skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Appropriate content for a personal blog regarding your job?
For a while now, I have been thinking about starting my own personal blog. I enjoy writing about different kinds of things, be it technical 'tutorial'-ish posts or more essay-like posts about the things that interest me, bother me, ...

I think blogging about technical stuff will help me think about solving problems, will challenge me to try new things, .. I'm quite excited about doing this, to be honest. I suppose there's no problem with the appropriate-ness of technical articles.

Lately, I have been extremely frustrated by the 'humane' side of things at my workplace. I often feel like the people I talk to daily cannot grasp or understand the things that bother me so much. I feel like blogging about this would help me a great deal in putting 'work' as a whole in perspective.

However, I am not sure if it is appropriate to blog about this and how my employer will react if and when they find out about the blog. I would not mention any names, but I suppose those who are familiar with my situation could figure things out nonetheless. People could figure out who I am simply by looking at my submission history.. (I created a new acct to post this, sorry.)

This has been keeping me from asking advice to more knowledgeable people too. I have thought about posting about my situation on HN before but, knowing my employer also reads HN, I have never wanted to take any risk.

Thoughts?
Good point! I am guilty of driving while looking at a map,
and it definitely dangerous.
Yes, college does nothing to anybody. It's a scam. Even without the startup you should drop out.
Agreed.

I've also found that the longer you are away from school, the harder it is to go back for a variety of reasons (motivation, money, family, etc.). I guess in a world where there are statistically millions of people like me (C'mon -- there are 6 billion+ people in the world!), it would cost less political and social capital to hire or invest in somebody with a degree than somebody without.
I've never had any type coercion bugs, can you elaborate?
Written language and reading is often not as fluent for deaf people as hearing: written English is based (loosely) on how the words sound after all, and if you've never heard them, you lose a lot of the useful tools to map between text and meaning. It's ironic that many people's first steps in sign language are to learn to sign the alphabet - as a tool it's almost useless for communicating with a deaf person.
In my youth I did much worse than this, but github... There is a saying, don't shit where u sleep...
I'm certainly familiar with the phrase. In American English it would be considered a collocation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation) because "trash can" et simil have replaced it... and Orwell's essay suggests that collocations detract from clarity. But I've clearly exposed my ignorance about this particular Britishism.
PHP and JavaScript:   Real-time Stock Dashboard
Not really. If they execute their rules faithfully and efficiently, the bad ones will be blacklisted and filtered out. That might be doable if they can program their VOIP phones and automatically block whoever violate their rules.
I wonder what would come of Microsoft putting out a $1 million offer for a new logo/brand with an entry fee of $10 and the requirement that each submitter must sort 10 other submissions in preference at some later date?
Checking it out, I'd like a few more options if you know of any.
Some of those suggestions lose their punch when moved to a non-American context.

I'd argue that the name should work on the assumption that it is the defacto standard, and so there is no need to distinguish between "normal mail" and "new mail". It should also contain a possessive pronoun. (Something like "YourMail", if not already taken?).

With such a name, when someone attacks the mail service it will be difficult to avoid attacking the person, as an attacker will have to attack "YourMail". Attack the person and the person will react.

Not distinguishing between normal and new will have two effects:

1) It will seem a normal thing for the uninitiated to use it.

2) In the case of an attack, it will be easier for people to say the attack is directed at themselves, since the generic name will draw people in, rather than letting them dismiss it as an exclusive club.
Given the extremely limited nature of the site, what protection do you think TLS would offer (against an adversary like the NSA that could trivially correlate your IP address with your email address).
sorry that was a deploy to fix the "oops, this page can't be found" that was flashing before the page loads. When we deploy Meteor, it hot fixes the client (i.e. restarts the app in your browser)
What is your blood sugar levels? Do you check them everyday every hour?
Privacy issues aside, getting paid to hack into big important systems sounds like it could be a job many people would enjoy.
The whole recruitment industry has been poisoned. So many liars and fraudsters that anyone left trying to do things right is surely overshadowed.

I've never actually met or dealt with a non-sleazy recruitment agent, so I don't actually know what they would actually do for me (either as a company or a candidate).

My note to recruiters is: go away and leave us alone. It's worth our time doing our own job advertising and candidate selection!
Brewing Beer with Robots
Got one
While customer happiness is vital, some concerns or questions on this framework:

- Affordability - does that mean priced appropriately for value provided or cheap? In our experience, cheap means more support requirements as customers who pay too little chew up most of the support bandwidth.

- This framework won't scale as the organization gets bigger (more customers). First, low-paying customers will demand more support and providing 2 minute turnaround becomes an impossible standard.

- Finally, this level of support is economically sub-optimal as some customers who want higher levels of service will pay more for that. Support is a feature.

