skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And that's where both the press and government seem to have a blind spot. Flying a drone autonomously for thousands of miles has been done in university-level projects, years ago. How long before some cheap drone launched from heck knows where drops a small explosive on a government building in the US? What will we do? Launch a global war, lashing out against an unknown assailant? Put drones over our skies to hunt unknown Bad Guy drones?

Drone warfare is the worst kind of undeclared war: It's highly prone to backlash, but so cheap it is irresistible to politicians and military leaders.
Thank you for the honest feedback and the good wishes.

Here's why we think our subscription model makes sense: In our evaluation (heliumhq.com/AutomatingGmailWithHelium.pdf), developing a script with Helium took 75% less effort (man-days) and 66% less code than a script written in pure Selenium. The average developer salary in the US in 2010 was $90k a year(http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer...). Say this developer works 260 days a year, so makes roughly $350 a day. If it doesn't take him 75%, but only 25% less effort to write and maintain some web automation code, then each day of him working with Helium saves the company $87.5. This means that after about 11 working days, using Helium will have paid off, leaving potentially 249 more days in the year during which to reap Helium's benefits.
I felt the same way, and then I noticed that the authors included a Ballmer Mode.

Also, I learned that someone's made a breathalyzer attachment for the Arduino (should have been obvious, in retrospect). YMMV, but it was a good use of my 60 seconds.
And just to make drive a little bit the point home: there are quite a few people suspected of terrorism in the US, like one French spy who blew the rainbow warrior, quite a few people from Viña del Mar, US citizen who passed through ESMA in Bs As, probably a few assassins from the mossad etc. And if a pressure cooker is a weapon of mass destruction, I'm pretty sure a hellfire is, too.
No I'm not arguing, my point is that the terminology is what makes people so comfortable with it. It's a lot easier to be angry about a pilot or a gunner accidentally killing someone than it is to get angry about a drone, because I think a lot of people believe that drones are autonomous craft that fly around without being piloted. It's in the name "drone."

I think that's why the U.S. military popularizes the term drone over "unmanned aircraft" which even then isn't true - it's a remotely manned aircraft.
NSA Coworker Remembers Edward Snowden: "A Genius Among Geniuses"
And... question. Why don't you teach newbies and then you hire them?
>> It's not a question of "ease".

I think the previous commenter was speaking on the level of disconnect between a drone pilot and their intended targets. It's much, much easier for someone to go through with clicking a button and watching an explosion on a screen than it is to say, murder each of those people if they were in the same room.
An interesting topic for a book turns into profit, I am wholly unsurprised. Congrats on your success :)

I've been curious about trying something similar, but I don't want to put my home address in emails to a mailing list. Did you end up using your address or doing something like a PO box?
I think it is time for a world-wide ban on armed drones, period.

Just like we have international treaties for other horrible things like mustard gas.

Do all the reconnaissance you can get away with. But I don't want a tired, overworked, morally disconnected 20-something sitting in a trailer somewhere in the US, pulling a trigger to kill unquantifiable targets anywhere in the world. Or any other country doing it to anyone else for that matter.
I've tried l-theanine after finding it was the active ingredient in those "neuro bliss" drinks (and having noticed a positive effect, placebo or otherwise, from them). I honestly didn't notice a whole lot of difference taking the extract solo, but I'll give it another shot as I still have a bunch of them. Thanks.
A desingeneer.
They get droned into submission.
No, we'd insist that every wedding have a security drone to protect that wedding from other drones. When you ground drones, then only the terrorists have drones.
Why software is eating the world
Who says that it does matter? I think the reaction would have been very similar if a manned aircraft had bombed the wedding party. Do you have any recent instances of mass civilian casualties resulting from a "conventional" bomb strike that got ignored?
If you ever feel like reliving a bit of your past the Game Boy Advance uses the ARMv3 instruction set. With an easily available flash cart you have a cool little portable system to develop on.
Would you think we can apply this same argument when it happens to be an american wedding?? Hell no. drones or no drones, we will definitely have some policy changes and definitely some heads will roll.
When we declare war on Yemen you'll be right. This is more akin to the bombings in Cambodia.
The questions accepting both the correct answer and the slighly incorrect answer I can understand. The "rule of law"-question, however, seemed more serious. I really wonder how things like that come to be.
It is so annoying when the hyperbole grows to the point of ridiculousness.

