skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ahem, if only to clarify for our overseas brothers and sisters of the world :), "Scotland leaving the Union" is probably what you meant there. Scotland and England are two of the four countries that form the present United Kingdom [1].

If Scotland gains independence, it will likely remain an active partner in the European Union.

"but presumably still a Commonwealth nation" - yes, the current policy is to continue to with the current British Queen as a constitutional monarch and remain part of the Commonwealth. I myself would rather Scotland become a republic, but I can wait another few years before fighting that battle.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_of_the_United_Kingdo...
A lot of people are getting attached to the "every American" aspect of things, and I think its important to note the distance between "knowing how to code" and "becoming a programmer." Amateur programming (for lack of a better term) like basic Python for data analysis or HTML/CSS to work on Wordpress sites (Hell, one of my friends who's a Social Media Manager learned Python to create some QoL scripts for her day-to-day routine.) is growing increasingly popular amongst recent grads.

"Whether you're a young man or a young woman -- whether you live in a city or a rural area -- computers are going to be a big part of future. And, if you're willing to work hard, that future is yours to shape."

It's hard to argue with the central message there, but we must be careful not to conflate that with the necessity of getting a CS degree. Every American should probably be able to change a tire. That doesn't mean every American should be a car mechanic.
And yet, one might wonder: who is it that benefits most from these stories on .gov and .mil doing these distasteful things?

As much as I'd love to believe that we've all spontaneously awoken to our governments being underhanded, I cannot help but wonder if it's as organic as we'd believe.
Wat.

A few months ago when someone taught a homeless man to code we congratulated him on improving another man's lot in life.

We continue to give kudos to folks like CodeAcademy for teaching people how to code free of charge and introducing more people to our industry.

But when the government does it it's a conspiracy the depress wages?

Sometimes I just... nevermind, I forget where I am.
23andMe 'not going anywhere'
I built this in 24 hours to test that I could do it. The code was not meant to be pretty, it wasn't meant to be reusable. It was made as a "hack".
I use hacker not to portray myself as a systems-infiltrator but in the sense of hackathons and building things quickly and roughly.
If this was meant to be a finished project of course the code would be much cleaner, however the class does the job and that was what I intended to build with this, a POC.
It would probably take over $100m to fund "100s of other companies".

The company is not going south. It brought in top-tier talent (Barry McCarthy ex-Netflix, namely) who reasonably concluded the company wasn't structured properly from a personnel standpoint. This doesn't appear to be another Color considering the company has plenty of cash, some quality executives and a functional product in a huge, well-known category (payments).
Generic advice for all HNers: if you publish things to the Internet, a single responsible party (which can be a bunch of people, as long as they can share an email address) with a PGP key is a very cheap investment in not having your dirty laundry aired on Twitter/HN/Pastebin/less savory places.

Specific advice to the Guardian: I'd encourage you to take the above generic advice.
Ask HN: Would you use an email presorting service like this?
Hi guys, at SquareOne we've been building a more manageable mobile email experience, and through all of our customer research we came up with an interesting service model that could live on top of the platform we've built.

This is a service for people who get 100+ emails a day and can't effectively stay on top of their inbox without spending hours a day inside it. We let the person with the highest incentive to have an email reach you - the sender - do a little bit of extra work and categorize their email for you. Concept landing page:

www.squareonemail.com/mailone

What do you think?
Whose sarin?
Completely agreed. Not looking that forward to this.
I think the most disappointing part about this is that the person that was hit had to be an 'ex-napster exec' to get any notoriety.

I am very sorry to hear there was an accident involving a bike and a car though, at apparently such a high speed that it broke in the window...
> Currently, I have not seen any service similar to this, so the competition is nil. I believe eventually every smartphone, tablet and computer will load Textter as their Live Messaging System.

Right. Because sending keystrokes over the network is so revolutionary that every electronics manufacturer in the world will abandon their messaging strategy to adopt Textter. Instead of just, y'know, sending their keystrokes over the network.
HN has this funny attitude: whenever someone is "bad at math", it's the fault of our education system and the way math is taught in schools, because everyone is clearly born with good sense of logic, however coding is for some reason such a different skill, and only a selected few (aka HN readers) can truly master it.
This article has several inaccuracies and fallacies.

The magnetic stripe on your credit card stores data in two separate bands. The old Reader grabbed from just one. With their new custom read head, Square can grab both, which makes every swipe more accurate, and more likely to work on one try.

There are three tracks on a magnetic stripe (IATA, ABA and THRIFT), the first two are used in banking. The first track stores alphanumeric data such as your name; the second track stores numerical data, namely the card number. Reading both tracks doesn't make the swipe "more accurate" at all, since there is no redundancy there.

