skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's hard to retroactively implement this model on Win32 desktop apps. Some programs (Skype, for instance) actually create and run executables on-the-fly (for their stupid obfuscation stuff).

Files should inherit the folder ACL, so a deny execute on a folder would work nicely, but end up breaking things for users.

Microsoft addresses these issues with the "WinRT" platform and sandboxed/appstore model.
Best interactive snowflake ever (WebGL)
Thousands of American adults and teenagers drown every year; something like 36% of Americans cannot swim. I'm not surprised with the high level of obesity in the US.
If you don't mind getting your hands dirty, you could probably make a prototype pretty easily. A battery, some buttons, and a bluefruit[1] should be enough to make one. You would likely need to also write some kind of input translator (Custom android keyboard or so?) to wrap/ convert the value from straight key presses to your combinations (since you want a combination of key presses to give you just one character). 3D print a case, and you're probably all set to go.

I mean, it's likely easier said than done, and would take some time and effort, but it's probably also pretty do-able.

[1]http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/09/27/new-product-bluefrui...
Acknowledge them. Start by saying hi and follow your heart after that. Many people don't even acknowledge homeless people as human beings.
Yes your experience is limited. Birth rates rise when children are an income producing asset. The shift from rural to urban populations dramatically lowers the birthrate since normally children are only an expense in a urban environment. However in societies that pay out money per child there is an incentive to have more children and the birth rates for the poorest tend to rise. This phenomena has been documented around the world and has nothing to do with your views on religion.
Why can't they move? They're not entitled to live in San Francisco just because their parents live there or whatever. That's life.
From http://www.sfbg.com/googleshoutdown:

UPDATE 12:32pm: Various tips have streamed in that this shout-out was staged. Protest organizer Leslie Dreyer talked to us on the phone and verified that this person's identity was Max Bell Alper, a union organizer from Oakland. This person was not a Google employee, and Dreyer was not able to verify if Alper was there in the morning with the group of 20-30 protesters. The Guardian is attempting to contact Alper for comment. Dreyer said she, as an organizer, was unaware that the "performance" had been planned. We are following this as it develops.
Politics. SF is a mess, Google and the rest of the Valley will realize they have to do something about it. I think this is the point.
Fake: https://twitter.com/FitzTheReporter/status/41014399019373363...
So you want a megacorp to start dictating your local politics to you?
This looks awesome and definitely makes me lean more towards an Android OS for a future phone.

This is not a dig, but because the SMS system is SO transparent a user may not be able to tell which of their messages / contacts allow encrypted traffic (based on the screenshot in the post). I might add a lock or some other mechanism to indicate which messages are secured.
I think this is an amusing idea; however the truth is most people are not meant to be programmers. For those of you in the industry think back to your first couple of programming classes and the people who could not grasp the idea of a FOR LOOP. There was a small group of people who could do it and larger group that just couldn’t. It’s not personal, I was never meant to play basketball it is what it is.
Isn't that about the time to fire them all and replace with cheaper recent grads? A CRUD app doesn't need a decade of experience.
Not a Google employee at all, but rather a plant, as it turns out.

Fairly extensive discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6876397
that doesn't really help me - I have an HDMI-only home setup - multiple HDMI sources switched by the AV receiver drive a single TV, I'd have to somehow create a parallel composite switch from all the video sources - Bunnie Huang's NeTV can almost do this (and with a nod and a wink one could hack the fpga to do it) so the technology is available to an enterprising hacker - whether you can make a commercial product that does this without licensing HDMI (or licensing and still making it open source) and without getting sued is debatable
I applaud them for creating a mini-Twitter firestorm in the process. It's a shame the local media misidentified one of the actors (one of them playing an angry Googler)
I actually interviewed with them...if you can call it that. I saw some negative post on here about them and decided to submit my resume for the heck of it.

They called me that day and I talked with HR and then we set up a ``technical'' interview with one of the head-honchos who has left. That interview lasted all of 5 minutes. He basically said we will have to hire someone who can interview you and the call ended in 5 minutes.

I don't have some special set of skills or anything...it was weird. Anyways...I had fun talking to people I read about in articles...
Kevin Drum (spoilers: knows how to code) had the best take on this:

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/12/no-everyone-do...

But wait. The link leads me to a fairly routine presidential video in honor of Computer Science Education Week, in which President Obama encourages kids to take computer science classes. "It's important for our country's future," he says. But I imagine he's cut dozen of videos for every other conceivable skill that could be taught in our nation's schools. "Nursing is important for our country's future." "Agriculture is important for our country's future." Etc.

So did this really lead to a conversation about whether everyone should know how to write code? How tiresome.1 I can probably list on one hand the number of significant skills that everyone should know. The rest are optional. Some of us know how to fix cars and some just hire mechanics to do it for us. Some of us know the law and some just hire lawyers to help us out. Some of us know how to drive trucks and some choose other careers.

