the duo decided to create art with the money.
I find it hard to take a security related project seriously that installs with:

$ curl http://cozy.io/install_cozy.sh | HOST=root@ip sh # sudoer required

Edit: even more annoying is that this script is only supposed to run on Debian/Ubuntu - so this script isn't even any more portable than .deb packages

Edit2 to be more constructive: would you accept contributions to build packages? Apart from this annoyance the project looks interesting!
>This isn't enforced by browsers. They will happily render all elements with the same ID and apply the same styles to all of them.

We live in post-xhtml times, browsers will try to make sense and render all sorts of bad code.

>If you accidentally put the logo twice on the page, it will be clearly visible. It virtually never happens and when it does it isn't hard to track down.

You're assuming the visual difference in applied style is always clearly visible, like a repeated logo. No, it's often not, not until someone changes something in a class and the change is populated everywhere the class was reused. An ID is a guarantee it was not reused, or at the very least serves as a "do not reuse" sign.

Edit: formatting
> the keyboard drove me insane as did the battery life

They've improved a battery life to 7 hours of browsing, it's even more than many other windows laptops out there. Are you talking about type cover? If yes, than what exactly drove you insane? It works find for me.

> I didn't like how it stands up compared to a laptop

They've added a new stand position which will satisfy those who are looking for laptop-like stand

> For the price of these things I don't really see why anyone would buy one unless you have way too much money to spare on toys.

It costs as much as macbook air but has a touch screen and a tablet form factor, it might fit a lot of people who don't want to carry around macbook air + ipad but want a single device.
He says later in the article he tried paid advertising, but it never led to sale.
How To Promote The Hell Out Of Your New Blog Post
Also, you could have the most talented coders in the world, but you tie their hands with this chain of bureaucracy and they won't get anything done:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6585161

Can you imagine having to navigate that to fix a problem? How many different people you'd have to get on the phone or in contact with via email?

What they needed is a "dictator for a day" at the top of the chain with the ability to hire/fire and get anyone on the phone immediately for answers.

By the way, California's health care website cost TWICE what the federal site cost. Maybe that is why it works but wow, that is a crazy pricetag:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6584954
This true - but without the opcode cache the slowdown would be minimal since all the comments are ignored.

Plus, the comments are there for future developers to use as a reference. Nothing worse than having something break, cracking open a file and have to spend hours having to untie someone else's code.

I'd rather have copious amounts of comments, then a minimal speed gain due to not having them at all.
With probably no place in Germany that's more than 250km away from an US/UK military base, and the "extraordinary rendition" program in mind, I'd also refuse asylum in Germany to someone who wants to flee the US.

Especially in a high profile case like Snowden's.

I guess a plane ticket to a non-NATO country through back channels might be better help for people seeking protection from the US than granting refugee status.
If your CSS ‘impossibly simple’ then it sounds like you don't need it. Every tool has its place: writing HTML by hand is still worthwhile in certain situations. My article assumes you are writing CSS in a project of sufficiently large scale that how you approach architecting it is important enough to think about.
I tried content marketing microsites, google ads, reddit ads, talking about it a lot, etc. Nothing really stuck, and then life got in the way and I lost interest.
I don't usually have a ton of ideas so I just keep them in my brain.

What questions do I ask? I usually ask potential customers whether it's something they'd find useful in their day to day lives, and what their pains are.
As a non-microsoft employee I'd never know that drive encryption and secure boot settings would be the same 'technology' or even under 'bitlocker'. As bitlocker to me is the same as os x filefault or truecrypt.

Why wouldn't you just put bitlocker, anti-virus, secure boot, UAC, ...etc under one menu called 'Comp. Security'.
This was the biggest take-away from this article, one I've learned after wasting much time building my own SaaS "products". Launching without an audience means nobody shows up. It's a very true statement. One of my favorite sayings now, from Jason Cohen, is to get 30 people to fully commit to pay for your product before you even start coding it.
I have a bunch of personal projects, but few of them are on github, and the ones on github are not done under my real name, because I find the concept of me having to work on nights and weekends to impress future employers offensive.

My personal projects also include things like my very playing around with a new language (so it is freaking ugly and so I would never want it used as a job indicator) and old abandoned projects that I've salvaged and updated as a favor to friends, which means the entire architecture is alien and "I Don't Care If It's Ugly Just Make It Work Because Right Now It Does Not Work At All" is exactly what the 'client' wants.

