skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This conversation normally comes up in the context of taxes for #3.

To which I say, if you're willing to allow the government to deport someone who doesn't pay taxes I'd tend to agree with you, but as it stands the balance is actually tipped the other way: Government (usually local) is forced to figure out clean water, last-resort healthcare, schools, etc. simply by people being present, whether they pay taxes or not, yet government has no ability to simply "get rid" of people

I say the libertarians go find a nice area somewhere with a failed state, take it over, prove its supremacy and be a big shining beacon on the hill for libertarians everywhere to finally prove once and for all that it's better, and then I'll care about "taxes as extortion".
You could think of it as detectives with a global jurisdiction. You don't need a tremendous amount of secrecy in what you're doing to do that job.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_renaming
Took a heck of a long time for an org with access to shitloads of cash and cream-of-the-crop developers to release such a basic "MVP".
Sometimes I feel like Rasmus Lerdorf is going to come clean one bright April Fools' Day, and reveal that PHP was just a hilarious joke that sort of got out of hand.
There's a lot of personal anecdote in your reply but little justification for why decades of jail are appropriate responses. It just seems like you think if you feel it intuitively that everyone else should just accept it. Sorry, I don't agree, and you're not very convincing.
Signing an agreement with a gun to your head is not voluntary. This is, after all, the normal complaint of the libertarian regarding the extortion of taxes, no?

Well the same logic applies when the "gun" is not physically a gun: If your set of viable choices has a size of 1 then you cannot be honestly said to have any "voluntary" choice.
A 24 Hour Radio Station in New Orleans Ran by Volunteers
Are you open to relocation? We can help take care of the logistics for the right candidate.
The former. They don't support any more physical memory than other high-end servers.
This probably goes further back in time than many on this site remember but once upon a time Newsweek and Time were pretty much the two weekly news mags. (US News and World Report but that had a somewhat different focus.) People were often surprised when Time and Newsweek had the same cover story even when it wasn't the current big news story--but this really reflected that the reporters and editors went to the same schools and worked in the same environment so really thought the same in a lot of respects.

I was an engineering major but I was involved with newspapers in various respects through school and there was definitely a certain "perspective" with the mainstream publications.
There is no fundamental difference here. Clasping your hands, asking a god for guidance in your head, then interpreting your own thoughts as the advice of a god is really no different from asking a god a question, putting your hands on a Ouija board, letting the ideomotor effect do its thing, then interpreting the output of the ideomotor effect as the word of your god.

The only difference is that mainstream Christianity blesses one method, and derogatorily refers to the other methods as witchcraft or divination.

Different religions all have their own forms of blessed divination, and forbidden divination, and they all assert that their blessed methods are fundamentally different from the others, but it is all the same stuff.
I've actually been writing a MUD in Node.js with WebSockets (well, Socket.IO, thus I get failover support). It's been a lot of fun, and has been really easy to use.

What is really interesting is just how easy it is to use WebSockets with the latest libraries. I've got a project in .NET that relies on a lot of Microsoft-specific libraries right now. But with the ease of WebSockets, I can rewrite the UI in HTML5 like we always wanted and get around to rewriting the MS-specific stuff in Java or Python more likely whenever I feel like it.

It's like completely platform agnostic pipes, in a way that TCP/IP sockets never seemed to quite do.

EDIT: I think it's just that I don't have to listen for new connections and figure out how to bind them in a loop that I keep alive myself. I get an event when users connect.
If the join is "compute all f(s, t) for s in S and t in T" then you'll save bandwidth (having O(|S| + |T|) bandwidth over the network instead of O(|S||T|)) by doing it on the client. Of course you could just run `rethinkdb proxy` if you want to save ethernet bandwidth and run the query on RethinkDB while connecting to the local cluster node.
"The rule of law is government's fundamental contribution to civilization."

"Most government employees, particularly members of the military, directors of agencies (Alexander is both), cabinet secretaries, judges, members of Congress and the President, take an oath of office."

Yes, most of my post was anecdotal. Those two points above are my case. I'm sorry it's not good enough.
The women weren't looking at their best whereas the men in the main look quite cool.
You could be "better off", but still have been screwed out of being "even more better off". That's still being taken advantage of. Consider the legendary story about how Steve Jobs screwed the Woz.
Does it even matter what the courts say? The NSA seems like it has no problems operating outside of the law and lying when asked what it's actually doing.
Show HN: Command-line Bitcoin prices on Windows
How should one go about finding interesting white papers to implement?
Can you imagine what it would be like finding some sort of living organism observable by the human eye? That would be the most profound moment ever.
White House says "No Amnesty for Snowden is Being Considered"
I do think it's interesting how so many cultures who were (allegedly) once on the forefront of science and technology have "fallen behind the curve." And no doubt history will continue to repeat itself.
You still have to dig through 20+ screens of possible configuration values, some configs are in web.config in your app, some are in some other machine.config files, etc. The configuration just seems like a mess compared to your standard linux app with everything nicely organized in /etc/<app>

Not to mention the difference of opinions you get when you search for IIS tuning info/documentation. Half the stuff is only valid for older versions of IIS and there doesn't seem to be a lot of good info on the latest version when it comes to tuning.
It's interesting to examine the history of soap and hand-washing: how patients and doctors gradually came to understand its importance.