In any case, I don't think computer programming would even make my top 20 of broadly useful skills.2 It's a great thing to learn if you plan a STEM career or if you just feel like learning it. But useful? For the vast, vast majority of us it's of no use whatsoever. Reading and writing are useful in nearly all careers, and are useful personally even if your job doesn't require them. But coding? Unless it's part of your job, the odds are vanishingly small that it will ever be of much use to you. Nor is it something that's useful in its own right because it promotes clear thinking. Nor is it a steppingstone to other, more broadly useful skills.

Coding is a specific skill needed for certain specific jobs. That's it. There's no need to put it on a higher pedestal.

1Tiresome because this comes up so often. Why do so many people insist that whatever skill they happen to know is one that everyone should know? There are lots of skills in the world. All of us know only a tiny fraction of them, and that's the way it should be.

2As a time-wasting skill, however, computer programming is hard to beat. I can no longer count the number of hours I've spent coding (or scripting) little utilities that did me no real good at all. But it was fun!
The prospect of changing something is often what attracted the founders to the idea in the first place. The most successful founders are not usually in it just for the money. If they were they'd have taken that $50 million acquisition offer on the way up.
You are waiting because no one bothered to build sufficient mass transportation.

Now that it's bad enough, maybe people can try to cure the disease instead of treating the symptoms.
Technically the 'audio out' signal isn't power.

Explain? Even if we ignore losses, the 'audio out' signal does work when it drives headphones.

I understand that an AC signal does not perform work when the current and voltage are perfectly out of phase, but that does not describe audio or else there would be no power transfer to drive the transducer.
The Gandhian Way
I don't think I was being clear. My point about apples and oranges was based on the view that if the programming languages achievements were as limited as the described foreign language achievements then not much would have been gained.
Wow that interface is annoying.

Suggestion: add a dead zone in the center of the window where the view doesn't more.
This was my exact usage problem with it as well. It was seamless in receiving standard SMS, but MMS & group messages simply did not come through, though I would be alerted to receiving them.

I gave up on TextSecure because of the flaw. I'll pick it back up if there's a fix.
I've always heard that type of input device called a twiddler, I found one when googling "bluetooth twiddler":
http://www.handykey.com/

* I'm an idiot, that was a top link because they're using the name twiddler, but they don't seem to offer bluetooth.
So you would choose not to store your value in bitcoin because of it lacks usefulness to you. Thank you for expanding on your original statement, but I think I missed the response to the question. I however would choose to store value in bitcoin because of my own prejudice against the dollar, should I expect to see bitcoin to do better because of this?
The World's First 1TB mSATA SSD
Matt works at the Guardian, and what he says is right: it's been an open source project since ~ May 2012.
The article linked here doesn’t mention the “faux Googler” at all. Not sure why you’re posting this comment on this particular article.
Define: freely

I think Moxie Marlinespike's talk at Defcon 18 (2010) was a really good one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG0KrT6pBPk

He talks about how we do not really have a free choice when it comes to things like having a Facebook account or having a mobile phone. Namely due to the network effect, you don't really have a choice if you want to be a normal member of society.
Yeah, but it gets passed on to the consumer whether or not they use credit cards.

Very few places charge an extra fee for using a credit card.

Honestly, I trust my credit card company more than most merchants I do business with. I'd rather have them be able to claw back the payment if something goes wrong. I think that I'm way more likely to be screwed by the other party in the transaction than I am by the trusted third party.
Xero.com Payroll for the United States
>The point is that we're not actually doing them most of the time.

I agree, but is that really knowable? By definition, the successfully done ones aren't known, right? Not that it's a reason to dive into conspiracy theories.
Pat, I have better things to do than debate semantics with a bored undergrad who aggressively downvotes any opinion that dissents with his. Take what you can from the discussion on gender equality...or don't, you're the one missing out.
NYC Government - A Century-old Hierarchical Culture in a Millennial World
Ask HN: Free account for life for early SAAS subscribers?
lets say I have a SAAS where subscribers are professionals and can be found by consumers for their services (e.g. lawdingo to find lawyers, turbotax CPA select etc).

To get the initial subscribers, what about the idea of not asking them to pay ever if they are the first 1000 or whatever users ? If the service takes off with those free accounts, wouldn't it be easier to show to the next 1000 potential customers ? If service never takes off, anyone we don't have to bother about next customers ? What do you all think ?
> It's plenty fast now, too. ...If this is not enough, you most likely have a software problem.

And 640k should be enough memory for anybody.

The problem here is that decent internet access (10-30mbps per person) is cheap to deploy, and easy to do, when there are no other problems standing in the way. (For instance, when the cable company doesn't buy off the local government).

Apologizing for phone and cable companies who are raking in record profits doesn't help us in any way.