On one level, developing a custom chip gave Square total control over the processes at the heart of the product: Decoding the magnetic signal from the credit card, encoding the electrical signal being sent to the smartphone, and all the encryption that happens in between.

First, the decoding of the swipe does not happen on the reader. The first version of Square sent the entire audio clip to their servers for decoding; this new version may do it on the phone. Secondly, there is absolutely no encryption between the reader and the phone, any encryption is between the phone and their servers.

The old version relied on a coin cell, which added around two millimeters to the overall thickness of the device. With their own chip, though, Square was able to be much more efficient in their use of power, to the point that they could draw all they needed from the smartphone via the audio jack.

An audio jack provides no power. The signal is created by electromagnetic induction. The previous version of Square used a battery to amplify that signal.

Edit: Square claims their new readers do some sort of "encryption." I am skeptical, but I had only tested the first version of the reader.
Obama says a few nice things about Computer Science and encourages people to learn more about the world, and HN still manages to find every possible negative angle to trash it. Impressive!
One's Wikipedia browsing history is very revealing. For instance people often use Wikipedia to learn about diseases they (or loved ones) have or are concerned they have. One should be able to research such diseases without revealing to advertisers or insurance companies the association between the user and the disease. The amount that can be garnered about an individual from their Wikipedia search history is kind of unbelievable. You can figure out things such as a person's interests, to some degree various aspects of their intelligence, some things about their medical history, if they are pregnant, their religious and political affiliations, if they may be suicidal, if they have surgery coming up, where they live and how old they are, what sort of pastimes they have, the list goes on and on. You can't figure out all of these things about all people, but the tracking has the potential to be very dangerous.

The most common way in which this data is used is targeted advertising, which probably doesn't concern you. Historically this type of data has also been used for price discrimination (which you may care about) and this data has the potential to be used in much more nefarious ways.

Even if we could somehow ensure the data would only be used in acceptable ways, the fact that the tracking goes on without most people's knowledge or approval seems unethical to me, and would be particularly troublesome on an encyclopedia of everything.
I am under the impression that this was a project management failure, not a technical failure.
songs that are added to the "Locker" are stored locally, so all tracks can be played without an internet connection. the Locker itself is DRM'd (not the tracks), so whitelisted applications (Traktor and Serato) can access the folder and play the tracks without issue.
I'd agree - I guess it's considered paradoxical as it surprises economists that expect a correlation between birth rates & economic means.

It's really more that economics doesn't properly serve as a predictor of human behavior (news at 11! ;-))
And it works as you'd expect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
Deploying a Go Application on Heroku (video)
If you're in SV/SF, over 26, and haven't made at least a million dollars for yourself through an exit yet, you're not in the cool crowd. Bonus points for an Official Exit and not just an acquihire.

Your street cred can wain though. The Powerset acquisition by Microsoft was okay for the time, but now it shows up as essentially an acquihire. If that sale was going through today, it would probably be a $200 million to $500 million acquisition instead of the $50 million bauble they got at the time.
On a side note, this is how every single zombie movie starts. Genetic Mutations to stop cancer.
Obama said a fundamentally ignorant statement that seems even more ignorant considering all the technical problems with Obamacare. Hacker News is just pointing this out.
Can't they get the stuxnet guys to help with that, or even their managers who understand how to get software done? Don't tell me they don't have some overlapping skills.
I have done this, and it is very helpful. Give it a try before you dismiss it!

You seriously won't believe what you'll find. For example, new laptops purchased from a big box have so much crap starting up that they make the laptop run poorly. It might seem obvious to you what programs should be uninstalled and easy for you to do it, but that's not true for other people.

Just email them and say you'd like to setup a chair in their office X day(s), all day, and anyone with any computer problems should come see you and you'll do your best to help, no job too small. I think you'll find your offer well received and useful, but there's certainly no harm in testing it out.

As a computer person, you're in a unique position to help and you can have a big impact. Don't dismiss this idea so easily!
With the scientific process, one could become an inventor instead of staying a simple laborer.
"Perhaps" is an infamous weasel-word. Why not say that you value all cyclists' lives less because some cyclists have flaunted traffic laws in a way that annoys you? If that isn't your point, what is?
Ads also limit the impartiality of the content. If you read a page about some company or some technology, and then some ad service decides that that's a great trigger to place an ad for that company or technology on the very same page, even if it doesn't spoil the impartiality of the content, it gives the appearance of impartial content.

This is the same reason why Consumer Reports doesn't take paid advertising in their publications either.
Am I the only one who is skeptical about this announcement? I am sure the amount of data Facebook has will be huge asset to any sort of AI development, but precisely because of the amount of data and the kinds of data they have, it's just scary what this could be used for...