Just my $.02. We have lots of happy customers of our SaaS biz so I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment. Just think it's important to be mindful of setting expectations correctly for customers as a 2 minute response standard doesn't leave much room for error and may not be sustainable.
Broken javascript app? you're implying that all Meteor apps are broken?
SMTP (mail protocol) between providers is unencrypted anyway. So, if I send email from gmail to ycombinator, it goes to ycombinator SMTP server unencrypted and can be tapped by anyone with access to the wire. Still, clear traffic between Google's own data centers is inexcusable. They are exposing my data to more risk.
What happened between the 19th and the 28th? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6638004

Hi Justin. To clarify, from what I understand, October 28
is the date MongoHQ detected this. They've provided us
with the logs of database access, and unfortunately the
queries leading to our spam attack on Saturday started as
early as October 19.
hey thanks a lot! thats pretty much the same way i look at
Exactly. The main reason I chose my current laptop over another was because it has a number pad. I now have a work issued laptop without a number pad, so I have to drag around my work issued keyboard because zipping through excel efficiently without it is harder.
Making repeated prototypes (in est, experiments), quickly, is how you approach entrepreneurialism in any sort of scientific manner. Nothing needs to scale, or work at the edge-cases, until it has product-market fit; and you might need to write twelve or twenty or two-hundred different apps until you find one that works out that way.

That's what makes these frameworks popular with HN: startup founders are not in the business of executing on a known business model (which might be viably accomplished even through a waterfall process and code written in C); rather, we're in the business of searching for a business model by building MVP after MVP, as quickly as we can.

MVPs don't need to be able to be evolved into stable, well-engineered products. They just need to prove product-market fit. Once you've got your traction, your proof, your intent-to-buy, you can use that to get the loans or capital, to hire the talent, to build the Well-Engineered Version. Until then, "engineering" is not even a consideration.
“NSA Tapped The Pope”, Spied On Vatican To Prevent “Threats To Financial System”
Hostile takeovers would take on a whole new meaning if you could legitimately employ Corporate Ninjas.
Seems pretty distracting to me - the "upcoming vector" seemed way too jumpy and kept puling my eye from the road. Surprised it's even legal with that level of detail.

How does it feel to you?
Of course ASP.NET was closed source, and from Microsoft — Meteor is open-source, and is being driven by a small team.
It's still much easier and more efficient to eat spaghetti with chopsticks.
this is brilliant.
That kind of approach is just going to lead us around in a big circle, and when we look back in fifty years we'll be just where we started
No way, then I'd have to deal with that annoying cord all over my desk and then having it invariably get tangled in my backpack. It's not that big of a deal to have a slightly offset keyboard.
I'm excited about it. I've always had trouble tracking down good lawyers even for brief consultations. I'm available unusual hours and strongly prefer email over phone (which presents the next problem of encryption, and 100% of lawyers I've asked about this have been too good for it, one even saying "Don't worry, you aren't going to share any confidential information with me", neglecting that even the fact I had the problem I had should've been treated as confidential).

I hope something like this can make it easy for someone like me to get legal help when necessary.
How old do you think the average HN reader is? Or is this covered in some kind of CS class?
I'll make an even bolder claim: Meteor doesn't work at all for anything except small toy apps.

Meteor is built on the idea of reactiveness between server and clients. That is if the servers view of the data changes, then the clients views' must also change at the same time. It accomplishes that using websockets and letting each client have a full copy of all the servers data in memory. Works great for simple chats and for highscore lists consisting of 10-20 items. Not so great when there are 500k items ordered by score and someone wants to paginate through all of them.

It's trivial in a sql-database backed application, but more or less impossible with Meteor because you can't listen to arbitrary queries without having the whole collection in the clients memory.

Btw, I'd love to be proven wrong though. I tried to write an equivalent of phpMyAdmin for the Meteor+MongoDB combination, but I couldn't figure out how to how to provide clients with an always updated view of mongo collections without running them out of memory.
Why did Lavabit ever need to have my messages in the clear?

The problem is manufactured and the solution is missing the point.
Thanks for identifying those issues — bugs we'll fix.
1. you're absolutely right. just pushed an update for push notifications and coding in some logic as we speak

2. you get a ribbon for being an explorer (being one of the people to unlock an area)

3. i want to add media , but im scared it might get crowded with a lot of nudes. maybe if we add karma and let users with a certain amount post, it would work
Don't forget hardware. If nobody uses this codec, all the chips they sell and license will have no clients. They must kill other codecs.
Spam is the reason. Mail servers are easy to set up, it's all the crap you need to do to actually get your mail accepted that's hard.
See "Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You" by Joel Spolsky:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html
The “dark” part is not so much the issue: why not leave out “mail” altogether? E-mail 3.0 won’t be e-mail as people know it (and will continue to associate with the very concepts 3.0 seeks to avoid). It shall be something different enough to give it another name — at least to avoid confusion, or to prevent spin doctors from taking advantage of the associations and mental model people have on the concept of e-mail. Nobody thinks of “e-mail” when you mention Snapchat, Facebook messages, Twitter… That would be different if these services had names like Snapmail, Facemail, Tweetmail, or Darkmail.
>using political and economic power rather than pure force