> they're taking for granted development that isn't actually there.

The development is there. Lithuania, Sweden, Switzerland, Iceland, and Romania didn't just "magic" their internet in existence. They took cheap easily-obtained widely-available technology and simply deployed it, along with the 30 other countries who all have (on average) faster / better / more reliable internet service than the USA.

http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/

Notice the pricing there too -- USA pays more for internet than many other countries that rank higher than we do. (We pay 4 times more money per mbps than Denmark does, and receive slower service then them for that cash).

http://www.netindex.com/value/allcountries/

> Signing up for the cable company because it has the highest advertised speeds and then complaining about the implications of a shared medium provided by an unregulated monopoly is myopic entitled whining.

I think we understand the implications of the shared medium. But it's clear that the medium isn't the issue -- it's the misuse of the technology by the ISPs. DOCIS 3.0 is not the issue, Comcast trying to cut costs by making thousands of homes share the same backhaul on the same lines, is the issue.

And what else should folks do? Cable is the only internet service that qualifies as "high speed" (by the FCC's very very lax definition of 'High speed') in 99% of the United States.

There are zero other options.

> Look into competing DSL options, really.

Why bother? So I can switch to one of the dozens of companies who all resell the same 2mb AT&T ADSL line. (A line which, according to our own Federal Communications Commission, is too slow to be called "high speed internet")

http://www.fcc.gov/reports/sixth-broadband-progress-report

Why would you suggest we subsidize the phone companies attempts to kill our access to the internet? At least the cable company offers something.

> Your new provider may even have warm-blooded people answering the phone.

They sure do. AT&T has the friendliest phone support team, who will in very kind and gentle terms, explain that since they're too lazy to maintain a single copper pair, I can't even maintain a single Netflix stream. But I should pay them $40/month for it anyway, because it includes "free long distance".
Maybe the pain of exchange fees will start to push businesses to hold Bitcoin instead at some point?
Since Arduino can be programmed to function as a keyboard[1], wouldn't that be an easier option? Then you can put the chording logic on the Arduino board and have it function like a plain USB keyboard otherwise as far as the computer is concerned[2] (that's kind of how the Makey Makey[3] works - it's also Arduino based).

[1] http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/KeyboardWrite

[2] http://store.arduino.cc/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPa...

[3] http://www.makeymakey.com/
I agree. Generally, I think criticism comes easier than praise. And no doubt, selection bias contributes to perceived hostility in forums. But I think CS cultures like in HN especially pride themselves on detail and pedantry. Let's be honest, I think most of us here have a superiority complex to some degree. It was probably ingrained in us through debugging. "compile? damn, segfault. gotta fix ALL THE ERRORS."

Lately, I've realized the motivational impact of having a hero. Something to aspire to. Kids go after what you expose them to. This ties in to what pg said in his essay about "nerds", and I imagine it has a lot to do with the unevenness of the CS demographic. I think the president's video is great. Not all of us have to become CS grads. But for some, the meekest exposure can sow the seeds of a great career path or hobby.
4 essential trends to consider in your 2014 planning
I wrote about this release and Kafka in general in Chinese and gather some information perhaps useful for Chinese guys: http://geek.csdn.net/news/detail/3866
If your kid can't do math, that's YOUR fault, not the teacher's.
Newsy exits with 35 million dollar sale to legacy media company
"to keep people from faking check-ins and gaining badges and mayorships that they didn't earn."

And yet, people claim bitcoins are worthless.
Understanding that the computer is a stupid, un-magical machine which obeys only (and exactly!) the instructions you give it is somewhat of a prerequisite for successfully writing computer programs. (Not exactly true, but it's very helpful.)

Understanding that the computer is non-magical also means that your computer users may be more likely to understand how to troubleshoot errors ("Was it something I did, or something out of my control?").
> When we asked students why they didn’t want to be software developers or designers, we'd typically get one of the following responses:

> "I thought you had to be really good at math to do programming."

Not a bad thought.
Rescale (YC W12) is hiring Sales Engineers
"Learn Programming...but don't learn Cryptography pretty please..."
Does anyone know what the sign "Fine $271; Total Fine (2011-2013) $1 Billion" refers to? https://twitter.com/maxbatt/status/410097083081695233/photo/...
Here's cyanogenmod's side of the announcement:
http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/whisperpush-secure-messaging...
What's so frustrating is that only some sections of some large metro areas (like Los Angeles and Dallas) can get it. Looking at the FIOS map from broadbandreports[1], there's no FIOS availability within the 635 ring east of I-35, which is most (all?) of Dallas proper.

The main places with solid FIOS coverage are in the northeast: most major metro areas in the VA Beach-DC-NYC-Boston corridor. And Pittsburgh. And Ft. Wayne, IN. Because Ft. Wayne clearly needs FTTP more than Indianapolis.

