skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't agree with Kevin. It's true that you can function without programming, but it's also true that being able to program could improve pretty much any job. Even a janitor could develop, say, a logistics application to optimize his path through the building he cleans, or build a roomba to vacuum for him.

And more broadly, I really do think programming improves the quality of my thoughts. I remember when I was 10 or 11 consciously experiencing the sensation of getting smarter as it dawned on me at deeper and deeper levels how to think precisely about problems. And that skill set invades every aspect of my thought process now. I find it to be a remarkable improvement.

On a practical level, programming is probably the best employment fall-back ever. I don't know many fields that you can enter without any credentials and make $100k+ within a couple years. That may change, but I expect it'll stay the same or improve for at least a few decades. So just for that reason, it may be wise for anyone who is capable to learn it.
How We're Destroying Our Kids' Brains
Part of the problem may be real enough, I don't live in that city or work for that company, so I am not going to say one way or the other.

I do have an issue with the "I've lived here longer than you" bullshit. If these protesters have a legitimate point (and if these buses really are the menace that people are saying, then I suspect that they do), they can surely make it without resorting to such elitist self-aggrandizing crap.
I was trying to be fair to the healthcare.gov administrators, but I agree with you.
He loses me a bit when he starts talking about his intent. Englebart indeed demonstrated precursors to all these modern technologies, despite the author claiming otherwise. So he didn't demonstrate a precursor Skype and screen sharing, just because there's only one mouse pointer to control in Skype? Ok, fine. Then he demonstrated the precursor to Screenhero, which has multiple mouse pointers and embodies Englebart's intent exactly.
An Interview With Ben Crawford, CEO of CentralNic
I don't know if you are being sarcastic, but I find your attitude despicable. I hope I never get to work for you.
Google Now leans pretty heavily on location services. I've found that it's useful at home and even moreso when traveling.
Love crack smoking mayors? Check out this Toronto agency's "Christmas Card"
It's harder to read. I want to see how many HN readers think the color scheme and the font makes reader uncomfortable?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=948108
And what makes you think Google can't or won't do the same? Their latest aggressive push of Google+ everywhere including the forced Youtube integration indicates that they have the capability or have been doing exactly what you suggest.

Not to mention the huge amounts of data they collect through searches and Gmail that they already have been using to tailor ads to each visitor.
They don't have to have any impact at all - all they need to do is provide the same number of public buses as private buses. Or not even that many.

Seeing the secret white Google buses will annoy some people. Sometimes for rational reasons, but also because people like being annoyed by stuff.

Pointing to a bunch of Muni transport with "This bus provided by Apple!" or "This carriage provided by Google!" will help raise the good-guy profile of those companies and offset against the drone-bus thing.

tl:dr - it's just an image problem.
We've done a lot of work on our house over the last few years, and I've observed how different contractors deal with scheduling issues:

1. Some won't return a call at all.

2. Some will call you back to say that they're in the middle of a project, and are too busy to take your business.

3. Some will happily schedule you in for a date in the distant future (like, three months from now).

I'm unlikely to bother calling the first two again for work, but the third makes me think, "Man, this guy is so busy that he's booked until March? He must be good."
We Europeans have our own troubles with homelessness and beggars (currently esp. German cities with Romanian and Bulgarian beggars), but well, we at least crack down on insecure housing.

Something like the mentioned shelter in the article would not survive a single day under inspection. If a landlord would rent (or let people live in) such a house, he would immediately 1) have all people taken out by government and 2) find himself in jail or with hefty fines. I wonder why NYC let this shelter open despite dozens upon dozens of complaints!
> I've been saying for a while now, if we were to replace high school and college foreign language requirements with a computer programming language class

Computer programming has absolutely nothing to do with learning a foreign language. Learning a foreign language provides excellent perspective on your own, leading to a much greater understanding of grammar.

I took four years of Spanish and it's the only thing that made the endless, repetitive English lessons finally 'click'. For the record, I also took four years of programming and passed both CS AP exams (not that it mattered, since at the time colleges wouldn't acknowledge it b/c it was taught in Pascal and everyone wanted C -- yes, they were really that dumb).