In fact, hand-washing took a really long time to catch on, largely because doctors saw it as an inconvenience. Some surgeons used to pride themselves on wearing lab coats covered with blood; it was the sign of a busy practice.

This story in the New Yorker actually makes a much broader, interesting point, investigating why some innovations take so long to catch on. For example, anesthesia was discovered around the same time as antiseptics, but it caught on about a decade sooner.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/07/29/130729fa_fact_...
Middleman on Heroku (with Nginx)
There is a major difference: physical manifestation.
Yeah! Haha the joke's on Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr, Yahoo! Answers, Photobucket, Digg (RIP), etc ... Those fools have been using a joke language and didn't even know it!

Seriously, the PHP hate gets old. It started off very much as a scratch to one man's itch. That man wasn't the best programmer ever (wouldn't even say top 10%, or even close), but he had an idea and executed it to make one of the most successful free products ever that has generated billions and billions of dollars for the world economy.

Can you say the same?
He didn't really get beaten up "Because of a Nigerian Email Scam." He got beaten up because he joined a bunch of criminals to aid and abet their criminal activity.

In other words, I don't think the lesson is about the dangers of replying to emails - it's about the dangers of hooking up with gangsters when you're not a seasoned gangster yourself.
Those are the concepts starting the beginner in the face, sure. Here some of the questions a beginner will have, phrased ~10x more clearly than a beginner would ever be able to phrase them:

1. What is an object?
2. What does it mean to "instantiate" an object?
3. What is a method?
4. What does it mean to "invoke" a method?
5. What is an attribute?
6. What does it mean to "get" an attribute?
7. What does it mean to "modify" an attribute?
8. What is introspection?

And so on, until we run into a concept through which we can explain something. The idea of an "object" is a big hurdle for beginners, especially if they don't have experience writing code — it seems like weird boilerplate. Likewise, "introspection" and other meta-concepts are incredibly challenging for beginners because they have a hard time stepping "out of the code," so to speak.
https://wiki.theory.org/YourLanguageSucks
Anything we can do to make criminal activity unromantic is a good thing my book.
Yes and no on the snark part. Don't we want them to "stop the bad guys"? That's the whole point of all of those agencies.

<extra-snark>
The FBI had information within the organization itself and still fumbled the ball: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03...

<snark-doubledown>
The CIA likely helped create Al Qaeda, so perhaps they were protecting their own. Or maybe they were too busy running drugs and plotting the overthrow of other governments to get the memo out.
</snark-doubledown>
</extra-snark>

Sorry, no love for any of these guys.
I'll raise a weak [citation needed] on the efficacy claim and argue that even generic Listerine tastes far better than salt water (either warm or cold).
While I understand why this was done (for the sake of comparability), I feel like its better to bite a bullet and slowly phase out broken functions over several versions.

Warn initially (few versions) and then raise exception/critical errors after. If developer isn't willing to update, chances are server isnt being updated either anyways.
William Moore is definitely rockin' the house.
My mother first saw one of these scams in 2001. She laughed and said, "Yeah, right."

Yes, she is a "normal."
Does the fact that it's used by large websites change the fact that it's a poorly designed language?
Texts from my son during the Arapahoe shooting
Well in fairness to Orin, that was what all the reporting seemed to say, was that the entire program had been summarily ruled unconstitutional (but that the ruling was stayed).
Your previous point:

> If your definition of morality is "a system for decreeing who should die" rather than "a system for ensuring everyone lives", you are the problem.

Isn't correct. No individualist chooses anything for anyone else less it be voluntary and without force/coercion.

> Justify your religious faith using objective data and control groups, or go back to church, please.

Resorting to name calling isn't going to win you any awards. I'm an atheist and I just simple believe freedom comes at a cost of having to have individual responsibility in terms of sustaining your welfare and direction. I come from a multi-generational welfare home. The state pacified my family, it didn't help them. I broke the cycle through individual merit and determination. This would still allow you to do as you wish, so long as others volunteer for your collective, and you don't infringe on an individuals rights.