Most other municipalities in the rest of the country are either locked into exclusivity contracts with other providers, or can't be bothered to give their residents real choice of good providers, or Verizon doesn't want the initial outlay for infrastructure costs for more deployment at this time, or some combination.

[1] https://secure.dslreports.com/gmaps/fios
Los Angeles is actually a much better place to live now for people in tech than the bay area. All the young people want to live in overpriced SF and the ones with families want to live in the south bay.

In LA the thriving tech community is all in west Los Angeles, where Venice is the hip San Francisco (but waaay cheaper) and Santa Monica / West LA has great homes (also much cheaper than say Palo Alto [if you exclude beach front]). And these 2 neighborhoods are 10-15 minute commute, very different than the hour commute between most of the south bay and SF.
I think learning to core for a lot of people would be useful to them in heir job in the same way that learning to work on machinery is to a farmer. Even if itts not their speciality, it relevant to their job.
If you've heard that, then you are probably right. I don't have any actual experience or knowledge about this shuttle system in particular.
As a black American, I wish that I were suprised at some of the comments in the video.
230 VCs and Angels invest in 45 companies for a total of $866M
How is any of that Facebooks fault?
Newsy's 'transformational' approach to video aggregation (considered to be on the borderline of theft by many legacy media companies) is a really interesting purchase for a media company like Scripps, which was founded in the late 1800s.
Thanks! Glad you enjoy the reading experience.
considering that land (and property) is more or less in fixed supply, SF could justifiably implement price/rent controls. Or zone things better to have more apartments.

I have no experience with SF first-hand, but from what I hear it is extremely, extremely expensive to live in. In Tokyo you can get a 1 room appartment for $600 a month ( a kinda shitty one, but you can find one), and it's easy to find meager jobs (fast food joints or convenience stores) to make $10 an hour (comes out to $1600 a month). The jobs are more or less everywhere too, but the point is even in the downtown-y area you can live where you work.

It's possible to work there because the population density of the special wards of Tokyo (the actual "urban" part, there's a lot of mountain) is 3 times that of SF. I only have a cursory knowledge of what it's like, again, but looking at apartment listings, it seems like San Francisco has a pretty high amount of gigantic apartments. Like, apartments that could be cut into 4 separate apartments-type huge.

From the side of the people who are mad about this stuff, about the rent and the transportation:

Here's a guy who has an apartment that takes up half a floor, who takes his private bus to go work out in the countryside, asking me, the guy making his burgers/checking out his groceries, to go live out in the countryside and bus into work because he couldn't survive having an apartment with 200 sq feet less space.

Even worse, this is next to some of the most technologically advanced companies in the world. We're supposed to be the Jetsons. How is it that we can have a halfway-functioning public transit system in nowheres-bourg, France, population 100k , but we can't seem to get one running in an area with 3 times the density and 10 times the people?

I'm not necessarily agreeing with everything, but the rage is justified. And it can be solved by political means.

>but now there is a trend towards reurbanization, and as more people move back into cities, the natural result of that is an increase in prices unless supply increases.

Supply can be increased pretty easily: by having companies build closer to the city center, thus expanding the radius of "interestingness". I'm sure that if Google had built closer to san francisco proper that the area of interesting things would have increased immensly. Instead they built their own little disneyland way out , with a huge suburb in between it and SF.

Obviously square footage is expensive, but what is money when you're apparently rolling in it? Building the Googleplex closer would've made it smaller but at least it would have helped SF expand its area of interestingness.
rah rah Bitcoin!
One could add the Marco Polo Bridge incident. Under inadvertent stuff one could add the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Is it going to get faster? I find that MDN pages load much, much slower than e.g. w3schools, which probably explains some or all of their failure to grab the top spot on most Google searches.

For example, a page like this takes nearly 10 seconds to render on the server before the browser receives a single byte:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Reference/Event...

MDN's content is already good. I'd prefer to see effort put into speeding it up rather than adding more features.
Very neat indeed. Integrating at a low level like that is an excellent plan for a good user experience.

Without diving into the code they link to, I wonder how it falls back to normal SMS for clients which are not using CM/TextSecure. They couldn't just send it encrypted in case the receiving client doesn't support that. So, they must negotiate which version to send (encrypted vs unencrypted). Apparently, this handshake/negotiation works with regular SMS. Anyone have any insight?

Also, I think it is important to note that the SMS messages are only encrypted in transit and not at rest. I believe this to be the case because the article says that I can use any SMS client I want. Also, encryption at rest would kill searchability, back-up/transfer to new device, etc.

Edit: I didn't mean to imply that encryption during transit is anything to scoff at. It is quite excellent compared to what people have now, which is no protection at all!
Goldman versus Google: A career on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley? [video]
Rails Assets: *the* solution to assets management in Rails