skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is great - they are making it worse for themselves!

Before the Snowden revelations came along nobody took you seriously if you thought we lived in a world of mass surveillance. Now we all know all too well that we do.

As the scandal unravels the government are clinging to the 'terrorism' fig leaf. They haven't got anything else, no other plausible excuse for what they have been up to. Nobody has completely seen through it yet, or, if they have then they haven't shared with the rest of the world exactly what it is that they are hiding. (There is something else going on, the 'al-qaeda' thing is just a ruse, however nobody really believes that it is a complete, total, utter sham of emptiness. We aren't there yet...)

They are going to have to squirm for a little bit longer before the grand reveal. Exactly who steps up to do this is not known, however, there are plenty of candidates out there, getting bolder by the day. One thing is for certain though, that grand reveal will happen and, when it does, this NSA spying lark will be put into perspective. That perspective will show the spying story so far to be nothing more than an appetizing 'light snack' before the immensely satisfying main course. Compared to what we have got coming the fall of the Berlin Wall was nothing!

Anyone care to guess what the ace is that trumps the government's 'terrorism' card? (There is one!)
I've written dozens of posts about it. Maybe peruse some of the posts here: http://notonlyluck.com/category/culture/
tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment. We all prefer different indentation sizes, and this technique takes care of that issue. If you want an indentation size of 2 [spaces], go for it, if you want 8, no problem.
Target shoppers undeterred by data breach; welcome 10 percent discount
I think that's a bad example, because your TryParse function can be thought of as returning a value wrapped in a monad. A Maybe monad, to be specific. In Haskell:

case (tryParse s) of
Just n -> putStrLn "Parsed " ++ (show n)
Nothing -> putStrLn (s ++ " was not an integer")

Nothing is a very convenient little concept: It's a value which isn't a 'legitimate' value in any context. It's always a flag value. In C, for example, there's no way to have a flag value of type int in this context, because tryParse could conceivably return any value of type int as its legitimate result. It's also wonderfully conceptually clean: The function either just returns a legitimate value or it returns nothing legitimate at all, and you always know which it did. The point is, however, it only returns one value, and doesn't rely on any out-of-band communications through errno or similar.

If you want to get fancy, you can use the Either monad. This can allow you to say why a parse failed, for example:

case (tryParse s) of
Left n -> putStrLn "Parsed " ++ (show n)
Right m -> putStrLn "Parse of " ++ s ++ " failed because " ++ m

In this case, tryParse would have the type:

tryParse :: String -> Either Int String

The point here is, you still only return one value, but they can be either of two different kinds of value, as distinguished by being tagged either Left or Right, and can even be different types. Again, one value, no out-of-band signalling.

And, of course, Haskell has tuples. You can do interesting things without them, however.
Said hearing can be watched here [1]. The industry speaks around the 30min mark.

[1] http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/MarketingC
Regarding corruption I just stumbled upon this the other day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_corruption
> *The ideal way to do this is to generate an SSL certificate for the CloudFront distribution, but Amazon charges you $7,200 per year for that privilege: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/

Maybe using SSL as an opportunity for a premium price gouge was smart business practice in the 90s. But these days, it's wrong.

Charge for the actual cost. Even add your customary markup. But not some arbitrary $7200 fee.

It may be legal, but it's unethical. Until they change it, Jeff Bezos and Werner Vogels should be ashamed of doing this.
I don't see a good explanation of how this works and how it fixes DNS issues.

How this particular proposal works was outlined in the thread. It assumes that the reader knows enough about how Namecoin and DNS work for it to be obvious how an implementation would be carried out.

Re: "how it fixes DNS issues", you might find this document interesting (about a Namecoin-based DNS system called DNSNMC):

http://okturtles.com/other/dnsnmc_okturtles_overview.pdf
They mention one person's cost for a PV system with batteries in the article, it was $14,800. (Look for "Hayashi bought a system with batteries"). It also states the buyer will be able to recoup his upfront cost in 2 years thanks to tax credits.