You can argue about force projection all you want but the US is not trying to engage in some warfare campaign against the entire planet.
the problem is not coming up with hard passwords. the problem is trying to remember all of them across the litany of places that require them (many with varying policies for creating "safe" passwords). if we can solve the "remembering" part, users wouldn't even need to be asked to create a pw (it would simply be assigned)
Nice service :)
The Mega Man games had amazing music too, but I think Metroid still stands out as one of the best examples of fantastic 8 bit music. Haunting!
IMO, there has been a merging of marketable elements of geek culture into the mainstream. Merchendise is, above all, sellable, and if you can do it, sellable to a broad audience. In one perspective on the matter, it was inevitable: fans are people highly predisposed to purchase merch; business has a vested interest in boosting sales of branded merch and executing on a spinoff and toy tie-in model.

Popular culture is, quite bluntly, popular, and things like movies have a broad appeal - certainly the drama of life played out on the big screen is more broadly attractive than #include <beer.h>.

All that going to say that it's no real wonder that ThinkGeek "sold out" to double down on profitable merch. I just wish I could still get an 11" Tux to terrify the non-Linux users of my workplace & home.
As someone not from the US, I despise what the NSA does (warrantless spying), but it's not even in the same league as these drone strikes. Not even close.

I don't understand why the rest of the world is OK with this. I really don't.
Fighter pilots now have very little risk of being shot down. The only real difference is the cost like you mentioned.
If only. All the links I can find are behind paywalls, but do a search for "drone wedding" from 2004 to 2007, and then become sad.
I'm guessing the test was not written by a lawyer, is how.
The Leadership Selection Funnel
Anarchism is against private property, not personal property.

It has no issue owning your own house, car, laptop, etc etc. That is yours and does not belong to the state, or 'everyone', or anyone else. It just does not want rent seeking; owning other peoples' homes and means of production, or hoarding otherwise (eg owning vast tracts of land you do not use). So for example a factory should be owned by it's workers.
The countervailing argument to "voluntary exchange" is that many trades are highly unequal, and in extreme cases, difficult to distinguish from choices made under duress (starvation vs. sweatshop, expensive medication vs. death, etc)

On top of that, trades that involve large quantities of capital must still rely upon law and violence to guard ownership, and therefore at least somewhat subject to public jurisdiction. The idea that land, or mineral rights, or intellectual property belongs exclusively to either (a) an individual, (b) a corporation, (c) a state, or (d) everybody, are all legal fictions and voluntary illusions. Other than perhaps the clothes on one's back, property is not a natural right (in the sense of natural law). We made it up. For better or worse, we should take responsibility for the relationship between private capital and the social contract, even if it is for the purpose of maintaining private ownership.

I can accept the argument that interfering with the quasi-evolutionary capitalist engine does more harm than good, and that capitalism is the worst system, except for all the others. But given the history of unearned legacy wealth, systemic ethnic and national oppression, and the state's role in maintaining disproportionate advantages for those with capital, calling the trades that occur between haves and have-nots "voluntary" seems a little disingenuous.
Show HN: Professional Reports from Google Analytics Data [New Tool]
Look at it this way: it makes killing people with targeted missiles that much cheaper, which means they will want to do more of it, not just to "important targets", but to "associated targets", too.

It's basically the NSA equivalent of mass spying. If spying becomes so cheap that they can just do it to everyone, then they're thinking "why not"? Same with drone striking. If it ends up costing them only like $10,000 per target - why not kill the associated forces, too? You know...just to be on the "safe side".
friends and family of the innocent killed won't be friendly with americans ever
I find it hard to believe that it's suggested people remember passwords. I would suspect that anyone who knows anything about security would be using something like LastPass to generate and store passwords.
Clarification: I don't mean that the pilot has an itchy trigger finger, I mean the system or decision maker. I see how the two might be confused based on my original comment.

The commander/politician/leader is answerable and responsible for his soldiers, as such if the risk to the soldier's life is taken out of equation an attack suddenly begins to make more sense as it carrier lower risk & lower costs, therefore requiring less justification.
That's not new either. The US carried out airstrikes in Iraq throughout the 90s despite not being "at war".
Neither the pilot of a fighter/bomber or a drone gets to decide on the targets. They're given orders from above based on the intel provided to the commanders. So the issue isn't itchy trigger finger of the pilot, but itchy trigger finger of the commanders. The commanders have demonstrated over the last decade a willingness to send drones into situations they would not send fighters/bombers. There are few instances of US incursions with fighter aircraft over the last few years compared to the number of incursions with drones.
Every russian IT company is registered elsewhere, because justice system.
How a single Tumblr post turned this unknown book into a bestseller
I'll try a pitiful attempt at a TLDR, feel free to try an improve it (if you can):

The IRS has extremely strong opinions on what it means legally to be a contractor. However you can easily avoid the legal issues and run a company as if it were full of contractors, if you want, by merely treating them legally as employees but treat them managerially (sorta) as contractors. And at least anecdotally sometimes this works really well.

