skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you want to know why no one in the federal government will take you up on your offer you should read about the Anti-Deficiency Act:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act
http://www.gao.gov/legal/lawresources/antideficiencybackgrou...

It was created because of tricks and workarounds past administrations have used to get around the legislative appropriations process. One of its provisions prohibits federal employees from accepting voluntary services for the government. From what I understand, the idea was to prevent people from volunteering today with the expectation of pressuring Congress to pay them tomorrow.

And, to be clear, if it were legal I'd already be trying to find ways I could help.
Open always wins, until it conflicts with your business interests. "Open" used to be the oft-repeated advantage over iOS in the early days, I wonder if that will slip away from the narrative like "SD card slots", "removable batteries", and "real keyboard" did.
The missing weapon from Doomsday Preppers' arsenal; Cabbage.
You're not a hacker if work just work hard. Most 'hackers' I read about these days are just hard working software developers. I'll consider you a hacker if I look at what you produced and think somehow there was magic involved. Not just spending long nights cranking out code, which is still impressive, but it's not hacking.
What's really annoying is when the Google apps start becoming worse to make Google more money. I never open the app store without wanting an app, but it constantly tries to sell me books and movies and stuff like that. They even have separate Google apps for reading and movies, so shoving it in the app store is just a money grab making my usage more difficult to shove some ads in my face. Were these apps open source people could just fork, but we're stuck going along with Google until they mess up so bad it makes sense to switch over entirely to Amazon App store, Samsung Apps Seller, etc. and the equivalent for everything else.
Ask HN: Is naming our hosting service ghostr.org taking advantage?
We had the discussion with my business partner. I saw an opportunity on having the ghostr.org domain available, but maybe he's right and it just seems we're trying to cheat on people by naming it just a character away from ghost. Should we change it?
c'mon, if you are as smart as you believe yourself to be, do you actually believe that the reason they ported their Perl code to Java was because "Amazon is a Java company"?

I could see many reasons to port one of the worlds largest sites off of Perl and onto something like Java, one being the availability of developers that are proficient in Java vs Perl.

Also, if the company you work at uses OOP to design their systems it's perfectly normal to ask you to design something with regards to those restrictions.
but then you have to have it be asynchronous to use indexedDB (which might be difficult or annoying with certain implementations)
> This is false. Google wins when more people use the Internet. Android is fulfilling its initial goal incredibly well: offer a free and open-source mobile OS to encourage mobile device proliferation.

> Android is doing exactly what it was designed to do.

That's effectively what it says in the article: "It's easy to give something away when you're in last place with zero marketshare, precisely where Android started. When you're in first place though, it's a little harder to be so open and welcoming. Android has gone from being the thing that protects Google to being something worth protecting in its own right."

i.e. Android is doing what it was designed for - protecting Google's presence on the mobile web - but with such a dominant market position Google found that it ceased to be solely a means of protection, and actually an asset in its own right. It's in that extension of the original aim where the interests of Android as an open source project and Google as a for-profit company do not match up.
Hoping we can come up with some simple model that will limit the voting rights, etc. curious about your thoughts on you could make it work.
> whales fly into the air unnoticed

Is this the origin of the Twitter fail-whale?
Modern Insurance Requires Behavioral Economics
I think that's because Go is reasonably good for, say, 90% of situations, and if you're in the 10% where it is not a good fit then you already know that and you know better than to try using Go in that situation, and thus few people find Go stinking.

On the other side is things like Python, which are reasonably good for a much lower fraction of things (e.g. 30%), but if you're in the 70% you very well might not realise it does not suit your situation and thus experience Python stinking.
My ex-wife teaches high school, and I hear her talk about the hours and the mandatory extra-curricular activity support, for the same low low price.

I tell my high school age kid never ever be a teacher, unless God himself comes down and puts his finger on his heart. America hates teachers.
By the same token, don't use this mantra to use low-contrast text like that used with this article. Absolute black may be a no-no, but this doesn't mean all of 'dark' is a no-no. Low-contrast text is poor form.
Objectively, Markdown isn't hard to learn, but people don't really want to learn anything, they just want to look for the button. Discoverability is, for most people, an important advantage of GUIs over most interpretation-of-freeform-text interfaces (like command lines and programming or formatting languages).
Well, this is really arguable. The "Iron Grip" is the modules that happen to be dependent on authenticated API calls to the servers that Google owns and maintains.