AI that has personal information of 500M+ people, using it to manipulate people...(first to click on advertisements, and then much more). In the hands of government, I shudder to think what's possible. With NSA already snooping around, perhaps it's not all that distant.
This makes me want to mail my phone to myself.
This is the saddest part. The NY Times recently ran an op-ed "Is It O.K. to Kill Cyclists?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/is-it-ok-to...

It appears that the answer is "yes, almost always".
Redfin Real-Estate Firm Gets Cold Shoulder in Silicon Valley
Employee Retention
Generally the distinction between gangster and terrorist depends on the motive. But the methods don't differ much.
FreeBSD now treats RDRAND as 'untrusted'
Actually, conspiracy theorists don't exist. They were invented by Obama to distract us from the real issue: who killed Kennedy?
Hm it depends how much the user tweets about these topics, if at all. I'd probably say ~5k and you'd start getting decent results.
- Thank you dbieber, for a deeper explanation from your side of view.
We see programming as a lifestyle, a vital part of our everyday lives. The goal with hour of code is to encourage people to learn programming as a utility, not necessarily as a lifestyle.
Scoble: In-Memory Data Grids
If preventing deaths was anywhere close to the primary goal they'd be funneling money towards stopping traffic accidents.

Terrorism is a convenient trope to get people to willingly relinquish their liberties, just like "for the children" but with the goal of deploying ubiquitous scanners, drones, and microphones instead of censorship schemes.
The Roost Stand - Space-age laptop stand
Well presumably because we already are telling people to learn how to write and communicate. Public schools spend more time on those topics than probably any other. Furthermore, advocating mastery of one skill is different from advocating basic literacy in another skill.

This said, I agree that "learn to code" is tiresome. Why aren't cries of "learn basic electrical engineering" as popular? Or, if we want clear societal benefit, why not advocate learning how to swim? Thousands of American adults and teenagers drown every year; something like 36% of Americans cannot swim.

Of course "either tell people to learn how to swim, or tell them to learn to code" is a false dichotomy (both can be done at once) but I am wondering why "learn to code" gets so much attention. The amount I hear about getting the general public to code seems disproportionate.
- I never knew Consumer Reports didnt take paid advertising in their publications. Thank you for the knowledge jgeorge.
How I built emojitracker
Global Government Surveillance Reform
China use forcible sterilization programs, which is one of those ugly and socially unacceptable answers, for good reason. (The US had a similar program. To give you some idea of how well it worked, the case that decided the constitutionality, Buck vs Bell, involved a woman who was considered mentally feeble due to being black, poor, and getting pregnant at 17. Turns out the last one was most likely due to her being raped by a member of her more respectable foster family, who committed her to an institution to cover it up. The whole thing was deeply fucked from the very outset.)
I worked for a major ISP - Two of them, one being the largest suppliers of DSL nationwide and the other, their largest reseller.

There are some horror stories out there - in truth, the majority of customers get what they pay for monthly without the plethora of stupids presented here.

On the other hand, when I set up service with Comcast, my bill had 4-5 mystery charges monthly for 4 months, no one could explain what they were, and they got credited. But still, it was an hour of my time each time it happened.
Electrical engineering, computer engineering, and computer science are related.

But, no, you don't need to know much about science to make phone apps or webpages. Studying a foreign language or in-depth grammar would probably be just as useful for those industries.

That being said, children going into software would benefit from exercising the parts of their brains responsible for patience, tenacity, intellect, technical reasoning, and problem solving.
The job is brutal. Look at photos of Bush Jr. before & after -- same thing.
Aww, I always thought the name "Opscode" was pretty cool...nice new logo though!
when you go to codeacademy that is your choice to improve yourself, and you either enrich yourself or quit. Fine. Very few on HN say, "you're an awful person, you tried to code on codeacademy and couldn't do it" (OK maybe someone might rag on a non-technical MBA that tries to pull the strings on engineers without understanding the damage they are causing).

When the government urges people to go do things (presumably to be followed by things like subsidies), it is a recipe for blowing up the industry by steamrolling people through it. Good examples abound: Home ownership. Going to college. Getting into STEM.
Vagrant 1.4
I love your parallel between car maintenance and coding, and I have repeated it many times myself. I think changing a tire is a reasonable thing to expect every driver to be able to do. Likewise, I think understanding SSL errors is the kind of thing every computer user should be able to do. Not code, necessarily, but understand something about this system you trust with most of your life.
I'm actually surprised how hostile HN is in these comments, considering that I thought the popular sentiment was similar. Every other day a new "learn how to code" post hits the front page, despite, I'm sure, most people who are commenting/upvoting don't need the tutorial for themselves.
Thank you for the well thought out reply and I'll admit and apologize that the previous reply was snarky with a bit of anger.

However, it suffices to say that using a thread lamenting the death of a cyclist for venting about improper cyclist behavior isn't a considerate thing to do. Let alone quoting a line that correctly suggests that motorists who kill cyclists are not treated similarly to motorists who are at fault in other fatal accidents.