Inconceivable!
Yeah, I don't know what's up with the price. I got mine from an Amazon reseller for $172 shipped from Japan. Not sure why it's so expensive on there now.
I'm still trying to figure out why this is cool.
I wonder if many of these 'Chinese infiltration' events that did lead to Gmail HTTPS/TLS were actually spy agencies of various nationalities, even looking like Chinese hackers when in actuality it is something else.
"1. Mozilla is the only browser that has no legal way to provide integrated H.264. Every other major browser is backed by a corporation and can afford the MPEG LA fee."

Mozilla could afford to pay MPEGLA but that doesn't help any of Mozilla's downstream distributions and it doesn't help other developers building open source software that want to include H264 capabilities. (Not to mention that millions of dollars a year in patent fees could be better spent on initiatives like building a better video future with Daala.)

Mozilla's mission is about more than just Firefox, it's about the Web, and solutions that only work for Mozilla distributed products generally aren't great solutions for the long-term health of the Web.

Mozilla could have shelled out the cash to license patents from MPEG-LA and adopted an existing open source H264 implementation. That would certainly have been better sooner for Firefox users, and possibly for <video> on the Web, but that would not have been enough for Mozilla because we are not in this game for our own profit. We're here because the Web needs us on its side, looking out for the interests that BigCos generally won't.

Finally, there is no chance that Mozilla, even with a giant Kickstarter campaign, could buy out the MPEG-LA patents for H.264. Not gonna happen. (Unless I'm missing all the multi-billion dollar Kickstarter success stories.)
it was us — HN blew up the single dyno the site was running on.
And to be clear, since you didn't say it, the screen is off between those turns. It also gives you audible directions just as any other GPS would, so you don't have to look at it.
Not that I disagree with the overall message but that's a silly example. Writing a joke tweet for yourself wouldn't likely lead to $10,000. At $10,000 a week you can dedicate many hours a day to coming up with a killer joke instead of working some other job or searching for a job... Unless that story is supposed to be a joke, in which case, I didn't get it.
Very confusing reading this on a github page. Took a moment to realize this was not github's own terms for dealing with recruiters. It is actually linked on github directly from http://vzaar.com/jobs - rather than being used to generate a page on their site. So why the github hosting? Are they accepting pull requests from enterprising recruiters who disagree with their terms?
Social content discovery engine for businesses
RGBDToolkit: DSLR + DEPTH Filmmaking
The NY Times is not Reddit. They will check the story through their own sources before publishing. They're not just going to repost the Washington Post story.

They're slow on Snowden stores because they do not have direct access to the Snowden documents, like the Guardian and WashPo do.
I'm basically working on that idea, too. It's built API first and the first iPhone App is almost done. http://goaly.co
Why do you feel that way? I didn't get that impression at all. It even explained how uncomfortable that makes the employee. An employee can easily search for a job on their own time.
Honestly, yes. You have to consciously decide to look down at an in-car UI, and change your focus to match. If something is constantly in your field of vision, it's going to consume more of your attention when you should be watching traffic around you.

My flight instructor phrased it this way. In a car in good conditions, you spend 95% of your time watching your surroundings. In an aircraft in visual conditions, you spend 70% of your time looking outside the cockpit. In an aircraft in instrument conditions, you spend maybe 5% of your time looking outside.

The pilot is focused on the hud first, the outside environment second. A car should be completely reversed from that.
> the unreleased Gen2 Google Glasses, which project the image directly in your field of vision

Where did you get that idea from? The pictures of the gen 2 Google Glass look almost identical to the gen 1, with the prism and all.
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Josh, it's an increasing article.

I don't know what types of apps your company builds but it would be nice to state that. I certainly don't think you believe that Meteor is a good fit for all kinds of web apps. It does seem like its a really good fit for the apps that your company builds.

I would get more out of your article if you provide some context around the types of apps your company is focused on.
It's just an irrelevant and unhelpful way to evaluate anything in software. Rails is no longer the height of fashion, but it's still a superbly productive way to develop web apps. There are newer options that optimise for different things and that might be a better choice in some cases, but they all bear the same foibles of immaturity that Rails had a few years ago. "Boring" is a complement to software, not a criticism - it implies that the software is sufficiently mature to just work.
This is brilliant mate, will test it out now for a few weeks in Sydney. I thought of the same idea after I noticed not so much of a gap in the pickup-game space, but just no real implementations that had been executed as good as they should be. From the screenshots, this looks like the one to do it!

