skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Public funding for science is frozen or being cut,

Public funding for science has generally been growing. It was cut a bit in 2009, but that's the extent of it.

http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2013/hist13pDefNon.pdf

http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2013/hist13pAgcyRes.pdf

I don't know where to find stats for private R&D - do you?
Who Else Wants to Hengao?
"They laughed at Einstein. But they also laughed at Bozo the clown" - Carl Sagan.
I want that domain !

on a serious note, I first thought its an app for software developers to keep a tab on their health ?( may be workout app)
after I checked the domain I thought its a service to collect feedback and rating for apps.
and when I clicked on the wufoo form I got some idea on what actually it does .
38% of Children Under 2 Use Mobile Media, Study Says
It has 4 GB memory same as my macbook air :)
The thing is, Linkedin bought Rapportive for $15 million.

Link:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/linkedin-picks-up-rapportiv...

So most of the preconceived uses for their technology were already hashed out and approved prior to purchase...

Even if that wasn't the case, the technology needs to be integrated somehow in the form of a product.

So as a low level employee, what are you expected to do? Be known as a bad and difficult employee? Quit? Even if you quit, others will happily take your place.

As non employees of LinkedIn we can expose this behavior as unacceptable and deceitful.
Kurumsal Kimlik Nasıl Yapılır?
Prime, AWS for S3, Treehouse.
I remember being sceptical at the time (lots of people were). The consensus here on HN seemed to be that Dropbox was trying to solve a problem Microsoft had already tried to solve a million times (file-sync) and the fact that Microsoft had never been able to sell it and get a decent user-base for their service was proof that this wasn't something people actually wanted.

Funny how a good enough implementation and good marketing managed to turn that around.

I don't remember what was wrong with Microsoft's solution, but I remember not buying into it.
This deserves a longer response but it is quite early in the morning, so I'll write the short version:

1) The career of programming (specifically) has MANY options which are not concentrated in the tech bubble. I know that is not obvious being so close to the epicenter of it, but 90%+ of professional programmers work, in Silicon Valley parlance, boring companies doing boring things. Banks gotta bank, insurances companies gotta insure, logistics companies have to do something without any convenient verbs to describe it, and all of the above hire (or beneficially hire, via staff arrangements with companies that are uninteresting to the Valley) vast numbers of programmers.

2) The ability to program doesn't hurt your suitability for virtually any type of knowledge work (when compared to a BA/BS in an unspecified field from Berkeley). Most of the time, it will help you, since it gives you superpowers with regards to many tasks you might be expected to do. In my (brief and unlamented) stint as a translator, I shaved months of mind-killing drudgery off my schedule because I have superior options for getting Japanese from Word documents into HTML than copy/pasting one line at a time into Dreamweaver. You may find yourself working in a job which involves analysis or acting upon data, a task at which worksmanlike command of a single scripting language makes you a hero worthy of legend. You will find, for example, that many companies still generate e.g. monthly reports by having people manually collate/screen-scrape-with-their-eyeballs six different data sources into an Excel file which is version controlled by copying with creative filenames onto a shared directory. You might think that somebody capable of programming their way out of a paper bag could do a better job in two day's of work. Some times, you're not wrong.

3) Even if you don't do programming on a day to day basis, knowing how to get what you want out of computer systems and computer people is valuable. Smart people often suck at this. You being a bridge between those smart people and their captive techies can make you indispensable. (For example, I bet Obama would currently kill for one person in his inner circle who can tell the difference between frontend and backend at the moment. That sort of opportunity exists in a lot of places.)

4) Your major matters much much less to your career path than you have been socialized to think, because you have probably not talked career paths with many people outside of academia, who have very skewed views on the matter. Three years from now nobody will care what you studied in undergrad.
"The promotion of false conspiracy theories is not harmless. In the past, what one historian dubbed as the "paranoid style of American politics" has led to fear of and antipathy toward certain religions and social and political movements."

The allusion to "paranoid style" is rather galling because that essay attacks right wingers exclusively... and there is no doubt whatsoever that the Warren Commission purposely downplayed Oswald's communist background as not to hurt Johnson's re-election.
AMD on track for 2014 launch of Kaveri
Why You Shouldn't Interrupt a Programmer
> You don't see deviances like that in genetics.

You don't? You don't think Lebron James is better than about a billion people at the game of basketball?

This is the 80/20 rule niched down about 10x.
1-Trick Chameleon: Predators Learn to See Through Camouflage
Instamojo
> Also, if you believe all Americans (also applies to all other nationalities) have the same rights in regard to the law, well I don't even know how to respond to that, because believing that would make you incredibly, desperately naive.