Accidents between vehicles and cyclists are not often the cyclist's fault (in <10% of accidents is the cyclist at fault)[1]. Bicycling organizations "do not know of a single case of a cyclist fatality in which the driver was prosecuted, except for D.U.I. or hit-and-run,”[2].

[1] http://www.sharetheroad.ca/what-are-the-dangers-in-terms-of-...
[2]http://www.sharetheroad.ca/what-are-the-dangers-in-terms-of-...
The dirty secrets of clean cars
"Only" a thousand bucks for people making $14,500 a year is A LOT OF MONEY...they could, you know, buy groceries for 3 or 4o months with that.
TextSecure, Now With 10 Million More Users
How does it compare to services like Amazon SNS, IronIO, 'etc in terms of costs and other tradeoffs?
> An audio jack provides no power. The signal is created by electromagnetic induction. The previous version of Square used a battery to amplify that signal.

Huh? I thought that you could get a limited amount of power from the audio jack by playing a tone through it while something's connected. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5560867/how-to-get-electr... seems to agree.
Mobile Ambient Location Poised To Go Mainstream
> We have experienced all the bullish news that there is and, for now, will be.

I think he is being rather short sighted here. Especially with news coming out that the Swiss parliament is investigating its potential to act as a legal currency.
I'd like to know how they are hoping to hedge BTC volatility, or if they are not planning to hedge at all.
You've told me nothing; you've added an irrelevancy.
1. Learn to listen.

2. Learn to speak.
>I think its important to note the distance between "knowing how to code" and "becoming a programmer."

Very true. I know people who are highly educated but have no idea what computers are capable or incapable of doing.

On the other hand, more people actually know how to code than know they know how to code, thanks to Microsoft Excel. See http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers... for instance, where Excel is referred to as "the world's most popular functional language."
I hear you. I used to live in NYC (queens) a long time ago and remember the only option in our building was TWC. But when I say remote area, I mean the entire area. We only have comcast or nothing. So now I am forced to pay for the "bundle" of TV and Internet even though all I want is Internet. Yes I called them to only get Internet and even then, you have to pay for the basic cable package. Leave it or take it.
Ugh, we have enough awful, unmaintainable code to deal with as it is. We really need less code now, not more.

I'd prefer it if he would call on Americans to learn to think first, or at least to meditate or something.
Yeah, I've been using 4sq for years and still do, but just don't have any use for the passive notifications. They only crop up when I'm going somewhere or doing something already. Most amusingly, they've been showing up on flights lately and they are actually correct. Not sure how that even happens since I know Google's WiFi database tends to just have the wrong location for train and plane WiFi in my experience. I'll hop on a train in NYC and it will say I'm in Boston.
No, it's because we need more coders or at least that's the essence of the problem.
That's not too surprising, as that's the kind of thing that impresses politicians and MBA's. In the real world, where delivering results is more important than checking off political boxes, tech companies have to work extremely hard just to hire the best people, so that's not a luxury they have.
how's that state-subsidized going to college working out for everyone? Or state-subsidized home ownership?
with raising money at a $3b valuation, even considering liquidation preferences, etc. you severely limit your exit opportunities. A $3b acquisition is technically a possibility but I would assume everyone is looking for at least a 2x exit, so now you need to be purchased for $6b. Taking money at such a high valuation can be a serious risk because if you can not get to that $6b IPO or acquisition (in snapchat's case I do believe that would be very difficult to pull off) you will not be in good shape.

These late stage investments are looked at like they are really low risk when in reality, it is always a substantial risk until you have a working business model. We say cash flow is king, but invest in the exact opposite fashion and flock to vanity metrics. Look at how Fab (a company everyone assumed would become the next monster e-commerce company) is flailing and trying to raise money every month while losing all viewership. I fear companies like twitter can foil the public market because less informed investors just equate them to facebook and there is some substantial chance this looks like a pump and dump in a couple of years.
Microsoft Works With FBI To Take Down Click-Fraud Botnet
Yes, that's the first thing that came to my mind as well. I guess they'll stay on the safe side as much as they can by inflating the prices in bitcoin.
I've been thinking for a long time how I wanted to start making educational content and I knew I wanted to use video as a medium. Rather than waiting any longer, I decided to make a screencast on a topic that I'm rather interested in right now and I hope is the same for others. Please forgive the rough edges.

The goal with SourceTank is to create screencasts on a variety of topics; Go, Rails, Node, Angular, etc... Basically anything that a web developer may want to learn in the course of their work.

I drew a lot of inspiration from RailsCasts (as many of you can probably tell!) and other screencasts on tech subjects.

I'd love to hear feedback, criticism, ideas for new episodes or anything else!