skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Starring Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, Chris Bosh, Jack Dorsey, Tony Hsieh, Drew Houston, Gabe Newell, Ruchi Sanghvi, Elena Silenok, Vanessa Hurst, and Hadi Partovi. Directed by Lesley Chilcott, executive producers Hadi and Ali Partovi.

>Code.org owes special thanks to all the cast and the film crew, and also Microsoft, Google/YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter for helping us spread the word

What the fuck is this shit? They really pumped billions in marketing!? Is America really that desperate to destroy the only real market it has left? You guys might applaud this but the only thing which this will lead to is unqualified people thinking they know how to program.

The job market will get saturated with mediocre programmers and those who really know their stuff will be too expensive to hire or get lost in the noise. We will see an increase of shit code in production. People think they can have a shot at the field which was dominated by us, the outcasts, for years.

This worries me, brothers, this worries me. If you think this is anything good, look at what happened with finances. It completely fell under the massive appeal of the mainstream crowd who thought they could become a manger and earn a quick buck. Programming is a serious art, skill and dedication you have to live up to.

It shouldn't be - and isn't - for everyone.
Yeah, I wish the search supported wild card search though, that would make repo discovery even easier.
No. And let's stop with this moral equivalence bullshit.

Let's draw some stark fucking lines here.

Assassinating your avowed enemies in a time of war, that's one thing. Assassinating your home grown political opponents, that's another thing entirely.

Using the legal system to pursue whistleblowers who probably should be protected, again, that's one thing. Killing whistleblowers, that's another thing entirely.

If you can't recognize the difference then you are actively providing support for some of the most evil and repressive regimes in the world by making fuzzy what should be clear-cut moral boundaries.
"Let me-ah be perfectly clear. Yes, We Can Code."
>> I have had poor results with both methods, though I have gained the all-important sensation of "doing something" while truly accomplishing precisely nothing tangible.

At least now you know it's a waste of time and effort.

>> In my view, the sublime difficulty is that voting, forming PACs to finance/bribe campaigns, and writing representatives are the only fully-recognized "legitimate" outlets for political discontent.

Yep, that's the way the system is designed.

>> These methods are absolutely ineffective in the face of money and power structures.

Indeed they are. By design.

>> Even the mildest in desire and most orderly in execution of protests aren't viewed as reputable by bystanders, typically aren't covered positively by media if at all, and thus aren't effective in creating change.

Well, who do you think the media serves? What group of people is it that decides whether some specific TV/radio-channel is allowed to operate, and for how long? What group of people would stand to gain the most from controlling the whole mainstream media?
Why does he sound like a shill? Do you know what a shill is?

Could it be that he just supports or believes an opinion you don't?
Which part is not correct? They go into great detail about their design for throughput. Re: reliability, "Not all use cases require such strong guarantees. For uses which are latency sensitive we allow the producer to specify the durability level it desires."

Pre-0.8, if a machine fails you lose all the data on that machine, only the lower durability levels were available. It guarantees at least once processing, while other queues generally make stronger claims. etc.

It's still very good at what it does.
What matters to me in Dasani's story, and what should matter to many of us, is how difficult it is for children with real talent and ambition to escape their circumstances. Think about the temptations that must be in front of her - sure, her mind and her strength and her beauty could eventually lift her out of poverty, but they could also make her a phenomenally successful drug dealer or thief. Or frustration could drive her to wasting her mind with drugs, or committing small stupid crimes that put her in the revolving door of prisons.

I grew up poor, although not as poor as her. I know how frustrating and difficult it is for talented, ambitious children. I got lucky, but there were so many ways it could have gone wrong, and nearly did.

But here's what worries me, and should worry lots of people. Call it arrogance, but I firmly believe real progress in our society is made by those top few percent with both the talent and ambition to do something new, something dangerous and important. Most people either can't or won't. So when society wastes one of them in the ghetto, it hurts all of us.
When I was growing up in Silicon Valley, everyone learned to code using Logo in (iirc) third grade. Everyone also learned to type. It was a required part of the curriculum.

Teaching us to code didn't mean we didn't learn to communicate. We still were taught math. At no point did the small period in programming and typing done once a week somehow deprive us of critical life skills.

It did however have a dramatic effect on myself and a good amount of my class. By the time I was in 6th grade, I knew three people running their own BBSes out of their houses (this was about 1989).

