skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I also have an intense dislike for the urban one-upsmanship that seems uniquely American in my experience.

That's fair, but you're talking about normative comparisons, and I'm talking about relative ones. I think relative comparisons are more useful in a country that, all things considered, has pretty safe cities. I don't mean to dismiss all of Seattle's problems, but it helps give perspective.

> Part of Seattle's problem - one that I touched on but didn't expand on earlier - is that it feels less safe than it actually is.

That's fair.

> Seattle is a pedestrian ghost town.

No, it's not. Downtown is, yes, but Seattle as a whole has many options for a pedestrian's nightlife. Capitol Hill is one of them, and it's an easy walk from downtown even.

I think that goes back to my last point. I just don't perceive the negatives of Seattle's "urban planning cockups" in nearly as dramatic of fashion.

I'm not from here, I'm not a homer. I just find much fewer problems here than I have anywhere else. I know you don't like relative comparisons, but when choosing a place to live relative comparisons are my most helpful tool.
What I'm about to say may be too unpopular on HackerNews.

Have you considered the possibility that not everyone shares the same moral standard and ideology? People came from different backgrounds and have different experiences, and most things are not black and white, but different shades of gray in this world.

I'm sure there are people who consider the Fourth Amendment to be obsolete just like there are people who consider the same for the Second Amendment.

I'm not saying I agree with it, but for people who believe they are actually serving their country, and in this era's unique geopolitical landscape, all means are justified, they WOULD be proud of their work for the NSA.

You came across as condescending due to the fact that you put yourself on a moral high ground from the phasing of the question.
Not yet, there's been many incarnation, but none of them ever reached a playable state. I've been on a kick to restart it lately after starting to learn prolog. I've been playing with some pre-made engines to find out if any of them can accelerate the whole thing a bit. Checking out Unity right now.
Cruzerlite lost nearly $30k because someone posted an unlimited promo code.
Heroku easter egg: Open your terminal and run `heroku create`
Or Halloween egg? In any case it deserves attention, and I know that most people don't create new, unnamed Heroku apps often. But you should make one, or several, today.
Yes, for some reason Accept-Language is totally ignored. It's quite annoying when you travel and suddenly the language changes. The trend to favor geolocation is almost ubiquitous. Few people care about user preferences in the browser, which is the standard way to do it.

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14...
Why (and how) I'm saying goodbye to Gmail
How does it work in Maryland, where this is already the law?
Right, but then you're just testing how fast a framework can vomit out a small string and some headers.

I'm not saying it's an especially useful benchmark, but it's intended to test something besides raw response speed.
Psychology today is still struggling with classifying disorders by observable symptoms. We are a long way off from being able to make a wide range of conclusive and specific diagnoses, particularly of subtle phenomenon. Hell, it isn't even clear how many different phenomenon we are currently calling "schizophrenia". We don't know the categories to put people into yet!

Regardless, I did say "foreseeable future". There may be developments that catch me by surprise, but going at the current rate and direction we are right now, there is no way in hell MRIs will be able to satisfactorily contradict "I am unable to recall" in a courtroom anytime soon.
I have a side project (dmtri.com). It lacks active users right now. I don't mind not having too many registered users as the website doesn't require you to sign up. I just wish that people would visit more and write more. Obviously the problem is that there isn't much going on actively on the site.

However, I detest the thought of spamming every facebook groups and such. I tried organically growing by writing really good content (http://dmtri.com/posts/28/alexis_ohanian_-_%22i_don%27t_regr...), but that in itself is a problem because I have to get visitors for that.

I worked hard on the project but I feel a bit discouraged by lack of interest so far.
Estella's Brilliant Bus: tour bus becomes mobile computer center for the poor
Google released glog, which is pretty much the same thing as this, https://github.com/golang/glog. glog seems a bit cleaner though.
The credentials are relevant toward whether it's a prank, and also the amount of equipment he has available for diagnosis.

(Does this mean I can cite you for fallacy fallacy? This game is stupid.)
Just for the record, my comment didn't intend to imply that JVM frameworks are strictly better in all cases, and I don't believe that at all. In fact, I'd argue that for the majority of applications, choosing any modern framework purely for benchmark performance is very foolish since all of them perform more than adequately.

Rails, for example, despite always having been "slow," performs far more than adequately for the vast majority of web applications, scaling patterns are well established, and it's obviously hugely productive for many, many developers and companies.
I can see the Fox News headlines already. "Not even the nation's best tech companies could save Obamacare."
In a way, it's kind of a relief that they're taking the bloat road.

With many tech products, I find myself lusting after stuff I really don't need, but with phones these days, it's more like "OMG! That looks so cool! I gotta ... oh wait it's the size of a kitchen table."