Where did I ever say that? I never even began to imply this. I'm just saying that that's what how the Law should be working as a central element of society.
Excellent point. Criticism is in many cases important.
Thanks for posting this. This is Chaitanya from Ozonetel. I can take questions about our journey so far
In my location the city owns the utility. If you have a private utility like PG&E or ConEd, I'm not sure.
Keller conveniently sets up the story painting Greenwald as a partisan.

He is the exact opposite of that. He's pro civil liberties and the rule of law -- consistently. People think he's a partisan because his writing sometimes makes Democrats look bad. His positions didn't change when Bush was in office.
Yes, Google is your friend, basically. That said, there are various libraries that implement a lot of generic, useful functionality. E.g. glib for data structures in a desktop application, libevent/libev/libuv for event-based programming, libpcre for regular expressions, various string libraries, SAMBA's libtalloc for a different take on memory management, etc.

What are you trying to do?
This one was awesome :)
> The richest 300 people in the world have more money combined than the poorest 3 billion people

So, what is your point, exactly ? The world would be better place if everyone was as poor as the next ?

You could say that the Universe is incredibly unfair, after all, for all we know, Earth is the only planet with advanced life in the Milky Way, and would it be better if instead there was bacterian life everywhere instead ?

Besides, whatever your point is, it's moot, because the key thing you should look at is : is the life of the 3 billions people improving ? The answer is a vibrant "YES" and the world as a whole is getting out of poverty, thanks to the dark evil of capitalism, which incidentally also works pretty well to get everyone out of the shit hole.
And I'm an example of how you can be right and still wrong because you let "other plans" get in the way. I'm on that thread with my two cents: "I'm impressed."

However, Drew took me out to lunch about 10 months later. They'd just signed their Series A with Sequoia (although it wasn't public knowledge), and were looking to hire their first couple employees. Aston had just been hired the day before as employee #1; Drew was wondering if they could interest me in being employee #2.

At the time, I had my own startup that I was trying to get off the ground with a friend from college. I could tell Drew was wicked smart, and he was way more prepared and ready to bring a product to market than we were. But my immediate response was "I can't leave my cofounder, and I want to see where my startup ends up going." He was very understanding, and said "Yeah, if I were in your position - when I was in your position [DropBox is Drew's second company] - I wouldn't give it up either." I couldn't help thinking, as I walked away, that maybe I'd just passed up the best opportunity I'd get in my life. They filled their positions with a couple MIT grads later that day.

A couple years later, after I'd moved out to the Bay Area and was working for Google, I saw Aston at Maker Faire, and mentioned that maybe I'd made a mistake in passing on DropBox. He said, "Naw, you made the decision that was right for you." And in hindsight, I think that's correct. I had 3 dreams coming out of college: one was founding a startup, another was inventing a programming language, and a third was learning how Google Search works. This way, I got to try my hand at all 3 of them. And I'm not sure DropBox would've succeeded the way they have if they'd hired me: they got some kickass early programmers instead, and I had some growing up to do before I was really ready to start something big.
Upgrade auf System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 R2
> No, society should seek to maximize widespread improvements in quality of life and further humanities cause through social, technological, and cultural investments

That's just your point of view. "Society" is not a unique body, it should be based on the sum of the individual aspirations of everyone part of it.
Really awesome read, thanks for the link!
i3 on Mint, Intel graphics. Took around 20% of one core (derived by clicking and unclicking Edit / Run).
I saw an interview with him and the BBC a few weeks ago. When the subject of the UK came up he said he didn't care what they thought and he didn't care if he couldn't enter that country ever again because of what he believes is a hostile political system.

He seems very willing to make enemies of entire countries which is an odd personality trait to say the least. I would think most westerners would be extremely distraught if, for some reason, they realised they could no longer visit the USA, UK, and numerous other major Western nations because of something they had done wrong.
> Another economical fallacy. When you put money in the bank, it's not standing there doing nothing. Savings are invested, loaned, used to create additional value. That's why banks want your money. (...)

Actually, it's the other way around. Banks loan money first. Only then do they worry about the amount of cash they have in their vault. The parent post is actually correct for the most part: excessive amounts of wealth tend to end up blowing asset bubbles rather than be put to good use in the economy.

You might find this talk by Steve Keen (of Debunking Economics fame) interesting if you've an hour or so:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPRdyVabiQk
Is OAuth Really Secure?
His logic is a bit off. In a truly efficient market (big if), if taxes were raised so significantly as to have a major impact on the rewards, then you would get a corresponding reduction in risk. I.E. Instead of having a 1 in 10 chance of a startup making it (as he claims in the post) you would probably end up with a 1 in 8 chance (or something similar) as the smaller rewards would, in theory, reduce the number of competitors. You would still end up with the same number of winners however.