My system permits yours to exist. Does yours permit mine to exist? That's the real moral crossroads we sit at. Also:

> Justify your religious faith using objective data and control groups

You know Philosophy isn't science right? The fact you ask for it screams you're a utopian statist who simply wants to be god. What is your alternative to individual freedom? A complex set of fluidly changing social rules that bind/limit us all that go beyond violence? Jail or Injure a Man/Woman because they disagree to cooperate with your rules? Just don't harm or tell me what to do and we'll be friends. Sounds like that's not reciprocal with you, and that I'd be required to follow other rules, lest I be jailed/killed/banished/boycotted.

Also, it seems like any anarchist society not predicated on either individualist or consensus based policy is prone to majority rule. What do you do with opposition? Punish them? Even if they're non violent. This all screams government, which ruins the anarchy...
S. Skukerman has that very distinct, wizard-like facial appearance. Quite intimidating.
> 2. A passing look at the docs would reveal that we do not use IGE that way, and instead use SHA1 for integrity check (see 'message key' here: https://core.telegram.org/mtproto/description). The problems you mentioned as endemic to IGE used for integrity verification, are therefore irrelevant in this case.

The consensus seems to be that you're doing encrypt-and-mac, where the mac is just a sha1? If that's true, then you're relying on broken properties of IGE (not provably UF-CMA), and your protocol does not provide provable integrity. That's an essential part of any secure protocol.

> As for KDF, going for slower provable algorithms used for each incoming\outgoing packet may be a preferred solution for projects aimed at the relatively small security crowd. But we don't really compete in this area, our competition is WhatsApp and other mass market messengers.

That's interesting, because the thing you've made up is actually slower than a provably secure KDF.
"I can believe a corrupt official would reach out to a random person for help"

Why is that? I would have thought that a corrupt official would be reaching out to his cronies, friends, cousins, etc. when he needed help with a scam.
Does the fact that it's a poorly designed language change the fact that it's a useful one?
"The decimal system is handy considering that people have 10 fingers."

How does having 10 fingers matter in a base ten system? If we're going by finger count a base11 system seems more appropriate - we'd have a unique symbol for each finger. And that way you can count all the values of the first position with your fingers and you only move to double digit numbers when you run out of fingers.

Anyway, as alluded to in the article, we should be using a base12 system:
http://io9.com/5977095/why-we-should-switch-to-a-base+12-cou...
Why didn't Google encrypt the fiber traffic between their data centers? I understand that private fiber links are supposed to be "secure", but telecoms like AT&T have a history of letting the NSA tap their networks.
And yet Google does release a lot of stuff. They are doing a lot to advance the state of the art in day-to-day computing. Operating systems, programming languages, lots of stuff.
I just executed (probably wrong word) about ten searches for derivations of Johnny Carson. You guys should go there and search for derivations of his name too. I figure nothing but butterflies and good things will come from their web team finding out who he is, and what freedom means.
I suspect the courts would agree that actual public things, like a twitter stream or publicly published photos, can be viewed and recorded without a warrant. And I would agree with you that that is right and proper.

I find your 'non-invasive' category to be odd though. I am not sure there is any legal basis for 'non-invasive' having any bearing on these issues, nor do I think it ought to. Recording the full contents of all your phone calls would be just as 'non-invasive' as recording the 'metadata' -- it would not 'disrupt the target' in any case. I don't see what 'non-invasive' has got to do with it.
Not always: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/mugshots/celebrity/music/david-...
Dyman & Associates Risk Management Projects: Physical Security
Critical Infrastructure Protection
Essential infrastructures produce vital benefits and services, upon which various sectors of our society depend. Our professional and experienced groups comprehend the risks to these infrastructures arising from natural and man-made calamities. While the Department of Homeland Security has identified 18 critical infrastructures resources that must be safeguarded, most of these assets are owned by the private sector.
Registered two hours ago and you're taking offense to criticism of their marketing. Coincidence?
Take $1,000, Trade Once a Day, Make $264 Billion—You Could Have Done It in 2013
That law already exists[1]. Also, Clapper could potentially be held in Contempt of Congress[2].

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perjury

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_Congress
NSA goes on 60 Minutes: the definitive facts behind CBS's flawed report
> Chief among them is the fact that none of the 354 database tables containing social security numbers were encrypted. Using strong cryptography to protect such "at rest" PII has long been considered a best practice in government and corporate data security.

Really? Although I don't work in that field ('government and corporate data security', or generally anything where we have to deal with SSN's and such) -- that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Encrypted database tables? I've never even heard of that. Can someone who does work in this domain tell us if this makes any sense at all, or translate this into what it actually means technically?

(On the other hand, the fact that 354 database tables existed with SSN's is a red flag in the first place, clearly. There's plenty of clear problems with what was described, I'm just curious about this alleged 'encrypted database table best practice')
Like Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein?
Fantastic. The villains back in the day sure knew how to dress. Contrast them to today's versions: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/file/mug-shots-121313
How far we've fallen...
No, but it certainly puts the importance of good language design in perspective.