What I'm going to do when my current phone dies, though, I dunno... TT
Unfortunately it shows the 32gb version as $150 more expensive than the US version (at 449AUD or 426.51USD at today's rate). Plus they charge more for postage.
In addition to that to make robust pagination you need aggregation. Printing the message "you are looking at page X of Y pages" requires you to know the count of the collection or else you can't say how many pages there are. I.e You need to reactively monitor MongoDB's equivalent of "select count(*) from blaha". Doing that (without cheating and caching the count) is very expensive in Meteor.
> Everyone on HN acts like there's no possible reason for people to support these types of activities.

And they're right. You don't need to play devil's advocate. The devil has enough advocates.
Wow, the database connection ip and dbname were taken from http cookies!
Note this is "authored" by watchdog.org which is a media outlet for the ultra conservative Koch brothers.
Show HN: Teaching Javascript to Write
As an EFF staffer who worked on this, I want to mention that ACLU and ACLU of Massachusetts deserve substantial credit for this brief.
Some discussion on Reddit here[1]. Apparently they were warned about their poor coupon code implementation before, and still kept using it; sending out coupon codes to customers that could be used an unlimited number of times by anyone to get completely free cases.

A good heads up to any startups out there to be careful about how they do coupons and promotions. Now a small startup is out $30k, and is left to beg and make passive aggressive pleas on G+.

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1pmlii/cruzerlite_l...
A fake/simulated penis would work though in a lesbian pegging scenario.
EXTERMINATE ALL RATIONAL THOUGHT. Questions are not allowed. Consideration is not allowed. Context is not allowed. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
They range in age from 14-17. One of the challenges I am trying to tackle is finding ways to keep everyone engaged even though they have a pretty wide array of skill levels. I've found that while none of the students have extensive programming training, the older ones have picked up a little bit here or there while the younger ones are more users of technology and don't really know anything about programming.

My wife is part of an initiative at her school to bring technology into the classroom, so there is already some awareness of this program within the school administration. Right now I'm totally focused on working with the kids that took the initiative to join the club, but who knows, maybe it can be developed into a program that could reach a larger audience within the school.
Ask HN: Should I leave my job?
I don't have a CS degree. I taught myself how to program in my early 20s (I'm now in my late 20s). I started out in front-end web development. I got hired by a company about 2.5 years ago to be on their front-end team. I learned a lot, in the early days it was great, they gave me the flexibility to do some really interesting things (back-end stuff, I even got to create a shared memory project using the Win32 api for our services to share common caches). They keep giving me front-end projects though. Now I'm working on an Android app for them, it's going fine, but I am seriously bored to tears and I'm finding it more and more difficult to stay motivated.

I don't want to be a front-end engineer anymore. I'm building a compiler in my spare time and that's what keeps me loving programming. Obviously I should be working in the back-end or OS level. How do I make this transition? I have some things I can point to in my work experience to make the transition, but not that much. Should I go back to school (I don't really want to)? How can I convince another employer to hire me on to do interesting systems work for them without an Engineering degree (I studied literature). Maybe I just need a perspective change?
Why you should work at Mavenlink
Citizens of the world, unite You have nothing to lose but your data
Amen Brother

Its sad that most places dont have a proper technical copy (with a full copy of live data) to do full tests on TDD is all very well but you need to test the entire system.
Once you go over 100 minutes, it simply starts charging from whatever balance you have on your account. You'll get a recorded message warning you, then I think it's $0.10/minute thereafter.

I usually stay under 100 minutes or go just up to the edge. If I'm at home and expect to be on hold or talk for a long time, I'll just use Google Voice from my computer, which is better than holding a phone anyway.
Google partnered with LG to develop Nexus 5... So remind me again why did Google bought Motorola for? ಠ_ಠ
I'm curious as to why Django was paired with gUnicorn and only gUnicorn for its tests. I would have loved to see it benchmarked with uWSGI, gEvent or something with a little more gusto.
The SDK handles retries on failed requests. There is a little bit of extra legwork to actually do the slicing of a Blob, but you should be able to call createMultipartUpload(), uploadPart() x N, followed by completeMultipartUpload(). The SDK will make sure that each individual part gets retried on failures. That said, it would be nice to have a helper for that process.
On YouTube, Brands Might Want to Focus on Fandoms
But it isn't in Comcast's best interests. They would rather limit their competition, so for them, they don't want this guy to win.
It's a monopoly where everyone is a shareholder.

Competition doesn't work so well for infrastructure because it's both essential and it has a high physical barrier to entry. Private corporations exist to increase profit, and that means paying employees less and lowering consumer value. Municipal broadband is making citizens happier than Comcast, Time Warner, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband
senior VP of Android Sundar Pichai told us that "the Nexus 5 will not be on Verizon."

