skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Figures. Obama bows before Raul Castro at Mandela’s funeral
People don't code because A) They are not interested in coding. B) They do not have the ressources to learn coding C) Coding has nothing to do with their job D) They are too lazy / no will to learn to code.

Hell, I know to code. I code daily, it's my job. And I pretty much NEVER coded as a hobby. I don't see why non-programmers would take up coding...
That's exactly the point about exploitation.

Many sex workers are not in a position to leave "job paying below the market rate", for a combination of reasons like illegal immigration, underage, drug addictions, and psychological and corporal torture and abuse.

In most definitions of human rights there is a provision that these rights are "unalienable", making it at least highly questionable to "buy" the right to violate someones sexual self-determination, or inflict the long term damage that has been shown to occur even in "voluntary" prostitutes.
Zapier launches redesign with over 250 integrations
The fact that this is being instigated by the federal government makes me suspect that this is deliberate planning for the long-term consequences of american societal breakdown, for when the war on drugs isn't enough to control the ever-growing underclass anymore.

Does this kind of thinking still place me firmly with the tinfoil contingent?
>Socially, it's also highly irritating to be around. Since most Vegans are converts to the life-style, it's like any other recent convert to a chosen life-style (religion, fitness, chosen computer platform, etc.), endlessly inserting it into every conversation and constant moral chastisement to self-justify the difficulties of their chosen life-style to those that honestly don't care in the least and have better things to do with their time.

It's more complex than that.

Every time I sit down to eat in a social situation, everyone around me is fishing for small talk to make. So, they comment what I order, and want to hear all about it. Since I've had this conversation a thousand times before (at least), I'm sick of it, but also well versed in any responding to anything they say.

It's also stressful, because many times I've had to play this game, people will say patently offensive things - sometimes obliviously so, and sometimes because they genuine assholes. Either way, it slowly sticks to your psyche

So, I'm making small talk, on a topic, which makes me feel bad, that bored me to tears long, long ago, and has marked me as a permanent outsider in more than one situation. And this is while my erstwhile friends sit around chewing on a steaming piece of something that I could have easily made friends with too.

So, I'm not at my best.
We had to say the lords prayer at school in the morning and regularly take part in christian services that you couldn't opt out of unless your parents insisted and that was in a UK state high school about 15 years ago.
But it's not, meat is so essential to human diets that unlike all other non-meat eating animals, we evolved away the mechanisms for surviving on plant only diets (or at least the kinds of plants a human would be expected to find in their local environment - shipping scientifically engineered and manufactured yeast paste halfway around the planet is kind of cheating).

Reducing the arguments to "because we don't strictly need to, modern civilization can construct a balanced diet without meat" requires that we follow this argument and consider all elements of chosen behavior that go beyond what modern society has made possible that will strictly allow for life-sustainment and reduce life to an ascetic, needs only, life-style where every person is "morally" wrong for occupying more than a 6'x8' housing unit that are stacked into constructs as tall as modern engineering will allow and for using more than x number of joules for life-sustainment etc. etc. ad nauseam. Arguing that doing anything other than strictly necessary life-sustaining activities is morally questionable becomes absurd.
The Infinite Monkey Theorem Comes To Life
I think math can be taught much more effectively to young children through programming. It gives them a direct and useful application of what they learn in math which could motivate them a lot more.
Apple is Wise About the Pace of Technology
I can turn it off. And I have.

If the positives of JS use outweigh the negatives, congrats, you get on the whitelist. If you annoy the living shit out of me with ten jazillion share buttons, I'll exercise my right to not let you run arbitrary code written in a Turing complete language on my computer.