Not everyone who went through Bullis Elementary went into programming, but thinking procedurally (though technically Logo is a functional language), is a valuable skill to be learned regardless. In my opinion, being able to break a large task down into simple steps is a critical life skill.
True, but intuition and general analytical ability is often overlooked when hiring data scientists -- because the term is so broad, what people are often looking for is a mixture of statistical know-how and programming ability, but often forget to ask for a good understanding of econometric principles.

For instance, there is a difference between understanding generalization error in the statistical/machine learning sense, and generalization error in the sense of external validity. You'd be surprised at how many models, even at reputed companies, use features that do not make sense or are based on implicit assumptions about the studied population.
Obviously insight is always a good quality to have, but it is particularly critical for data scientists as the right or the wrong insight in the context of machine learning algorithms can have huge consequences on your company.
> but how do we stop it? Can it be stopped, or is corruption in government, just something we're forced to live with forever?

Excellent question - the question of our time.

I think you'd have to learn what lessons you can from the peace movements of South Africa, East Germany, the color revolutions and so on.

However, this raises the question: if the government has unofficially declared war on the civilian public - should the public declare war on the government?

These books by Gene Sharpe are worthy of further study (especially "From Dictatorship to Democracy"):

http://www.aeinstein.org/english

Perhaps a new form of government entirely? e.g. decision making using the jury system:

http://equalitybylot.wordpress.com

Very encouraging that more people are becoming aware of the machinations of power. The real terrorists are much closer to home unfortunately ...
Pgvm (PostgreSQL version manager) 0.2.1 was released
Technically the 'audio out' signal isn't power. However as folks have discovered you can send an audio signal, rectify it, and lightly load the audio amplifier (which will think it is driving some really crappy headphones :-)

This is like using a side effect in software to initialize a variable. Clever but not durably so.
That is a great article. It's important to look at the language used by media in these cases, for example look at this local news article about the ex-Napster person's accident, the headline is: "Bicyclist dies after hitting patrol vehicle in Calabasas" which implies that the cyclist was the one who hit the police car, even though he was rear ended. "The man was riding east on the road when he crashed into a patrol car traveling in the same direction, officials said."

http://www.vcstar.com/news/2013/dec/08/bicyclist-dies-after-...
Bike lanes by Casey Neistat : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzE-IMaegzQ
I'm curious: if you found another engineer who was in a messy codebase doing something something seemingly crazy, would you 1) assume they're an idiot or 2) reserve judgment until you know more?

I would hope 2). Because here's the thing: we can't extricate ourselves from our history, and the people closest to the problem have a lot more information about it than those moralizing from afar. There's a bunch of questions you don't bother to ask yourself:

Was the container of Chinese food actually purchased or found? Who knows. Probably, but the parents don't seem to make a habit of it: the daughter makes her siblings PB&Js. And is it a crazy expense? Also who knows, but buying a couple containers of cooked white rice in NYC isn't going to be crazy expensive.

Are there nearby grocery stores to buy actual food? Maybe, but more likely the nearest places will be liquor stores selling shitty food for outrageous prices.

Does the facility they're in provide the means to cook raw ingredients? Probably not.

Is the electricity supplied consistent enough to trust having more than a single meal in the fridge? Who knows.

And perhaps the biggest thing: do the parents have the capability to plan to cook and to succeed in that endeavor? You might say that "these people deserve to suffer if they can't manage to cook rice and beans," but here's the thing: maybe they can't. Maybe they never picked up that skill, maybe drugs have destroyed their capabilities for planning more than a minute ahead. But regardless, they can't.

In tech, we recognize that we have to build systems out of potentially faulty components. But when we're building a society, there's a strain of thought saying that you shouldn't design for fault, because if a component is faulty, it deserves to be dumped into a garbage bin.

That's perverse.
>Assassinating your avowed enemies in a time of war, that's one thing. Assassinating your home grown political opponents, that's another thing entirely.

And both have happened. Check out a 20th century history of the Western Europe and/or the US.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Check out the colonial and post-colonial histories of Latin American, the Middle East, Africa and Asia for reference.

Hitler was a small time crook (and Putin an insignificant insect) compared to what the other western powers did (and still do) in such places, from the Congo to Chile.
French agency caught minting SSL certificates impersonating Google
Is the future of programming mobile?
In the long run the ability to understand and manipulate information via automated instructions (ie, coding) will almost surely end up being as important being able to capture down and consume ideas (reading and writing) or manipulate abstract quantities through symbology (mathematics.) It's a fundamental skill that is plain to see unless you are so entrenched in the contemporary details of things like programming languages and platforms that you've lost touch with the underlying power, leverage, and joy of it.
First of all, unless you are in SF or another tech city, I wouldn't even try relying on your local city in order to build your company. You have to think about the internet as your startup scene, and focus on having a good presence there (twitter, etc.). I think trying to be too local with an internet product is a mistake for most companies.