I'd fully support their modules that connect to the cloud servers being open source / GPL / etc, but to expect them to open them up to unauthenticated requests is untenable and leaves them way open to abuse / lack of rate limiting / making the service a bad time for all involved.
If you're looking to give it away, or sell it, I'm interested.
What makes you think this would be taking advantage of people? Is there some well known hosting provider named Ghost, which I've never heard of? ghost.com seems to be some symantec forwarding nonsense. What is it you're worried about?
All of its Maps data and many of its APIs already existed for Google Maps on the desktop. Within the mobile space, and relative to a mobile-only competitor, Google's access to that data is effectively free.
It was like sailing through a garbage tip

:(

As an individual, what are the things we could do (other than using less plastic), so we don't contribute to this mess?
History doesn't really support this. Even Linux had to get some corporate backing (initially Red Hat, Suse, and the like), and later Canonical and others before it really took off.

Open source has proven to be a long term survivor, but not a winner.
it would be plain dumb to ignore it and I have no idea why anybody would upvote a comment suggesting that they do so.

I upvoted it because I was going to write essentially the same thing.

I've been thinking about it since Colbert publicly non-invited Banksy to paint the wall outside his studio. I don't believe that dollars are an appropriate unit of measurement for life experiences. I do believe that graffiti and others forms of street art are intentionally impermanent and functions of their location.

I would support trying to sell it if the building owners were living hand to mouth, but that's obviously not the case. The author's already monetized the "inheritance" by selling a literary "piece" to NY Magazine. She doesn't need to sell it so leaving it as part of the gestalt the artist created is the greater good. If it gets defaced by some other graffiti artist or the police/Bloomberg (who are only feeding the frenzy with their attitude) then so be it, the limited lifespan of graffiti is an inherent part of the art. Like making sandcastles.

I would probably set up a hidden video cam in case someone else came along and tried to steal it. Not that the stealing is necessarily a problem for street-art, but taking it would involve damage to the building itself and that would be unacceptably outside the scope of screet-art.
> While it might not be an official requirement, being granted a Google apps license will go a whole lot easier if you join the Open Handset Alliance. The OHA is a group of companies committed to Android—Google's Android—and members are contractually prohibited from building non-Google approved devices. That's right, joining the OHA requires a company to sign its life away and promise to not build a device that runs a competing Android fork.

...

> This makes life extremely difficult for the only company brazen enough to sell an Android fork in the west: Amazon. Since the Kindle OS counts as an incompatible version of Android, no major OEM is allowed to produce the Kindle Fire for Amazon. So when Amazon goes shopping for a manufacturer for its next tablet, it has to immediately cross Acer, Asus, Dell, Foxconn, Fujitsu, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, Lenovo, LG, Motorola, NEC, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, and ZTE off the list. Currently, Amazon contracts Kindle manufacturing out to Quanta Computer, a company primarily known for making laptops. Amazon probably doesn't have many other choices.

That is fairly incredible, I'm surprised it is not an anti-trust/competition issue.
Seriously? This is like saying "poets are just lazy writers who decided to create work with the least amount of effort possible."
I suspect a set of new societies would create its own dramas and ideas fairly quickly. I'd agree that the Greek and classic and some modern insightful writings and plays might be useful nonetheless!
Benchmarks: Parallel Go, Rust, D, Scala and Nimrod
If the Linux community wants to attract more newbies, they need to come up with an easily "grokked" text editor.
You're right I didn't make myself clear, sorry.. it's because we offer hosting for Ghost (the new open source blogging platform) and their url is ghost.org ...
The current XRDS issue (ACM student magainze) has a very good explanation (human readable for both technical and non-technical). And it's free!
http://xrds.acm.org/article.cfm?aid=2510124
"In the case of yesterday's Node.JS release, which did not practice complete disclosure, and did put the fix in a larger patch, this did not prevent interested individuals from finding out the attack, it took me about five minutes to do so, and any serious individual could have done it much faster."

I'd say you're spot on. I'm sure this wouldn't be the last "this is how you should really disclose" posts either. I prefer that approach to just lamenting about how terrible it was and fortunately there are many great examples to draw from.
> they make you verify your identity first. Why would they do this? They were afraid that people would get sticker shock from looking at insurance prices that didn't include the money they would be getting from taxpayers to defray the cost.

There are subsidy calculators out there that ask a few basic questions about income levels and you can get this information without requiring somebody's exact identity.

The cynic in me suggests that this system was specifically designed to get somebody's identity because at some point this information is going to get funneled directly to the IRS with the goal of going after and hassling people who still can't afford healthcare.
Completely off topic, but why can't I keep the page zoomed out far enough to view the entire width of a paragraph? I'm on my iPhone; is Google doing something screwy to fuck with iOS users?
> Well, this is really arguable. The "Iron Grip" is the modules that happen to be dependent on authenticated API calls to the servers that Google owns and maintains.