Or a really short TLDR is contemplate the building trades and the role of a general contractor, and run your (probably) non construction company that way.
Bush continually did much more heinous shit on a constant almost daily basis than just a semi-accidental strike somewhere.

So no, not really. Republicans are the ones halting congress in every single way and doing what you just suggested. It is the entire point of the party. Regressivism is extremely easy, just fight against any changes and if someone ever actually manages to change anything your platform is to change it back. Republicans and Democrats do not do the same thing, I am so tired of hearing about this.
Interesting. We have a ton of work put into Selenium already so switching costs would be rather high for our team. But probably worth keeping an eye on this project.

You're going to have some big obstacles to overcome trying to get people to pay for this versus using Selenium.
Max file size?
> The US National Security Agency is considering offering an amnesty to fugitive intelligence contractor Edward Snowden if he agrees to stop leaking secret documents, an NSA official says.

That means as bad for the NSA as giving amnesty would be, they consider remaining documents worse.

That means however bad you've found the revelations so far, expect worse to come.

As for Snowden, I presume he's smart enough to realize amnesty from the NSA leaves dozens of other government entities or just angry people to get him, whether legally or illegally, who already flout the Constitution, lie, illegally detain and send people to countries that torture, etc.
A summary of the evidence that most published research is false
The Last Taboo: coming out as an atheist politician in USA
https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/about
PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. et Cie, S.C.A. is duly licenced as a Luxembourg credit institution
Almost, but not quite. The difference would be that the US isn't killing civilians just for the sake of killing civilians to cause terror.
"However, as long as 99% of their targets are bad guys, Americans are going to continue supporting the program."

The problem here is that 100% of the targets are bad guys while seemingly a very low percentage of the casualties are. Americans continue to support the program because the media does not do it's job. Instead they act as a mouth piece, a cheer leader, instead of doing actual journalism.

The War on Terror, much like the War on Drugs, is a utter failure. It has ZERO chance of being successful because of tactics like this.
Here's something that will blow your mind. EVERY country considers its own citizens to have more rights than other countries. Otherwise we wouldn't have millions of people dying every year by preventable means. And there wouldn't be widespread despisement of refugees.
This is a really neat article. One thing: the author falls victim to a common, unfortunate mistake in calculating the percentage gains: ...120 cycles. That’s a 30-percent speed-up. and then ...98 cycles. Compared to the original code, that’s 60 percent faster.

The right way to calculate this figure is (t1 - t0)/t0, rather than the author's formula which seems to be (t1 - t0)/t1. For instance: (157 - 98)/98 = 60%, but the actual amount is (157 - 98)/157 = a 38% speed up. A heuristic: 60% of 157 will be much more than 60 (since 60% of 100 = 60), which means a 60% speed up would reduce the speed to below 97 cycles.

It gets even more misleading the more efficient it gets: Adding up the cycles, the total was just 1689. I had shaved almost 1200 cycles off of my friend’s code. That’s a 70 percent speed-up! The author has 1200/1689 = 71%, but the correct numbers yield 1200/(1689+1200) = 42%.

Not that I don't think these are significant gains, but it's just misleading to label them like this. If you've removed less than half the cycles, there's no way you've seen a 70% speed up.
This. I'm working as a consultant, and I see the same thing over and over again. There aren't many "IT Managers" that are competent at what they're doing. If you are good at what you are doing (which might be programming), go and look for an environment with like-minded individuals with a sense of craftsmanship and pride in their work. Everything else will suck the life out of you.
If the United States had firebombed Denver instead of Dresden, yes, the US government would have made sure it didn't happen again.
Troika consultancies: A multi-million euro business beyond scrutiny
Harold and the Purple Crayon

http://www.amazon.com/Harold-Purple-Crayon-Anniversary-Editi...
What's scotu?
1 GB
Informing them in this instance does seem more like the situation where you tell your bank your traveling overseas between X and Y.

It's reasonable to assume a flood of cash would be enough to set off various alarms.

It is a shame you have to be so wary of PayPal, but in this case it did lead them to do what would be the right thing no matter what you were using to cover payment processing.
> Most managers will instinctively delegate dreadful tasks. That's part of the fun of management.

I think this becomes one of the reasons that so many managers end up being viewed in a negative light.