To some extent the social space is riddled with a lack of ethics, mainly because it's effective and users are fickle. But there are a lot of other spaces where you don't have to make such tradeoffs and can still build a business. Maybe those would be a better fit for how you want to run your company?

Unfortunately, ethics kind of go out the door when you've got major investors that you want to provide a positive return to. Imagine the pressure for Circle to provide a return, and then imagine whether you'd even want to have that kind of pressure on you every day (and they've been around for a while and aren't huge yet, so I'm guessing it's by no means an easy ride for them either).
if something causes the bay area monopoly on startups to weaken in the near term, I expect it to be around retention challenges or costs.

We have a fundamental problem in Silicon Valley: there are not enough places for people to live in. This manifests itself in many ways (higher rent, higher salaries, higher turnover, etc) and is probably going to be a hard limit on how big the local tech industry can get. It's a certainty that other significant startup hubs will arise unless something changes.
Interesting article for me, being that I have no experience with the ISP industry in America at all.

"The best solution, I think, is to lay fiber in all the municipalities and have consumers choose their ISP, with service delivered on the municipal fiber lines..."

This is exactly what has been happening where I live - Christchurch, New Zealand. A number of years ago, a city-owned LLC called Christchurch City Networks Limited (now known as Enable Networks[1]) began rolling out an extensive fibre network in the downtown/city-centre area. Initially, for about $700 (NZD) per month, you could lease a dark pair between your premises and your ISP of choice (or even directly between two arbitrary premises, plugging directly into your own equipment at each end, with no ISP involved).

You'd then negotiate arbitrary speed/bandwidth/caps with your chosen ISP. We were paying something like $3000 per month for a 1000 mbit/sec internet connection with (IIRC) a 2TB cap. This was probably 8 years ago or something, it doesn't cost anything like this now.

Latterly, they've been rolling out a GPON-based (passive) fibre network. If you are connected to this part of the network, there are highly standardised plans available from multiple ISPs. You can choose one of two speeds: 30 mbit/sec symmetric, or 100 mbit/sec symmetric. Different ISPs have different usage plans available. Any public (government-funded) school can sign up for a 30 mbit/sec plan, with unlimited traffic, for something like $200/month.

Amongst home users, ADSL2+ and VDSL2 are both still popular choices (and our pricing there seems similar enough to the US, with stupidly low caps and high prices), but fibre continues to gain traction.

[1] http://www.enable.net.nz
Actually Square updated their reader to encrypt the swipe data sent from the device a while back. That is the revision that needs a battery inside the the reader (to power the chip that handles the encryption). I believe this was added after several competitors made a big deal about the skimming potential of a Square reader.
I'm going to be really annoyed if Clinkle winds up being a performance art project.
I guess there really is water at the bottom of the ocean.
Interesting language. I wrote some pretty bad programs with it for my comp sci courses. I haven't wrote a single line of COBOL in 8 years.
Perhaps it was dumb. Perhaps not. I made a judgement call that I'd be able to make more of a difference to the company culture by sending a blunt email to the senior management team than I would by joining the company's middle management where I'd have very little influence anyway.

My hope is that they will implement some changes based on a. concern about their public image, and b. evidence that they are losing qualified candidates as a result of their imbalance. It is often the case with companies like this that many people on the inside would like to see a change but lack the evidence and support necessary to gain widespread support for it.

If it doesn't work it doesn't work, and yes I am involved in other activities to promote gender equality (both men and women's equality), both inside and outside work.
"The things I'm gonna do for my country."
So much work could be saved if most people learned a tiny bit of scripting, or really even what code is capable of doing. My girlfriend was telling me how one of the people in her office spent a few days renaming a huge number of files, so they'd be consistently named. I cringed when I heard that - it was repetitive, followed a pattern, and could have been done in minutes with a python or perl or bash script written in an hour or two by someone with a basic knowledge of code. That's the kind of coding everyone should know - the same way everyone should be able to add columns of numbers without using their fingers.
Protesters block Google bus in S.F. Mission
The problem with distinguishing agents provocateur from real terrorists lies in the proof. Enough real terrorists / revolutionaries / gangsters exist that one cannot assume governments acting as the sole generator. And reasonable people do not - or at least should not - act solely on suspicion.

Leakers might provide a solution, but a lot of conspiracies are very small and tightly-bound. And one cannot discount the possibility of the leak - or the leaker, e.g. Snowden - being discredited.