It also consists of witholding access to those APIs if a company uses a competitor service:

> Another point of control is that the Google apps are all licensed as a single bundle. So if you want Gmail and Maps, you also need to take Google Play Services, Google+, and whatever else Google feels like adding to the package. A company called Skyhook found this out the hard way when it tried to develop a competing location service for Android. Switching to Skyhook's service meant Google would not be able to collect location data from users. This was bad for Google, so Skyhook was declared "incompatible." OEMs that wanted the Google Apps were not allowed to use them. Skyhook sued, and the lawsuit is still pending.
> A failure of this scale and visibility isn't going to help their business reputation

Do big failures really hurt people or companies all that much? At some point, you're dealing in a realm in which relatively few people even play (or perhaps even want to play) and you may be the only game in town anyway.

Bankers/CEOs who lost millions were still given large bonuses with the reasoning that "we wouldn't be able to find anyone else to do their job". Well... I could certainly lose millions faster than many of them, and I'd do it for half their bonus, thereby saving the companies money :)
It's a good article. What we have done for LedgerSMB is to try to have a 48 hour immediate response guarantee, a 7 day reproduction guarantee, and a 30 day fix or workaround. Usually things have moved much faster (and unless the problem is complex, we usually have a fix within 7 days).

The big problem we have been facing is that after our initial efforts to secure the application, we have run into fewer and fewer classes of vulnerabilities that we have to worry about and these are more and more complex to exploit. Our new code is verifiably SQL injection free with only a few areas requiring periodic manual review, and SQL injections even if they could occur, would be far more limited in scope than they were in previous versions.

Consequently, it is easy to let things fall through the cracks particularly as security gets very good. We have, truth be told, had problems there.

We periodically review CVE's for related software to see if we missed something that might have otherwise been missed. We have found items that have fallen through the cracks in this way.

But regarding why folks should care, if you look at

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/11786/?task=advisories

and compare with

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/11926/?task=advisories

Which will you choose for your business?
This is a response to http://www.fairsearch.org/ which was created by a coalition of Google's competitors to try to convince governments to regulate Google.
You are talking post modern art , not mordern art.Art died when it became highly speculative.But it did not die today, by the time of Picasso it was already dead.
What I am more worried about than any other HealthCare.Gov glitch, is if this website was so badly designed, that the data it holds, the functions it does would also be extremely badly designed and secured. Yet NO ONE is talking about this angle.

Thats what keeps me up at night.
I would also read the manual of a car I just bought before driving it. I guess that's just my style.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying your assumption is unreasonable. But in the end, it's on you as a conscientious developer to read the documentation. I'm not even suggesting cover to cover - in this case though they are very up front about write concerns. There is no real excuse to find this out any other way, it's just negligence.
Other:

Antarctica?

I.S.S.?

Sealand?

:)

Edit: Uh oh, New Zealand isn't covered.
This guy is independent, maybe, but definitely right-leaning. And, I don't know that I have heard anyone on the right put forward the ideas of taxing capital gains as normal income and doing away with corporate taxes. They normally want to do the latter, without the former. In other words, they want a no-holds barred tax holiday for the wealthiest (which will eventually trickle down, of course).

But, what he is saying might be workable. I am curious to know how much additional revenue the government would raise by taxing capital gains at normal income rates vs. how much they'd lose by not taxing corporations.

Anybody have a reliable source on that?

Because, in some respects, C-corps would then become more like S-corps, in that a significant amount of untaxed income would flow through as dividends to shareholders where it would now be taxed at the normal income rate.
You could always lie and say you gave him permission, but that would probably be a crime in itself.
I feel like the discussion of MongoDB is a bit like the discussion around the Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare"). The conversation always shifts between whether the very idea of a noSQL db is a good one, to the question of Mdb's implementation faults and (I guess?) its strengths.

Whether 10gen are vapid spin-meisters or not, even whether they have developed a usable product, seems orthogonal to the question as to whether a schemaless persistent storage layer might be a better fit for some projects than a relational database.
That's' quite an interesting point of view.

Seems to be well supported by the fact that there are significantly fewer good and free apps on AppStore than PlayStore.

Maybe startups are more afraid of adding ads onto their beautiful app prototype when they are used to the iOS culture of always paying for apps and not thinking of ads, whereas Android users maybe in a higher degree accept ads on their app.
If a company "uses $thing to design their systems" as a matter of dogma, I don't work there. And "Amazon is a Java company" was the actual reason given by the people I talked to. If they were lying or had no idea why they were doing the thing they'd been told to do, that's just a different reason why I won't work there.
There have been cases in LedgerSMB where we have had to do something like that. The SQL injection fixes in 1.2.0 were too numerous to backport without extensive beta testing, and the new permissions management system in 1.3.0 could not be backported for similar reasons. In both cases, the same workarounds were suggested.

However, those really should be rare cases.