The world seems to have joined in with Adblock. Keep up the parade of annoying bloat and people will start doing the same with JS.
For about a year I had a kayak on top of my car every day. I'd start my day by going to the lake, kayaking to the middle and then floating freely while doing my work and having breakfast. I don't think I have ever been as productive per unit time as when I did that. Coffee shops can't even begin to compare.
There's plenty of Western countries that are less screwed up than the US.
The author implies that everyone is smart. This is false. On average, everyone is of average intelligence. The entire population lies either below or above average. Not everyone is capable of being a software engineer, and people like Barack Obama need to focus on helping people do well at whatever it is they can do well at (rather than trying to churn out a bunch of burdensome code monkeys).
Nonsense.

Well, it depends. Writing a Minecraft clone? Yeah, you can probably just give up. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be checking for failure. Check, if failed, pop up a message, log something, and die.

However, not all applications are created equal. If I'm writing a (for example) safety critical piece of code then I may not have the luxury of just exiting (I may not be using dynamic memory allocation at all either, but that's neither here nor there.) It may be more beneficial to my users (or absolutely required) to attempt to recover.

Not all software can just exit on a whim, but obviously this is a small portion of the software that exists.
I use Win7 and Win8 at work doing development/programming. Win8 isn't as bad as I initially thought, though for development it is annoying because fully disabling UAC for some dev stuff killed all metro apps. This past weekend I used linux as my main OS and honestly kept forgetting I was on linux compared to windows. Personally I think my next desktop will be pure Linux (Mint) and maybe a Windows VirtualBox as everything I need Maya, Steam, Dev Tools except Adobe CS is available on Linux.

Will this be the year of the Linux desktop? No probably not but if Microsoft doesn't have another Win7 success it could be the opening Linux needs to get more than your typical tech savvy person to give linux a try. SteamOS on Steam Machines shows some promise as well to introduce people to linux.
Founders are killing their startups more often than you think
AWS Management Console - New Auto Scaling Support
One word, for those in the know ;-)

-Aptosid
Ignorance is usually not a very good moral defense. In the context of prostitution, real or faked ignorance proves highly effective, though...
NASA JSC Unveils 'Valkyrie' Humanoid Robot for Darpa Robotics Challenge
>“in an era of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and mass killings in schools, police agencies need to be ready for whatever comes their way..."

There has always been terrorism in the United States.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States

As well as mass shootings.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-m...

This current "era" isn't defined by the number or scale of these tragedies but by institutions' and the public's reaction to them. If we want to protect the lives and welfare of the average U.S. citizen our money and efforts would be better spent tackling some of the less newsworthy health issues.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_preventable_causes_of_d...

Also the time frame of the Sandy Hook Shooting was extremely brief. The shooter was believed to enter the school around 9:30 the first 911 call was made at 9:35 and the last shot heard was at 9:40 and the police enter at 9:44. The MRAP and other military artillery obviously wouldn't have made a difference due to time frame of the tragedy.
"I would see some tinfoil-hat type ranting on Usenet 20 years ago"

Ok then so how many "tinfoil-hat type rantings" have not come true?

It's easy to say "I had a feeling I should have bought that stock" without acknowledging all the stocks that you didn't buy that didn't go up in price. Or the ones you did that didn't go up in price.
Well, read the article. There's a whole bit in there about just doing the basic bit of security you need to do in the early days.

I mean, enforcing HTTPS is easy and elementary, but maybe they didn't have time? Or something.
Merchants don't have to hold Bitcoins to accept them as payment. Several services exist that convert Bitcoin payments directly into local currency, allowing merchants to accept Bitcoin without exposing themselves to its volatility.

See: https://bitpay.com/
> Sometimes, gender has nothing to do with genitalia, and sometimes it do.

No, that's not how it works. Again: Read up before commenting on a topic you're not familiar with. Having a penis does not guarantee a person is a man, and having a vagina does not guarantee a person is a woman. This is pretty basic stuff to understand. I'm not sure why you're having trouble.

> Do you have a problem that grants to students are given on the specifics of someone being of the racial and ethnic minority called African American, and is male?