I would also add that the decentralized command-and-control model of terrorist organizations (i.e. cells) allows outside organizations to hijack cells for their own ends, at least temporarily. With no higher-ups actually giving orders, who can really determine the source of a particular objective?
Java is pretty high performance, usually on par with C++, and usually faster than e.g. Go.

Writing Java code so that there are no perceivable GC pauses is an art, but it is not impossible to achieve.

JVM might require more RAM upfront, but a well-written program is usually reasonably memory-efficient, too, so the consumed memory grows reasonably slowly with the problem size.

Writing things in pure C is often just too time-consuming.
Learning to code does not mean programmer, but if you learn a little bit about creating software you will have a peak behind the curtain and will be better able to assess what is practical and what is not as well as have some sympathy for the code monkeys.
Is Asana doing poorly?
This is correct in an M&A scenario, but usually not in an IPO. In an IPO, the most common treatment of preferred is to force-convert everyone who holds it to the equivalent amount of common stock, and such a term typically appears in later-round VC term sheets.

Not only do public investors dislike having a junior series of common stock out of the gate (Google-style two-class shares notwithstanding), but the special rights that come with VC-type preferred stock (series votes, class votes, rights to appoint directors, anti-dilution, blocking M&A, etc.) are eliminated once there are public shareholders.

[Speaking as a former VC now public investor who builds and sells VC cap table modeling software.]
This is a tried and true tactic. It would take extensive use of brainwashing and belief in fairy tales about an enlightened government, a city on hill exceptional-ism or what-have-you to think these don't happen. However, this level of brainwashing is achieved in US quite often. It is a lot worse vis-a-vis the rhetoric of independence, free thinking, individualism. But that in an of itself (this belief that we are no brainwashed) is also a result of brainwashing.

The issue is quite subtle and there are a few factors at play. One is the basic need to believe their "team" is a good team. This works with the brainwashing. "Teams", "us vs them" is ingrained in our tribal brains. We want to think our team is the winning team. We are better, special, not like "those others".

It is really working against the flow when attempting to show our citizens that "yes, our country has done these horrible things to others". They is an irrational immune response against it, they have been believing their family/their team they've rooted for now has a dark secret, its past marred in shameful things. They have been telling others, their kids, and themselves how great our country is, and now look! -- a total reversal, "what, have I been living in a fantasy world all this time?" kind of bewilderment. So instead of exposing and handling the hard truth, it is easy to bury it, stick fingers in the ears and say "la-la-la, I am not hearing you, ..."

This also is interesting because it kind of explains what happens in the brains of many who work for CIA, NSA and other such agencies. They are supposedly hired for their exceptional patriotism. Now sometimes it backfires, because they realize what they have to do in their jobs contradicts the high idealized patriotic beliefs of what this country is about. So there is Snowden, he is one of them. What about others?

There was an article just yesterday about how "Morale at NSA is low after the leaks". Hmm, it is low. Why is it low?. Good to explore. Did many realize they have been playing for the bad guys all this time? Or do they just feel angry about one of their team members "betraying" the team and they don't see anything wrong at all with what they do. To keep their nice govt job are they forced to believe one thing in their heads ("this fucking contradicts what our Constitution is all about!"), and profess another thing at work publicly. Much like North Koreans perhaps. Cry with happiness when "Dear Leader" drives, but curse his guts in their head? Who knows.

Another way to look at it is from a psychopathic, practical aspect. Do people just acknowledge the situation for what it is and say "yes we are bad and we love it". "We conducted these attacks? Great! Let us do more. If it means a blowing up a few civilians so be it." I can image many at the top operate on this principle.
When Apple was in the business of Internet filtering: KidSafe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGMQLfi0kGc&t=39m32s
I call on every American to learn English and possible a second language first. Then maybe we will have more ideas to code.
I'm not sure whether I'd prefer Bitcoin to be considered a currency or a commodity. I'm sure there are strong for/against arguments that I could find on Google, but (in the purest expression of HN-as-crowdsourcing) would really appreciate a curated list of blogs, papers, theory, opinions, etc.
CyanogenMod rolls out encrypted text messaging by default
You can minimize failure if the point of a system is not output but process. If you continually improve each individual process rather than just optimize for output. So for example in this case if we asked her parents not to produce a good child but simply to figure out how she can get to bed on time every night, then we are asking them to do an easily focused on thing. Do not tell them what to do, just say, "how can you do [x]?" maybe providing access to internet research capacities would be helpful for the parent, but in general simply getting them to focus on how to improve their immediate surroundings in that moment itself produces meaningful change.