In reality, there are a number of intangible benefits to starting a business that will overpower any reduction in startups due to higher taxes. Autonomy, excitement, and having a large impact all contribute in the decision to take the risk. Additionally, starting a business is still one of the only ways to strike it rich (unless you get lucky in the athlete/musician/actor department). So for most people with sizable ambitions, a reduction in rewards due to higher taxes will not have any meaningful impact on their decision.
> they know which keys belongs to which houses

Need to be corrected into "they claim to know which keys belongs to which houses", right?
You seem to be implying that tech companies can have a higher moral ground. They're still run by people. Technologists can still be culpable even if they're in positions of authority precisely because they are people. Any other way of thinking is a gross over-generalization of people's ability and desire to do the right thing.

Besides, even if they aren't in the positions of authority, technologists can still be culpable. I thought we already had enough examples in history of culpable people who were "simply following orders" to render such types of discussions moot.
> Jobs get created because there is demand for something

In the modern society, you are beyond the natural "needs" of the population and you don't need any of the new products that are sold to you. Obviously nobody needed a iPhone pre-2007 and now suddenly everyone has to have one. There's nothing such as "fixed demand". Demand is created by new products, designed by rich elites or companies that can manufacture them and need significant investment to make them a reality.

And the "crowd" investment system already exists, by the way. It's been around for 300 years, it's called the stocks exchange.
Thanks Prashant for posting, this is Prashanth from Ozonetel
I think the basic problem is the structure of the industry and the kind of people who are in it. In USA, by and large the telco business is a mafia business. That is what is fundamental is control of the territory. This is clear when a state is divided into two parts: one for Verizon and one for ATT. It is clear when one reason given is the costs of "right of way" that needs to be paid to the city: it is a deal between mafia groups.
Simply think about it: if you are interested in high tech, where do you go in the USA? Certainly not to the telco. Now ask the same question in France, where do you go? Maybe in telco. The reason is that some countries like France, South Korea, Germany, etc. did not have a big tech sector. Also very little start up culture. But they understood the importance of the tech sector and they did what they could to unblock it by breaking the local mafia. So, the end result is low cost internet. It did only marginally help the creation of a tech sector, but that is what they could do.
Sharp criticism from know-it-alls is often a sign that an idea is good. It's amazing to me how, even though this is common knowledge, good ideas continue to polarize. I'd hate for you guys to convince everyone to be so nice that we skew this long-trusted signal :)
Blows my mind that the proof shows something as tangible as 18 types + all the sporadics. Since I have absolutely no insight into the field, does anyone know if the 18 is special in any sense?

The difference to me between physics and maths is that the latter has the capacity to be fully deducible from the axioms, and in that sense, it's fascinating that somewhere buried in our system of numbers, groups, geometry etc. lies a set of characteristics dictating the existence of those 18 types.
> Nature is unfair.

And some people really want it to stay that way.

I read somewhere that we were all born with the same rights. It's still a joke, a few centuries after someone had understood that:

Money equals power. Power equals rights (in our society, until now).
Diabetes and heart disease were widespread in India long before 1992. A simpler explanation, over the last century, is that Indians are eating more, and exercising less (i.e. not in the fields).

Aloo curry over white rice - nothing healthy about that, whatever oil you use to cook it in.
Spam = Problem -> Captcha = Solution -> Captcha Solver = Another Problem. Sigh.
> Nature is unfair.

That is no argument against striving for an as fair society as possible.
Well, the attack vector seems to be mostly ZIP email attachments with EXEs.
We've just launched Paymo 3.0 into public beta - if you're looking for a good alternative please check it out:
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Same here. Arch Linux for a few years, never had any problems with it.

I've recently spend a few days with ratpoison as a WM, but got back to XFCE for the moment.
> Nature is unfair. [...] The only thing society should do is ensure everyone has the same rights in regard to the Law no matter how rich, how poor, how different you may be.

Since you are so readily dismissing egalitarianism on the basis of being unnatural, I'm sure you have a great natural explanation for things like property rights and law.

For all I care, you can have libertarian or egalitarian ideals, but make no mistake in thinking that either of them are natural. If the point of a government or rule of law was to keep the natural order of things, we wouldn't need it at all. Not that I think that being unnatural is inherently bad, but don't try to put yourself on some sort of high ground by saying that your economical philosophy adheres to some sort of natural fact if it doesn't.
>So it's only partially true that the poor benefit from inflation. They'll benefit from cheaper debt payments and possibly higher employment. But they're unlikely to see much of the added money supply in wages, and they're going to take it in the chin on prices.

The theory is that inflation will decrease wages for anyone making above market wages. That's one of the mechanisms by which economists theorize that inflation stimulates the economy. Downward nominal wage rigidity, and all that.