No. Your comment implied you had the problem, as though because they give it to black men, it somehow detracts from the fact they're giving it to men — like it doesn't count.
No. Basically if you fought and lost a patent dispute your dispute was still held. If you licensed a patent you licensed it, and it was believed to be valid.

If you dispute the patent, fight, escrow the license fees, or filed with the court, and the court ordered you to continue paying during the dispute, then you could get your money back.
Yeah, next 6 months we'll gonna see how the whole privacy angle plays out. Interesting times.
Academia.edu bothers me on a somewhat different level: It becomes yet another of the levels were academia pretends to be more and more like the business world (with LinkedIn). The whole idea is to further display and reinforce your own splendour, adding subtle peer-pressure to everybody else.

One of the things we get told frequently is that we need to "expand our social media presence", i.e. to get LinkedIn and academia.edu. This is essentially highly functioning hypocrasy in my opinion, because the same people who advocate it or "follow" your profile, if met directly, do not give a shit about what you are working on.

I have enough of the "so...what are you working on?" question that immediately follows the exchange of names. It is almost always followed by the shortest possible description, because, really, nobody gives a shit. Often enough, even the general topic area is enough to make other people glaze over and switch off. Academia.edu etc. pretend that there is great interest where there is none, and at the same time further the already backstabby and highly disingenious environment within academia.

At least, that's my take on it.

[edit]: It also furthers the already widespread plague of inflating your CV with absolutely bloody everything you've ever done. Given a 15-minute talk as an introduction to a class or seminar? That's a "talk" now, apparently. Organised a club that met (perhaps once) to discuss the importance of petting animals during the exam period, and that asks for access to petting animals for everybody[1]. Onto your profile it goes. Wrote an "article" for the "journal" you and those other people you know "published", made up of your and your friends' articles? Publications! etc.

[1]: I wish I were kidding. I am not. However, since posting a citation for this would reveal a bit more about me than I care to share here, I won't. Take it or leave it!
I agree with your premise that those powers have very little power beyond what is surrendered to them. For example, creativity has almost solved the problem of dragnet surveillance, through inventions such as public key cryptography, anonymous remailers, onion routing, and so on. (Although one must opt in to those solutions at the moment.)

However, the asymmetrical advantage of creativity vanishes in the case of targeted power. A creative individual doesn't stand a chance against the smallest application of power -- brute force wins over intellect. This is an open problem, that perhaps doesn't have any solutions.

My understanding is that most "threats" you mentioned are using the tactic of isolating individuals from the aggregate, because it is then that power is an advantage. Hence, endpoint hacking has taken the place of cracking ciphers, with metadata/social network analysis being a means to this end.

Just as important as creativity is a positive outlook. There are still discoveries and inventions to be made. Hackers should not get discouraged, stay optimistic, and get to work.
Getting prepared for the next Cryptolocker Domain Generation Algorithm
The "New" labels on http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromecast/apps... only have "-webkit-transform: rotate(45deg);" set, breaking the design on non-webkit browsers. :(
I preferred Marathon a lot over Doom. Some reviewers have called it "the thinking man's" shoot-em-up and I think this holds some truth. Of couse Marathon was released almost a year after Doom's release, so Bungie had plenty of time to improve the genre in many areas. Not just in looking up and down, the game also featured:

- weapons with multiple modes and reload mechanics

- advanced lightning effects

- "5D" space (one of the multiplayer levels used this)

- physics (e.g. grenade hopping and missile ballistics)

- neutral and allied npc's

- more varied elevator / switches system (e.g. in the "Colony Ship For Sale Cheap" level)

- motion tracker in UI

- nifty level mechanics, like the levels without air (e.g. "G4 Sunbathing")

I still wonder if Jason Jones could have become an equal to Carmack if he kept his focus on coding games ...
The processor could recognize that it is in common key generation code, and generate 'entropy' that precisely reverses most of the existing entropy. The existing 'good' entropy could be known by the hardware PRNG.
French gov used fake Google certificate to read its workers' traffic
"from the downvotes, I can only assume"