My bad. I should have included a source first.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/31/5051304/google-nexus-5-wo...
No one likes spammers.
Heavy regulations & requirements on the insurers.
You set the price based on what is reasonable and customary.

Like Medicare.
I don't know how accurate this is but I've read that the TI OMAP processor division no longer exists so the Galaxy Nexus can't receive updates that it may need to support 4.4.
There are no free nights and weekends with this plan.
Founder Q&A: Popular iOS app developer wants to sell, acquihire not an option
However, this big PR outrage will probably have them come to their senses and crumble down the NSA workforce. Checks and balances.

This seems extremely optimistic to me. If you're assuming these people joined up because of good marketing by the government, how can you possibly argue that a "big PR outrage" will be an easy and immediate knock on the head resulting in "oh hey, this is terrible?"

I don't doubt that some of the people in these positions were lured in with the promise of helping America or Americans. But at this point they live in the machine. They are its cogs and wheels. That's a very different situation from those of us on the outside looking in, thinking how black and white it all is.

The government and parts of the media are still managing to convince many people -- people who don't work for the government at all -- that this is actually not a bad thing. The idea that they're not concentrating time and resources to keeping the faithful in the fold is unfathomable to me.

Some might see this and bail. But I think many more are somewhere along the spectrum from convinced to brainwashed.
I'm not trying to be overly harsh, but have I completely lost touch? Somewhere between the strange page layout and the poor copy, I lost track of what Mr. Kim was supposed to be doing. It went from popsicle redesign (cool, my kids will love this!), to "let's rebrand a software company's message" (awww.). Huh? How is this thinking outside the box? Why not design a new feminine hygiene product while you're at it. Will that impress your pain-in-the-ass professor?

If I were the professor and my job was to prepare students for the "real world", you know, that place where you actually have to make money, he would get an "F-". Even Rodney Dangerfield would have passed with an F+.

I'm sure Mr. Kim is super smart (smarter than me for sure), but what on earth made this MS marketing material HN-worthy? A book-smart 20-ish-year-old has somehow stumbled onto a saving marketing angle for Microsoft?! Kudos for him, that's superior self-marketing. But what a load of complete bullshit.
Don't get be wrong, I don't think for a second that it wouldn't be a ridiculously exciting job -- I mean even the thought about having a government security clearance is a thrilling thought (even though I'm sure it's less cinematic than I might hope) --

I also completely buy the competition angle -- especially considering I'm not going to pretend that Google is the "good guy" here, fighting perilously for our freedom against the evil government.

And third, I also see the point that, ya know, at the end of the day, these guys are probably building some useful systems.

I suppose my curiosity is mostly granular; I'd love to read some interviews with people who are directly working on this stuff to get their side. It seems like they have some REALLY good engineers working there, and I'm curious how.
I understand how you feel about this. I feel the same way. I wish the Software Engineering Code of Ethics[1] is taught in engineering schools and instilled into the minds of youth so that they can exercise their judgement in the future. Of course, I understand teaching something in school doesn't instill anything, but at least it will expose a few students to the points it makes. Take these points from it for instance --

1.03. Approve software only if they have a well-founded belief that it is safe, meets specifications, passes appropriate tests, and does not diminish quality of life, diminish privacy or harm the environment. The ultimate effect of the work should be to the public good.

2.09. Promote no interest adverse to their employer or client, unless a higher ethical concern is being compromised; in that case, inform the employer or another appropriate authority of the ethical concern.

5.12. Not punish anyone for expressing ethical concerns about a project.

If you've not read the SE Code of Ethics, I urge you to take a few minutes to glance over a few of the points.

[1] http://www.acm.org/about/se-code
Why is a countdown desirable?
"It's only 140 DPI".

Do you know how long it took to get there?

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/where-are-the-high-...
Four words: "Need to know basis".

It's entirely possible many of the component parts needed for this were developed as "black box" (i.e., they were told not to ask questions as to why this was being developed, and the developers just assumed it would be used on a foreign network.) This is done commonly for graduate students working on weapons research in government labs who do not have the appropriate clearance, for instance. They need to know an explosive force is acting a certain way to model their calculations, but never is the student told exactly who or why that explosive force might ever occur. In fact, they may be told it's a completely theoretical exercise.

A surprisingly small number of people are actually needed to "deploy" something like this in the wild, if you're willing to pay for enough testing to ensure your black boxes work exactly as promised...
I think it's just simple economics- they would have weighed up the Google Play income they get from various markets and the benefits they get from subsidising the device in relation to that. I live in New Zealand which is just too small a market for them to worry about, even though it would be simple to ship here from Australia. We'll still get the device, like any other, but through LG's distributor's rather than from Google.
The problem is even chip makers don't support their own devices that long. For example Qualcomm only supported their own chip the Snapdragon S3 only for 18 months, which is why when HTC used it in the HTC One S in 2012, it was already on its last legs for support, and then HTC couldn't update it anymore in 2013 because they said Qualcomm wouldn't update the drivers for it anymore.