Surely part of a manager's job is to protect the team from external pressures.
The decision to delegate should be made on the basis of the impact of delegating / not delegating, not on how dreadful the task is.
I have found it mostly has to do with the care letters are written with. An e-mail is like talking in real life, in many cases someone responds to it right away and if there is any misunderstanding you can correct it right there with another e-mail. In many cases a letter is much more formal, you have to take a little bit of care to make sure the message is getting across right the first time.
Open != API
When I took my test, most of the people in the waiting room were struggling with basic English. They tested my ability to write English by asking me to write the phrase, "The US flag has 50 stripes", but I got it wrong because I wrote "fifty" instead of using Arabic numerals, and they awkwardly discussed whether or not to tell me my mistake and ask me to redo it, or fail me. They tested my ability to read by showing me three similar sentences, reading one aloud, and having me point at the one they had read. The test questions and answers are published online for the same types of people who might be challenged by these questions: people who haven't patiently gone through the whole process. None of it really assesses your ability to communicate in America or participate in the democratic process.

This article feels like picking at the unlikelihood of the legal situation in Dr. Doolittle. "Animals have been talking this whole time..." -- Josh Sneed.
I'm one, but I've had 26 years of experience in programming and software development to learn the stacks. At the company I work for arguably 4 of the 8 developers are full stack developers, so we can't be that rare.

One thing that I'm not seeing here is the long view. Sure, learn JavaScript, but recognize that due to its sub-standard nature it will be a transitional technology until a better run-time for web apps than web browsers comes along. JavaScript's popularity now is akin to the massive success of Visual Basic were a large number of adequately skilled programmers could crank out the needed business applications. JavasScript allows for much the same, and there's nothing wrong with that, it's just not something that will last into the future. So instead of learning JavaScript, learn how to program, how to develop software, and how to keep your fire alive so you want to learn the new stuff that will eventually replace what you're using now.

I sure as heck don't want to go back to Visual Basic, and I look forward to the day we don't have the HTML/CSS/JavaScript morass to build our software on.
Exactly this. I'm not a US citizen and I can not remember the last time someone spoke about the United States as something we should emulate or as a country we should support. Political panels with topics like "Are the US still our allies?" are popping up around me and I personally wouldn't affirm that statement. There is an overall feeling of meddling in other people's affairs associated with most US actions nowadays.

Germany already has declined participating in the attack on Iraq, but still provides plenty of passive (possibly also some active, even though that would be illegal) support (logistics, allowing air bases) and most people still perceive it as the right action.

It is hard to find recent surveys on the topic and especially Transatlantic Trends seems to refuse to ask the question if Europe should continue to support US military actions further and focuses mainly on the NATO (neither drone strikes nor the Iraq War are NATO operations).
>Why does the flag have 13 stripes? The official answer: "because there were 13 original colonies." In fact, the flag has 13 stripes for the 13 original states.

Maybe I misunderstand the point, but Delaware was the first state to be granted statehood in 1787, a full 10 years after the "Betsy Ross" flag with 13 stripes was in use. If you're going to write a super-pedantic article, you should be super-accurate too.
It's very easy to not agree with the way the US government handles these sort of things, but you have to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are not doing this for shits and giggles.

It might seem nationalistic to some but it reminds me of a quote from "A Few Good Men" -

Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.
I wouldn't go that far. They've adapted over the years, just like our economy/government has gone from Capitalism to Corporatism.
> I had to make sure that my searches didn't use US selectors, such as a US phone number or IP address.

i.e. "we aggressively spy on all U.S. citizens, but we try really hard not to look at that data."
My thoughts exactly. I love to learn new things, but they have to be interesting. As a C#/Unity3d game developer, most books and articles I've read lately for work been about data structures, algorithms, high-level OOP and functional programming concepts. May be it's my personal taste, but quirks of IE developer's code and implementation details of CSS sound like a lot more boring things to learn.
I read through the comments and see you are catching a lot of flack for being closed source and daring to charge. My advice, do what you think makes sense for your company. You seem to have already done some cursory market research and I am guessing based on that you've decided on your current course of action...stick with it unless you have a good reason to change direction.

Feedback is definitely important and useful but take it with a grain of salt. The HN crowd is a rather biased one and doesn't really reflect the broader dev world. Maybe try attending some dev meetups where you are likely to get a more diverse opinion.

You've already quit your day job to do this, unless one of these folks is going to be paying your rent, you should absolutely focus on monetizing your product.

In terms of the open vs closed source issue, I do agree that dev products should make their source code available, but that is only so it is easy to fix problems and address security concerns. You don't have to make it "open source", as in: allow people to freely alter and redistribute. I use this same approach with my company's product, which is also a dev tool (see my profile if you want to check it out).