We tend to overvalue good design just for good design's sake.
Nothing in this discussion mentions anything broken, though.
The site is extremely slow at the moment. In case anyone has trouble accessing it, I managed to load it, and here's the relevant bit:

Well, there were other factors in play there. htmlspecialchars was a
very early function. Back when PHP had less than 100 functions and the
function hashing mechanism was strlen(). In order to get a nice hash
distribution of function names across the various function name lengths
names were picked specifically to make them fit into a specific length
bucket. This was circa late 1994 when PHP was a tool just for my own
personal use and I wasn't too worried about not being able to remember
the few function names.
I like his quotes:

> I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I'll just restart apache every 10 requests.

> I was really, really bad at writing parsers. I still am really bad at writing parsers. We have things like protected properties. We have abstract methods. We have all this stuff that your computer science teacher told you you should be using. I don't care about this crap at all.

(from http://axonflux.com/5-quotes-by-the-creator-of-php-rasmus-le...)
Arguments from popularity can be amusing when laden with sarcasm, but that doesn't make them valid arguments.

I'd say PHP is and has been popular more because it's easy to hire an army of self-trained "php developers" for peanuts than because it is a "good" language.
Right, so "magic" is acceptable as long as it's "magic we endorse".

Looking at it from the outside, there's no serious difference.
"You might like..."

My peeve is when they're about two paragraphs into the article. I've just started reading, why are you trying to get me to leave already?
I was looking at old photos from the 40's of my relatives in rural North Dakota. They look better than any photo I've ever taken. Uncle Joe was a spiffy dresser (so were his kids and wife). He also was dirt poor, so I'm a bit shocked at how well he is dressed.
"... 1,115 staff had joined the strike at three sites, but there had been no delays to deliveries."

I laughed out loud when I read this. It sounds like Amazon is the only company who's giving jobs out to the slackers. Then the slackers are expected to work hard, can't meet those expectations, so they go on strike. Meanwhile Amazon is unaffected. Amazing.
journalism should be something people develop on the side while still maintaining their primary work skillset (with industry-specific skills).

I really love the idea of this, but I think its infeasible given time constraints in every industry, including press. I do think there is room and cross-disciplinary talent in media organizations for a journalist reporting on a (for example) programming heavy topic to grab someone from their engineering staff to collaborate and then share a by-line. If you have someone with domain knowledge in-house you might actually save research time and get a better article even with more people working on it.
Some of it probably has to do with the fact that everyone back then dressed better. MUCH better. Nowadays it's black people with T-shirts that are WAY too big for them, or chubby hairy white people with nothing but a tank top and shorts.
Ask HN: how do I get myself ready for the job market again?
I've been recently growing frustrated at my job - a few key people who I just can't seem to click with and a technology stack that is getting better but still moving glacially. For the most part, I love it, and I'm happy with a secure job where I can stretch my legs. I'm young, though, only twenty four. As much as I love it, it seems like there could be something better out there, and I think I'm finally ready to start looking. The problem is, it's been a while since I actually had a job interview.

Even worse, this job was/is my only technical interview. Everything else was bog standard retail jobs. I feel like I don't even know how to look for a good job anymore. It used to be trying to find the best hourly rate, but now I think about things like "what's going to give me the most happiness?" or "what kind of job would help me keep my skillset sharp and stay relevant?". It's frustrating to feel like I'm good at my job but not know how to find myself another one.

So, I turn to you Hacker News. Do you have any tips on how I should get myself in shape to try and find another, better job? Job boards to look at? Cover letter secrets? Are cover letters still even a thing? Should I delete my Twitter account? Help. :(
Well, points for honesty, I guess.
Just as Microsoft Windows is still the largest desktop OS, but nobody seems to care. It is entirely possible to have continued dominance of industry (X) only to find that the value of dominating industry (X) isn't what it used to be...
You'd have to qualify what "poorly designed" means or even what language you're talking about. In that mail, Lerdorf recounts his time writing PHP/FI nearly twenty years ago. It's like judging the current Linux kernel based on the early version Linus Torvalds was using in his lab around the same time.
> I'm thinking that the repository could be moved out of the working directory and placed in its own file that's not invisible.

Symlinks are your friends.

> then repos would be portable and you could ftp them.

tar might come in handy.

> The backup functionality could be separated from the history-tracking functionality, so you could make backups freely without adding noise to the commit history. A backup would basically be a tarball that you could append to a repo file, taking advantage of previous entries for compression.

You can already do this. You can have commits without ancestors or descendants in your repository, and they will still benefit from delta compression.
I've written a few thousand lines of PHP in the last year or so. Every time I do, I want to weep.

It might be better than Perl, but not by much.
Because "No" means no?