Learning a foreign language provides critical insight into language. Learning to program provides critical insight into how to break problems down and how to structure a solution. Both are valuable and dissimilar.
Google rolled out integrated SMS in Hangouts (on Android) a month ago. It's not as transparent, but SMS and Hangout chats are in the same app, and you can switch between the two types of communication with the same person easily.
All the devices that connect to my TV are HDMI as well. Put a splitter/converter after your AV receiver and you're good.
Yeah, you should be able to do that as well. There are a lot of different ways you could make a project like this work, I was just wanting to throw out an example to show that we're empowered to do these kinds of things now. We don't have to wait for some company to come out with a portable, bluetooth chording keyboard anymore, we can do these kinds of things ourselves. I think that is really exciting!
Mirage 1.0: not just a hallucination
Maybe you can do something useful with visual cryptography?
If you're like me, you had the wrong google account selected. Once I switched to my phone's, it was terrifyingly accurate.
Why? Your liability is zero, your potential inconvenience is low, and there's no reason people can't skim your card info using other readers too.
In Seattle we have http://www.501commons.org/ which sounds like what you're talking about.
There's no laws preventing kids from pressing every button in an elevator, but that's pretty irritating when it happens. Now imagine the same kid doing it in the elevator that you have to use every day.
You might be interested in this bit from The Wire's David Simon that appeared yesterday:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-cap...
Exactly how is it protecting my eyes?
Make your mission about skepticism. Skepticism is the driving force behind today's data boom.
That sassy phrase (Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.) is irritating to me. Now I'm not casting judgement on anybody who _does_ find it entertaining, or useful, but for what it's worth, the _original_ phrase is:

Those who know, do; those who understand, teach.

-Aristotle.
If you don’t like the menu bar or the tool bar, don’t use them. You can even turn them off if you resent the space they use.

Emacs is much better graphically; it benefits from graphics just like any OS benefits. I could talk about minor improvements while debugging, or I could mention that Emacs can open image and PDF files. This is not the 1970’s when text UI’s were the norm – this is the future, where we do have graphical displays, and all programs should take advantage of them. Living life in an emulated 1970 (which a terminal emulator is) is silly.
>There's no need to put it on a higher pedestal.

Agreed, but when there's an important skill that's being developed overseas and neglected domestically, well, its worth beating that drum. Agriculture doesn't have that problem.

The world is becoming more and more digital. Encouraging domestic success in technology should be a national goal and, no, "I have an MBA and an idea for an iphone app" isn't enough. Software is still eating the world. The Chinese, Russians, and Indians certainly understand that. Do we?
He was stuck in the transit area while waiting for a connecting flight, when the U.S. revoked his passport. Not much else to do but stay there.
I live in NYC and my net income is just under 60% of my gross income
Oh, I totally agree.

I see Google announcing AI research, and I think "self driving car" or "understanding search terms", but I have no doubt that it's also "serve better ads" or "slurp more data".

You're right, I should have put that in.
"It makes me sick that I pay around 40% in state and federal taxes and social security (not that much lower than Western European countries) yet there is still so much poverty and poverty related issues in our country."

Maybe the problem isn't the money involved, but the methods involved. After all, they say that to repeat the same actions and expect different results is a form of pathology.
The extent that programming has been required to make effective use of computers has been in freefall since computers were first constructed. I see no reason to think that this trend will not continue.

Making sure that people can effectively use computers is different from having people learn to code. I really think that anyone who insists that the later is necessary has some serious tunnel-vision.
Well, it's partly because the article is a bit narrow minded. Well, thats what I feel anyways.

As the article rightfully points out, what matters is intent, not the actual technical means of implementation, or even how it appears. We do have modern "screen-sharing" applications with multiple cursors. Just take a look at Google Docs.

The "problem" of today's tools is that computing technology went through this phase called the "PC" in which single-user interaction was all there was, and we went ahead and found efficient methods of single-user interaction, and then taught entire generations to think based on that metaphor.
"I think Marx was a much better diagnostician than he was a clinician."

That is exactly my view as well. Great article.
Failures should be seen as opportunities for improvement, not as opportunities for blame. A good way to start is by having teams accept responsibility for failures, not a single employee.

For example, if someone accidentally deleted a production database and there's no backup, they didn't screw up, the team screwed up for not having backups and for encouraging working in production.
JobsLookout: DevOps/SWE to drive deployment of services? iOS to drive product?
Lookout is hiring for a couple key positions. We're a mobile security company that uses big data to make the interconnected world world more secure.
If you're interested, shoot me an email at jeunee.simon@lookout.com

Positions are below: Head of iPhone Product Development-- https://www.lookout.com/about/careers/detail?gh_jid=4766

Lead Service Deployment Engineer--https://www.lookout.com/about/careers/detail?gh_jid=2226

Senior Software Quality Engineer--Automation---https://www.lookout.com/about/careers/detail?gh_jid=5151

Principal Engineer--Infrastructure---https://www.lookout.com/about/careers/detail?gh_jid=2223
TEPCO Estimates 25 Sieverts/Hour Radiation at the Bottom of Reactors 1 and 2
I'm surprised they missed this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_%28testimony%29
> It actually tends to give me nausea to have the only light coming from the TV. Having some sort of light whether its this, a nightlight, or a soft light from a different room tends to prevent this nausea.

Finally, someone else! People always give me strange looks when I complain about this.
What nonsense. Who pays to stop at the curb? Why would Google pay? They're just grasping at straws, because housing prices are rising, and they want to blame something.