Separately, as a karma strategy, it makes sense to upvote something that you reply to (regardless of whether you agree or disagree) as it tends to make your reply higher up (because the parent comment is higher up) and get more visibility which in theory should result in more karma.
This generalization gets bandied about too much. Crime trends and patterns are highly local. I'm sure violent crime is dropping in many places, but in other places it's spiraling out of control, for example, South Chicago, East Oakland, Detroit. I think it's a mistake to throw those places in the same basket as a small city in Ohio (unless it really has similar crime stats).
Why not just use BTSync for syncing? I use it for this purpose and it's fantastic.

For backup you can use one of many solutions to archive to S3. I wouldn't recommend Time Machine.
Confirming that the UK does not do either, although there are some schools that are co-funded with the Church of England.

NB: I went to CoE schools for 7 years of my K12 education, and came out an atheist. I think part of it is to do with the teaching - even at a church school, we were encouraged to question everything, and had at least an hour a week where we learned about other religions in a very objective light.

I believe that on many levels, education comes down to that learning to question - and when you're told to believe things unquestioningly, you're intentionally breeding ignorance. My take is that it's not so much about schools having prayer etc, but the way they encourage thought. Kids are smart; if they're allowed to think for themselves, they will.
Nor are you better off with Bittorrent Sync. It's closed-source as well. That could change of course.
Never judge a book by it's bootstrapped cover, I guess. Hah. That's cool, thanks for the info!

For the record, I thought MVP because I somehow didn't notice all the other projects and thought this was the only one.
>Socially, it's also highly irritating to be around. Since most Vegans are converts to the life-style,

Even as a veggie (and vegan dabbler) I 100% agree that these types of people are annoying and I avoid them. Generally I avoid talking about it the same way I avoid what colour underwear I'm wearing. :)
Radley Balko’s book, which is cited in the article, "Rise of the Warrior Cop"[0] actually makes a very good argument that the 3rd Amendment which prohibits the quartering of soldiers during peacetime was referencing this exact situation, wherein a group of government controlled "peace officers", which are essentially military personnel, are in constant deployment inside the United States of America keeping tabs on it's citizens. He argues that it has nothing to do with literally being forced to give up your bed to a soldier, but entirely with the state housing soldiers within it's walls. With the gifting of Tanks, M16s and other paramilitary gear to ordinary police officers, we're essentially creating another branch of the armed forces.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1610392116/
Uruguay set to legalise marijuana today
Things like... I think gays shouldn't be beaten up and jailed in Russia for engaging in gay "propaganda?" Things that people who are under the threat of being beaten up and jailed for saying fear?
Introduction to the New York City Tech Community
It depends on your definition of "helped". YC helped us in a lot of non tangible ways (the company probably wouldn't exist without their help, for example :).

But YC did not directly help us land these customers in the forms of introductions. For the most part, they've come to us through word of mouth and internal employee references.
I do like BTSync and considered it, but I'm not the biggest fan of the idea that my data is stored on everyone's computer. AeroFS allows me some semblance of control, and as I grow, it will allow me to add users easily.

I won't know until I try it though, I could just as easily change my mind and use BTSync.
Agree. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't evaluate officials - especially elected ones - on their views.

Now, what could be a workable approach...
I said it was ridiculous from a practical standpoint. My hyperbolic language probably muddied my point. I'm only saying I see much more value-leverage in putting energy into reducing meat consumption than eliminating it. If nothing else, it's an obvious first step.

There are a lot of problems with pushing an agenda as extreme as veganism. It defines itself prohibitively, instead of positively. It says "I don't eat meat" instead of "I eat vegetables". That's off-putting and turns the conversation quickly into one about absolutes and morality. I think that's a super high-cost, high-friction path to changing behavior from a practical standpoint.