I also reverse-engineer game protocols and find vulnerabilities in them. There is no social good to me releasing that stuff. (No, I really don't feel like being a soldier in your Full Disclosure army.)

I do lots of coding stuff in my spare time. I don't do it to get a job, I do it because it's fun.
Whoops, will get that fixed once the lockdown period ends in the competition. Have to wait until Thursday unfortunately.
Here's an interesting observation I've found related naming in dynamic languages. As I've been working more with Ruby and Python over the past few years, I've been using and debugging more and more open source code. In the process, I've noticed how naming affects trying to work with and debug code in these languages. In general I've found it more difficult to jump in and figure out code written in ruby than python.

Part of this seems to be the grep-ability of identifiers. In the ruby community there seems to be more of a push towards constructing DSLs, which seems to cause developers to write more generic single word methods and variable names. Searching through a decent sized codebase tends to result in a lot of noise/reuse. In the python world, it seems that methods at least tend to be a little more verbose and more easily identifiable. Explicit imports in python do help quite a bit also.

Has anyone else noticed a similar pattern, or am I being biased here?
How do you install new stuff on your machine without super user rights ? Do you have a specific user to run apt-get ?
Deploy Ghost on a PaaS
Shouldn't it be a place to drift, to think, to read, to meet new people,
and to work at whatever inspires you?

This article does bring up a valid point, but it seems that the author is also blinded by his romantic notion of what a university should be.
Recent releases of Delphi have been troubled and a bit directionless; it seems like Embarcadero, the current owners, are understaffed or incapable, and they seem scattered and unable to make consistent strategic decisions.
Great piece, great thoughts

I'm glad you were able to get some good experiences out of the MOOCs that focused on more relevant, practical skills (startup engineering, technology entrepreneurship, etc.).

I wish more faculty (teaching MOOCs or not) would try to make their course more relevant and applied rather than abstract and rote (there are tons of techniques like service learning, problem-based learning, etc.).

"I also was able to deal with the independence due to everything being very task/goal oriented rather than just the instructor saying abstract concepts for us to somehow grasp from listening. It also had an extremely practical aspect to it, as by the end, one had to bootstrap a startup using all the skills learned, and so there was an incentive to spend extra time learning."

I have a presentation on the Pros and Cons of MOOCs I'm giving tomorrow (I gave it 6 months ago, too), and I added a link to your post (on the slide about the perspective of non-matriculated/outside students): http://bit.ly/considermoocs
Digital Marketing in the USA
Use USB TV card. One from pinnacle seems to be the best.
Well he put the source on Github and it's very interesting to see how some projects come together.
Ha! No, no interest in resurrecting it at all, I just wanted to share what I learned.
So, if Android products are banned in the US, that doesn't change the fact that they would continue to be sold elsewhere in the world, right? And if so, wouldn't it be likely that you could pay to have an Android imported (perhaps illegally)?
While I agree this is a somewhat troubling trend, it is also ignoring the vast majority of students who go there and get an education as expected. It does seem that some conflict of interest rules should be put in place, but the hyperbole of the article weakens its case.
I'm dealing with this now, having been interviewing for different engineering roles over the past two months. It hasn't been as bad as straight-up conceptual math problems, but there have been plenty of questions that I have questioned for validity.

Interviewer: "How can we optimize the character replacement in a string such that we use no extra memory?"
Me: "We do this and that and this. But, should we consider what situations we would need this optimization?"
Interviewer: "What? Why?"

I can now use this as a filter as I interview organizations. Optimizing algorithms by creating your own core data structure classes (instead of using the built-in ones) is great in certain circumstances, but an absolute waste of time in many others. And if you're not going to ask me about those times when making those improvements is important, then you're not asking questions for a programmer -- you're asking them for a theoretician who can recall syntax.

It's poor practice, and I've seen it everywhere.
> Many people are embarrased when their companies fail.

In this case it was just one product getting shut down (and only until we can do something better); there's clearly a demand in the market for it, maybe stronger than ever.

I'm actually much more embarrassed by the horrible formatting of my PGP message (I never really did PGP stuff on Mac before, and forgot about the newline issues.)