This is such a reach, its laughable.
It is shocking to me that it took so long for this technology to be realized by the public at large. Decades passed before this technology reached people's homes.
That's not a terrible idea at all. Around here, you can also get bean filling in jars, which is another good source of protein (and flatulence, but what isn't these days).
Seriously,

To just take two examples:

-Every bitmessage user can be mitm'd by their ISP. (yes, I know about tor).

-Every bitmessage user could have only bad peers connecting to them when peers aggressively try to connect to their client.

These are two examples of attacks that work on bitmessage, that are addressed in the libertymail proposal, and for which a possible solution is given.
Your link says the opposite of what you posted. From the article: "To our surprise, Scala did quite a bit better than Go, with an average round trip time of ~1.6 microseconds (0.0016 milliseconds) vs. Go’s ~11 microseconds (0.011 milliseconds).", and "Notable in the opposite direction was that the Go server had a memory footprint of only about 10 MB vs. Scala’s nearly 200 MB."

I have no idea where people got the idea that Go was faster than Java, or that Java/JVM is slow in 2013. Not trying to discredit Go (its my language of choice), but to say it surpassed Java while only being around for almost 5 years is disingenuous.
Would I love to see Sheryl Sandberg be the mayor of SF? Yes.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, the main reason founders refuse acquisition offers is because they believe their startup has a great future and will be worth a lot more later. I don't think the thought process is ever, "Well, $50 million is great, but you know what? We're enjoying what we do so much that we'll turn it down even though that's the most we will realistically be able to get."
loving the fake Hitler quote
Well, this is about the time we see crazy theories about some crazy civilizations living inside the planet with all this fresh water and heat freely available to them....
Which guy?

The guy not mentioned at all in the article?
As someone who uses Vagrant for a ton of puppet testing, the part about the Windows guests in 1.5 made me incredibly happy.
Why are there so many Romanians and Bulgarians in Germany? Seems a weird choice to make. I mean, Germany's a lovely place, but why a mass exodus to there? "It's Tuesday, let's move to Germany."
The machine-readable output is interesting.
I did within an hour, indirectly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6857657
Regarding the problem of losing in-house skills and experience, how about the notion of continuous hiring, in other words add another tech worker about every 3-4 months?

Then you have a rolling system where there's enough overlap that when employee #6 leaves, employee #9 or #10 can take up the slack pretty quickly.

I suppose it's not easy to "time" your hires because it's so hard to find the right fit, but if you can hire a reasonably good fit within a 2-3 week recruitment window then you can space them out.

The other advantage is that the earlier employees gradually get more staff to train and delegate the work to, so they will feel actively involved in relieving themselves of the 60-80 hour/week pressure and meanwhile their equity is continuing to build up.

I'm not a start-up founder (yet), so this may be fundamentally flawed thinking. Any comments?
You want them to work for minimum wage and equity only

Then, based on past HN articles, you proceed to do your best to scam them out of the equity you gave them.
You'd be making a pretty big mistake to opt for something that hadn't been vetted, over TextSecure, simply because of the availability of source code.
Does President Obama know how to code?
We teach writing as a required subject in schools, without the expectation that everyone is going to be a professional writer.

We teach science without the expectation that everyone is going to be a scientist.

We teach physical education without the expectation that everyone is going to be a professional athlete.

These are all good life skills to have even if you don't learn enough to make it your career. So it should be the same with programming.
As my sibling poster pointed out, this article doesn’t mention “the guy” at all.
Wow, you weren't kidding - 10164ms for me. From what I can tell, there's not much dynamic content in the page. Static caching would go a long way there. I'm sure they'd appreciate a pull request from someone with some Django chops! https://github.com/mozilla/kuma
Today's Hoax: The Screaming Google Employee
The track record of open source cryptography is bad.
> Throwing money at the problem is literally the best way to solve it:

You clearly didn't read the whole article. This particular family inherited $40k but spent it on heroin. The naivety of that Atlantic article is astounding.

I think New York City has done an absolute ton for this family. This girl might have done okay, except her mother encourages her to fight her peers (and the mom picks fights with store clerks in front of her children). That is ultimately going to be her downfall, and I am not sure what the city is supposed to do.
How is that subversive? It's basic personal finance. It's no more subversive than teaching kids to share toys encourages communism, in my mind.

In general, people shouldn't spend more than they make. If they spend more than they make one month a year, but save enough the other months to cover it, no big deal. I don't see how that's any different at a macro level, but I'm also not an economist.

To me it's far worse to avoid having people learn basic personal finance things than it is to avoid it, in case some people apply it to bigger things.