Further, I worry about the constant association with veganism and health. It's far from my field of expertise but it seems to quickly lead to pretty boolean discussions about whether meat is good or bad for you, and those discussions don't resolve very clearly. I'd rather we talk more often about the fact that the modern meat and dairy industries are completely and irrefutably destructive to the planet.

[Edit: See Zike's excellent response to your comment for a perfect example of what I'm talking about above.]
Just because it has blocks and you can break them, does not make it a 'minecraft clone'. Like we do not think a rich text editor to be a replacement for Microsoft Word.

Let's see a redstone implementation in survival mode :)
Yes. It's comforting to think that it's all orchestrated from the top; that means that, even if it's not you, someone is in control of this chaotic world. The truth is much more frightening. No one quite knows what will happen or how to prepare for it, and we'll all likely get screwed when the unexpected happens.
It depends on what kind of user you are. If you are comfortable with the risks and rewards of being an early adopter using bleeding-edge tools, then by all means try Julia. If you need the stability and functionality of a mature platform, then you may not want to learn Julia as your first tool.
> Tip to non-vegans: you too, are likely to be running a vitamin B12 deficiency,

Thanks for pointing that out and it's really what I meant. My Mrs loves her popcorn this way (although she eats meat).
Shame on you for trying to distort the precepts of Buddha. Stop embarrassing yourself!
E) They don't have time to code off-hours

I have a list of things-to-code as long as my arm, lots of little utilities and websites I want to create. But once I knock-off work at the end of the day, have dinner and perform the daily ablutions I simply don't have time.

It is frustrating.
> It also helps that it has been proven to work in eliminating gender bias.

Another unsubstantiated claim. It's like you don't understand how claims work. Saying whatever you believe as though it's fact doesn't make it so.

> like I said, Sweden education system tried and failed and that fact is not hard to find for yourself.

First: It's not my job to prove your argument for you. Second: According to you, Sweden apparently tried gender-exclusive classes. Hacker School isn't excluding men from its program. It's just providing a way for women to pay for expenses. Those are two very different things.

> Others has published articles such as

That article actually proves you wrong...

>> These programs have brought or accompanied significant gains for women and minorities. In the past 25 years, black participation in the work force has increased 50 percent and the percentage of blacks holding managerial positions has jumped fivefold. In 1970, women comprised only 5 percent of lawyers compared to 20 percent today. Twenty-five years ago, the student population at University of California, Berkeley, was 80 percent white compared to 45 percent today.

So, they are beneficial, and they do work.
I think the point isn't that the emails were exposed so much as the exposure of the emails allowed the identity of commentors to be revealed.
Thanks, the article was indeed interesting, even though reliability is what interests me the most. The "99.99% uptime SLA" mentioned on digitalocean's website means up to 3.5 days of downtime per year unless I'm mistaken.
https://www.bitmit.net/ was the eBay for bitcoins. They're shutting down, no official reason why, though it's suspected they got hacked.
Can Bitcoin Replace PayPal?
Disable javascript for the page and get no text. What happend to graceful degredation?
> Question is: why is the government so afraid of its own citizens possessing such gear?

Is that the right question, considering that the tactical gear market is allowed to exist? I'm apparently too lazy to do it, but it would probably be instructive to look at the history of that ban on military-to-citizen sales.
The Silicon Valley letter
This is a rambling stream of non-sequiturs and misleading statements. A key pull quote is "The NSA is not a law enforcement agency."

So? From the motto "We track 'em, you whack 'em" to parallel construction, we already know that's not a meaningful distinction. Then, ramble ramble ramble... we come to how North Korea is sufficient justification for a Cold War era budget for snooping. What?

Is this the best an NSA analyst can come up with? TL;DR: Claims of good intentions, feigned boredom about your emails (unless some software flags them), North Korea, and "we're not the cops?" This is very very weak.
I love how whitespace has turned into an "issue" and how a problem has also turned into an "issue"