One small thing, had some issues with the register screen returning me to login screen after I pressed the register button (I know it's in beta, just pointing it out :) )
It's stuff like this that causes site owners to require a captcha or throttle based on IP. Anyone can create 5000 fake accounts with a script, so there's nothing too original here. Based on the blog title, I thought they might've discovered an interesting XSS exploit, or social engineering technique.

Generating 5000 fake accounts falls into the script kiddie level of originality.

I'm sure there's some developer at Github right now tasked with locating these fake accounts and deleting them.
It certainly would make sense, since the US embassy in Berlin seems to be used for spying, too:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/cover-story-how-...

> "Research by SPIEGEL reporters in Berlin and Washington, talks with intelligence officials and the evaluation of internal documents of the US' National Security Agency and other information, most of which comes from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, lead to the conclusion that the US diplomatic mission in the German capital has not merely been promoting German-American friendship. On the contrary, it is a nest of espionage. From the roof of the embassy, a special unit of the CIA and NSA can apparently monitor a large part of cellphone communication in the government quarter."

http://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/tid-34373/infrarotbi...

^ "US diplomats could be expelled from the country"... mind you, they're not at all talking about closing the embassy, but "just" expelling those under diplomatic immunity who were doing this (and persecuting those not under diplomatic immunity). It might just be to look good for the Germany population, they might be serious... here's hoping.

http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/media/usbotschaft105_v-ardga...

^ infrared image of the embassy rooftop which I saw on German TV, in a discussion which surprised me by its serious tone and the absence of handwaving or belittling.
Heh, i also wouldn't be surprised for this site to be a high profile target... Any successful attack to it would completely embarrass the u.s. Which id imagine is up there on some peoples lists right now
Do you think instead of coming up with a new XBox logo or whatever he's tasked with at Microsoft, he's going to show them a popsicle? Or a new kind of bookshelf? I think now that he's being paid to do what he wants, he won't find much reason to deviate from what's asked of him.
I think a lot of the dislike is from simply not understanding many of the techniques. E.g. in second example, there's a bit where the melody is extremely staccato, but the note length isn't achieved from the keyed duration but by a flurry of other percussive notes overwhelming the compressor/normaliser. I guess without knowing that it might seem uninteresting.

If you understand stuff like this you can appreciate the music. I'm not exactly going to sit down and listen to it in a dark room sipping some red wine, but it's a new and unique compositional technique that can be incorporated into other music.
Agreed, as long as the "worthy" bit of your sentence remains the goal. This being an inherently political issue, probably 90% of the people grousing about how badly this works never wanted it to work at all (and probably 95% never would have used it anyway, being employed with existing health care options).

But to the extent that there are real people who want to purchase health plans through the federal exchange and can't: yes, this is a disaster and has to be fixed.
that's not a chance I'm willing to take. This is how PHP started. It was a reject experiment that escaped the lab. Then some poor souls took it seriously. Now all of humanity suffers.
How to make a beefy VPS that performs
More promises to keep your information private, from people who already showed they are not competent to keep your information private. There is no reason Lavabit should have ever been able to disclose enough information to the government to get customers' messages
gruseom asks, Is there anyone writing today with anything like that quality (i.e. that combination of clarity and directness)?

Steven Pinker is attempting to advocate for more clarity and directness in writing. I think his rather long lecture on MIT video, "Communicating Science and Technology in the 21st Century,"

http://video.mit.edu/watch/communicating-science-and-technol...

has been submitted to Hacker News before. In text, I see Pinker has a shorter work, possibly transcribed from a different lecture, "The Writing Code,"

http://www.thewritingcode.com/pages/transcripts/pinker.html

that discusses what makes writing distinct from speech (Pinker knows this even better than Orwell, as a linguist) and how to revise prose.
When my fridge broke and the repair person came, it was basically: Either the circuit board or the compressor needs replacement
It is yet another hidden price of DRM. The W3C's embrace of DRM won't help either.
Rails is modular. It is possible, and a frequent use case to utilize portions to persist data, perform business logic for requests from code running in the web browser.
I built a website www.selfstats.com with this sort of thing in mind.

Ask yourself questions
Receive email everyday with the set of questions
Reply to email with answers

Login to your dashboard for an overhead view (charts, lists, etc).

An API and Mobile support are in the works.
I agree with the barrier. I wonder if the NSA has made surmounting that barrier possible. If the friction to getting a 'secure' email experience is low enough, people will put up with having two for a while.

As for connecting them. I could handle just being able to communicate with my security conscious friends on this platform. That might make it a niche play early on but so was email.
It's like they were running up against a deadline and just crunched the best they could. There is so much insanity in this project, and I say that as someone who more than anything wants this to succeed.