We have major debt problems in the population, in my opinion. The housing bubble was a part of it: buying things that one can't afford, with the assumption that prices always go up. Credit card debt being near $1 trillion (I think it's around $800b), college loans being over $1 trillion.... Borrowing has been made very easy for quite some time, but just because money is easy to get doesn't mean that the average person should borrow as much as they can (which is what I meant above when I said that affording minimum payments != affording something).

Put those numbers up against the median retirement savings, which are ~$150k for households with head-of-household aged 65+[1, Table 7]. It seems pretty obvious that we as a nation should be educating people to save for their future. I guess another solution, which would be to assume that people can't/won't save no matter what, and use the government to facilitate that "savings" (i.e. increase Social Security's role to the primary source of funds for retirement). That way we wouldn't have to worry about people subverting the system and can just trust the government to do all of the hard work for them. That may match up better with your view, if you find personal finance potentially subversive...

[1] https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43057.pdf

(Edited to fix typo: $8b -> $800b)
I don't personally think it's worth it - I live 2 miles away from the Googleplex, and bike to work weather/schedule-permitting. But a number of my coworkers just really want to live in the city. I think it's a generational thing - the majority of people my generation seem to prefer city living.
Animated Backgrounds
For anyone who doesn't know. Vagrant acts like a wrapper around VMware, VirtualBox, or even AWS, so that you can easily automate testing. You can also share your Vagrant boxes (images) with others in an easy manner. Vagrant is one of those things, that once you start to use it, you wonder how you managed without it. I have created several screencasts about Vagrant:

Learning Vagrant @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/4-vagrant

Create a Vagrant box with Veewee @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/5-create-a-vagrant-box-wit...

Learning Puppet with Vagrant @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/8-learning-puppet-with-vag...

Managing Iptables with Puppet @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/18-managing-iptables-with-...
Should be pointed out that Newt Gingrich did a similar spot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9elnB2wMEP0
I really like the "Disable passphrase" option.

Having to enter that all the time made this a dealbreaker with my wife last time. I figure just encrypt the handset and that'll be good enough.
Ask HN: Best way to distribute multi-GB dataset?
I'm in the process of shutting down Word2[1], an MMO scrabble-like word game we built for Node Knockout back in 2010. The game's world is amazing - ~265MM tiles, ~123MM played words, over 1MM unique players. Once all personally identifiable information has been removed, I'd like to provide it to interested parties to play with. The clean dataset will be ~15GB compressed - what's the preferred way to share multi-GB files these days? Bittorrent, S3 (probably Requester Pays unless there's another option with manageable costs), or something else? Suggestions welcome.

[1] http://massivelyfun.com/saying-goodbye/
The track record of closed source cryptography is worse.
America already overproduces scientists and engineers.

Out of curiosity, do you have a link to any evidence or supporting materials to this claim? It's the first I've heard of it.
First Look: No Man’s Sky
You mean the recent "secret weapons" in Syria thing? [0]

[0]= http://www.lrb.co.uk/2013/12/08/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin
The main trick in machine learning
MDN dev here. Page-load time is one of our immediate next goals. Tons of traffic to our document view and lots of potential back-end processing on each doc kinda sucks. But, we're using New Relic now and hoping to tackle things iteratively as we go.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Project:MDN/Plans_a...
Diaspora isn't up to much lately. The project was pretty mismanaged from the start.
I think this debate a great idea in principle, but unfortunately they both lost me around 10 minutes when they both decided to totally pigeonhole the other industry into the worst possible view:

Schiller (paraphrase): "Finance must be more important than programming some little gimmick at Google" - That's not all that Google does.

Wadhwa: "What has finance given us? CDOs, CDSs, subprime loans, housing bubble, economic meltdown" - That's clearly not all that finance has given us.

With both of them being very close-minded about the other industry, the chances of getting a true debate about the pros and cons of each are slim.
I agree that not all dams are bad. The real issue with dams is the scale. We are on track to dam the majority of the world's rivers over the next 50 years, and this will have significant effects on river and coastal ecosystems.

>> I much prefer free, ecosystem-provided desalination (aka rooftop rain-water harvesting).

I agree; however, this is not an infinite supply. Taking water from rivers is effectively a form of this and it is lower cost than many other "free, ecosystem-provided desalination" since the water has already been collected into a river due to gravity and land contours. As we remove water from these 'free' sources, we are depriving an ecosystem of that water.

The worst case scenario is something like the Aral Sea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
Wow, that takes me back. I was at school with the kids of the guy who wrote that, his study was full of awesome designs and tons of similar stuff.
Isn't MDN mostly stactic content? I don't understand why it's so slow... Everything should be served off of static pages on a cdn.
Unused features are technical debt
How LinkedIn screwed up our friendship
LOL I'm discussing the view from outside of how SV "works". Its an open question who dislikes that particular aspect of the topic more, you or I.