It is worth noting that while we could not backport our anti-CRSF measures to 1.2, we did provide separate fixes to the most severe CRSF vectors (like those which could lead to account takeover).
It's not uncommon to use "sic" to denote a british spelling of a word, though the usage in that instance is debated.
Maybe I'm not understanding something, but how did you cause your boss to lose anything? Unless I missed something, you tried to warn him, but he had already signed a contract, so he lost the money on his own. Why would any of this be considered your fault?
Rust vs D
Insurance companies are not required to participate in the exchanges (and many don't). And while people are required to buy insurance, they aren't required to buy it from the exchanges (many will still get insurance via their employers, for example).

Both sides are choosing to use the exchanges rather than one of their alternatives, so the fees paid are user fees, not disguised taxes (unless you consider all user fees disguised taxes, which is a separate philosophical discussion).
Lowbrow FTW
In particular about this being the only major project they were working on. They didn't just rewrite, they stopped doing everything else in order to prioritise it. The mind boggles.
My wife taught at a small for-profit high school for one year. Long hours, extra BS like babysitting the lunchroom, dealing with parents, low pay, having to write her own curriculum: she quit because it totally sucks ass.

Seeing how hard it is made me appreciate a few excellent teachers I had through school more.
That'd be an unqueryable string field in most sql databases. Not at all the same thing.
Perhaps you should reach out to the folks behind Ghost (http://ghost.org/about/contact/) and ask if its ok to use the name ghostr.
requirements for car insurance are set by each state, IIRC. and not everyone has a car - it's not mandatory. Everyone has a ... 'health'.
Our generation accepts graffiti. Previous generations didn't. It's when they die that objections will cease.
I especially enjoyed a fraudster's description of his son's profits in World of Warcraft:

In 2006 or 2007 my son sold 80,000 gold to IGE and they paid him $70 per 1000g. That's right, $5,600
directly to his PayPal account. He got most of the gold through selling as he types this: "aq20 spellbooks
from guild bank around level 60"
I'm from New Zealand, I just picked South East Asia, because that's where our game servers are. Would've appreciated an Oceanic option, OP.

Edit: Nevermind, it's Australia and New Zealand now. You can just replace that with Australasia, for the record.
Drop some acid? Yeah, I guess you could, but it's far from a free ticket. Besides, it's really easy to be creative without it.

There's just one thing you have to do -- think.

Just always keep your eyes open to the things that don't work as well as they should, and work to improve them. Just start. Start small. Build out the core, then go bigger. Let it consume you.

A million great ideas come out of any kind of work you feel passionate about. Just find something that sucks and improve it. Once you get the ball rolling you'll have more ideas than you could build in a lifetime.
Italy (or southern Europe)

edit: thanks for adding it to the list!
Generally I'd only have at most 2 formats at once while you converted the older records to the new format. You're right that there's no sense in keeping around a dozen versions but there are a lot of business cases for having two versions of a schema active at once. For example, if you can't bring down your application to convert everything mid-day and instead want to do an incremental conversion.
I always thought that Scandinavia was part of Western Europe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Europe#Population_of_We...
Exactly. Google's mapping data is a legitimate competitive advantage, and there is no reason anyone else forking android should be entitled to it.
HTTP has now been essentially split into a lower transport layer and an upper semantics layer. If someone created an SRP extension for HTTP (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=356855 ) it would apply equally to HTTP 1.1 and 2.0. Or you could use SRP with TLS ( http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5054 ), but this has the same UX problems as client certs.
It's idiomatic in every language to handle errors, Go is not unique there.
Ohh, thanks.
Also, it's not useful to refer to "government" as the thing being opposed by anarchism. What they are really opposing is hierarchical organization in general.

I used to be more sympathetic to that point of view, but I eventually realized that too many nifty things (such as the computer I'm typing on) could not possibly have come into existence without a disciplined, well-managed hierarchy of some sort. Somebody has to be the boss, or we might as well all go climb back into the trees.
Southern Europe / Mediterranean Europe
So it is misleading to make conclusions from a PE ratio at any given time, simply because earnings for any particular quarter or even year is very situational. If for perfectly legitimate reasons (say to fuel growth) my earnings this quarter are $1, then my P/E ratio might be astronomical. In the context of pro-forma financials, taking out one time costs and special events, my P/E ratio is more telling. Amazon is a great example of this. There are quarters where AMZN has negative earnings. Does that mean that Amazon is overvalued? Not necessarily. Dig a bit deeper, take out things like acquisitions and restructuring costs for example, take earnings over time and that will give you a much stronger case to make a decision on valuation.
I was taught the collective name of Australia and New Zealand was Oceania?
Without Food: Testing an Organic Soylent Alternative, with Doctor's Comments
A great article i almost agree with him on that, but in my understanding hacker is the person who does things for fun and uses EDIT[(his/her)] genius mind to solve problems in that sense those things always become more challenging which require an extra bit of intelligence.
North America, USA, North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Are you hosting the site through Github Pages?