If you are arguing that minimum wage workers are making above market wages (and that argument is supported by the evidence of the high unemployment rate) well, That's certainly a valid point. But those making $10/hr at mcdonalds? (the California minimum is $8.00 and McDonalds will pay you a little more than that after you've been there for a while.) - are those folks making market-clearing wages? I'd argue that they are.

However, the other side of this is that inflation is generally thought to increase the demand for labor in general. I mean, my personal take on it is that we have vastly more unskilled labor than we have demand for. We need more demand. More demand for labor would mean that companies wouldn't be so picky. That's the thing, companies whine about not having skilled labor, but when the economy gets hot? Companies train. I think I've written before how I got a programming/sysadmin gig when I was 17... in 1997, and how that would have been nearly impossible four years later. Meanwhile, I turned those four years into enough experience to remain employed through the crash. I became a dramatically more valuable employee during those four years, and I don't think that this increase in value is because I'm some extra special super-virtuous worker. I think most people in that situation would have become dramatically more valuable.

So yeah; I think we need to create demand. The private sector could do this by coming up with new industries (like the service sector in the '80s.) or the government could do this directly through WPA style projects. Inflation, I think, can be seen as part of an attempt by the government to stimulate the private sector into doing it. But either way, I think demand is key. Demand is the problem.

Long-term unemployment has brutal long-term consequences that are much worse than simply not earning as much for a while, because not only are you not earning while unemployed, you aren't gaining experience. You aren't becoming more valuable for your future jobs. It's bad on an individual level, but it's also bad on a macro level; there is a real reason why experienced folks get paid more. They are more productive.
If you're looking for an alternative check out Paymo 3.0 (shameless plug) - we've just entered public beta:
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> isn't there a sociological theory that basically says that an organization tends to be controlled by the people who care about the continuity of the organization, instead of the goals it represents?

Systemantics has something to say about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics

It's superficially funny and subversive at first glance, until you start thinking about its observations applied to large systems that you have worked on, and that you work and live within like BigCos and the government.
From the article:

"Captcha" stands for "completely automated
Turing test to tell computers and humans apart."

No it doesn't - where's the word that starts with "P"?

According to Wikipedia "CAPTCHA" is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" (and is apparently a trademark of Carnegie Mellon University, which I didn't know.) Even that's a really bad backronym.

Google's reCAPTCHA page[0] says the same thing, and even attributes it:

The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Public Turing Test
To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis
von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of
Carnegie Mellon University.

That should then be CAPTTTTCAHA. Doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Given the term CAPTCHA it seems that a "better" (by some definition) backronym would be:

Completely Automated Process to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.

At least with that one only the particles "to" and "and" are left out of the abbreviation.

More on topic though, I long for the day when off-the-shelf systems that even script-kiddies can use are able to break CAPTCHAs with ease - that's when they'll finally die. TicketMaster gave up on using the standard CAPTCHAs earlier this year[1], and I'd love to see something better replace it.

[0] http://www.google.com/recaptcha/captcha

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21260007
To use your metaphor, one player is given 300 free shots while everyone else only has one. And if you don't sink enough baskets, you starve. Also don't call in sick for a game, nobody cares.

I don't understand why HN is so strongly anti- corporate and govt monopoly and yet so massively pro-personal monopoly.
The basic idea is good; I'm not convinced Squid buys you any security, though. If everyone can operate that way, consider allowing access via SSH only.

Oh, and don't forget chroot (or something more modern, like jails or even SElinux).

Having said all of the above, for the typical startup, the main threat is not an attack on the server but some shoddy application code committed under yet another tight deadline.
"because of something they had done wrong."

What has he done wrong?
RoyalCMS. It's an extremely flexible content management system, which focusses on creating functionality by using plugins. It's like an platform for websites. It is not quite done yet, but we have a (kind of) working beta: http://royalcms.net/
The real problem is not excessive wealth but generational transfer of such. Let someone reap the benefits. BUT then take away the majority of the wealth away upon death so he could not transfer it. Let his decendands be able to inherit total value of 100 each (whatever the poverty line is that year) and take away the rest.

This way we make the emerging of elites harder and falling out of them easier.
When first shown it by a friend, I didn't want to use it because I was ideologically only using open source stuff, and servers I have control over. I carried on using Unison and some dodgy shell scripts.

Some years later, I got a free 60Gb Dropbox account with a new Samsung phone. It seemed a good way to sync my music and photos, and to let me access text files on the phone.

I'd meanwhile got fed up with my hand made scripts, and tried a few other commercial backup solutions, and got fed up with them all. So Dropbox seemed not a bad part to a backup strategy to use from my desktop as well.

I think this year's privacy news on the Internet has shown my original view was correct. And Drew has shown that a mature, usable, cross-platform syncing client is nevertheless something I use!