So it seems it may not be just OEM's fault, if their component suppliers won't support their components for longer either, although I guess you could make an argument for OEM's making their own drivers for everything, or Google trying to introduce another layer of abstraction for hardware, and upgrade everything themselves.
Surely this is something trivial to identify internally for you guys?
Trying to identify the motivations of an action from the perspective of the perpetrator doesn't mean that one agrees with their actions. Rather, it's a way of getting a better understanding of the problem

For example, it's useful to look at the causes of various evil historical deeds because they shed light on how to prevent them from occuring. To say that exploring the causes of these deeds is tantamount to supporting them is to throw away any sense of rational discovery.
A Primer on Startup Growth
Python puzzle solutions
In a way, we (or at least, the decision-makers in the valley at least) do approve of the snooping.

Google did something very drastic when it was found out that the Chinese were looking into people's e-mails: they pulled out from China. They were lauded for this move: we all said it was courageous for a company to do this, it was morally correct, and so on we went with praise. But what are they going to do now with the knowledge from recent revelations? Pulling out would mean an end to the money coming in. Are they going to do that? Are they truly going to do something drastic, something substantial?

I'm of the opinion that nothing will basically change. Having talked with many tech CEOs I've learned that the people making the decisions just don't care about this (and those that do, care about it less than they care about making money). What's more -- a lot openly declare this is needed for a functioning society -- John Doerr was on the verge of saying this in the Arrington interview. I might sound jaded and defeated when I say this, but I think this is really it. I don't think our future will have considerably less snooping going on, this will go on, little will change.
4.3 is okay, but 4.1 was pretty damn quick. Oh well...
> Why use JSON, at all, when we can just print the resulting JSON text!

Indeed. But if you want to actually force the server to encode some JSON, then make the reply include portions of the request. Then you don't have to have artificial rules about how it is implemented to get interesting/meaningful results: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6650499
Most are members of the overwhelming majority of software developers who do not participate in online forums like HN, which is a reason they may seem alien to you.
What if your task was to find weaknesses in operating systems?

You join the organisation, and are told that "the enemy" is using a particular OS, and it is your job to get as many exploits for that OS as possible. Those exploits are passed along to someone else to actually deploy.

So far, you have no idea that your organisation is spying on citizens of its own country.
I feel like what you did might be considered spam - posting on FB groups, and reposting on HN. It's not adding any value to the community. But hey, what works, works.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6650499
I know one large company where contract operators managed to destroy every copy of a very large companys payroll by loading tape after tape onto a malfunctioning tape deck.
No condescension intended, I am honestly just more curious -- I'd love to read some honest, uncensored interviews from people working on these things, mostly to just get their side of things.

I totally agree that people have varying beliefs on this stuff and for some this might be just as noble as any other way of serving their country.
I'm sort of confused by how authorship works in the US News & World Report generally, and clicking around a bit on the site doesn't clarify it. Do they have professional staff reporters? Is it just reblogging stuff from elsewhere? Are they buying freelance pieces? Is it like Forbes where there's a "Forbes proper" and an "anybody can blog on Forbes.com here" section (and if so, how do I tell which is which)? I can't really sort out what the intended semantics are for an article published on usnews.com but with a byline of another website.

Seems confusing, but in any case, letting outside lobbying groups run news articles in their pages, not marked as either contributed op-eds or paid messages, is a bit weird.
I have easily 10gb of pictures that I can show anyone as long as I have my phone. Also, at least 15gb of music and I'm about to install Debian just because I can.
HNify: A RESTful API for HN - One that works
The tuition is higher if you are not already a California resident.
Maybe the security community could have a discussion about whether it's time to start shaming people like TheGrugq.

The people who are working for the NSA are people in the security community. You can see it in the phrasing on some of the material that's been release (WIN! stood out to me w/r/t one of the previously released docs regarding some MITM scenario).

Obviously there are some very smart people in the community who are working as contractors for the government. Ostensibly this community has had a rich tradition of civil liberties, and the current generation is now selling them out for as much money as they can at the fastest rate possible.

Two years ago, we had people like Charlie Miller saying "No more free bugs."

Look where we are today and ask yourself if Charlie has ever had any ideals outside of looking out for number one.

I am turning sour on the security community.
there are ways of posting tactfully. i believe in the app thus i think it's useful for those students. i dont continuously post over and over, so far, only once per page. i have students liking and commenting, even friending me telling me they like the app.
Johns Hopkins is a "chain" hospital?
It seems much more ancient than 2005 (I would have guessed 1990's).