That doesn't seem too bad.
However, European privacy directives contain explicit exemptions for many governmental organizations, including the EU itself, national security, taxation, and policing, and would not have protected citizens against the abuses suffered at the hands of fascist or communist governments

It's interesting to compare: in the US, corporate databases == good , government databases == bad, and it appears the exact opposite in the EU. Then there's this:

EU directives are addressed to the member states, and aren't legally binding for citizens in principle. The member states must transpose the directive into internal law. Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of personal data had to be transposed by the end of 1998. All member states have enacted their own data protection legislation.

Which just makes me think from where we are today, neither approach seems to be ok for the avg person, on top of the behaviors and incentives for individuals/companies/governments aren't lining up. What's going to give for something to fall which ever way (or is there really anything to give way at all)?
Out of curiosity, why is none of northern Africa mapped? I'm even more surprised none of Turkey is mapped... they even have positions there [1], so I'm guessing it's not an opposition to Google by the government.

[1] http://www.google.com/about/jobs/locations/istanbul/
Yeah, that sucks. Even living near the Caltrain (in the south bay) would have been okay (1 hour to get to SF, which is not that bad).

SF is quite expensive. Another option for the future is to live in the East Bay (Oakland or Berkeley), near a BART station.

I see now that you listed Android under your "Interests," which is okay, but it will lead many employers to think you actually have experience with Android. If you want to get into Android development, the burden is on you to teach yourself the basics and get an app into the Play store. Doing this will greatly improve your chances of getting an internship with Android dev. Most startups are not actually interested in teaching intern on the job. Most startups use internships as an extended interview.
Or perhaps maptag?
http://playmaptag.appspot.com/

Disclaimer: created by a friend.
CDC - Estimates of new HIV infections in the United States
> I'm not sure that you can enforce the human/address connection in software.

It's a hard challenge, but not impossible. Online banking (mostly) works because it's possible.
...and I suspect oil prices will continue to rise rapidly in the next decade.

That was my thinking when I bought a bunch of oil ETFs a few years ago.

Oops.
I did, and sections from that blog post were quoted in the link, and the specific rationale was dissected and questioned.
Holiday banter may go something like this: "Carnival booths, lawyers and politicians maybe the most honest... But there was once this company called Telegram that went the way of its namesake. Blah blah... for screwing over a Russian guy in a PR disaster of an unpaid $200k contest award. Maybe they should have offered a canned ham instead."
I'd say not so much as advocated by the blogosphere (which can be annoying, as fans of almost anything often are), but by the people actually designing and using FP languages.

In any case, there is certainly valid criticism of FP, but Bracha's just isn't it. My impression is that the guy -- as clever as he may be in other areas -- barely understands FP, and makes disparaging remarks about things he isn't familiar with. Read his blog; every assertion he makes is shown to be incorrect or misleading by people who do understand FP, like Tony Morris or (very politely) Philip Wadler himself.
"Its not that Windows can't handle drawing Macintosh looking buttons or something."

It's an unfortunate misconception about Mac OS X's UI that it's just a pretty skin. It really isn't, and this is why people complain about things not 'feeling' right.

OS X's UI is all about exposing direct manipulation. When you change a setting in OS X, its effects are supposed to ripple through the UI instantly, without having to click "Ok". There's no "Cancel" either, because the cancel action should be obvious: simply uncheck whatever you just checked.

In other words, OS X acts like a light switch: you should feel free to turn it on or off as much as possible. Windows acts like a light switch that not only requires you to confirm turning it on or off, but where the switch actually closes itself off every time you change it, requiring you to open it up again.

The evolution of web apps in the 2000s is explained by the fact that web developers switched to Mac en masse. As a result, web apps slowly but surely adopted a similar model. They didn't just become prettier, but they drastically simplified their model, moved away from the "open new form, fill out form, submit form, see result" model to a text view turning into a text field and then back again, all without ever leaving the page.

There's basically an entire contingent of programmers who are utterly blind to all this. They operate computers using the mental model of how the hardware and software works, and then laugh at users who feel it makes no sense. In fact, it is the computer that makes no sense, and doesn't act like any other object in your house.

So I disagree that it has nothing to do with engineering. It really does, but it's about the kind of engineering that simply isn't on most programmer's radars. It solves problems they don't have, because they work around them in their heads every time they use it, so the computer doesn't have to.

Case in point: I go to install a game on Steam. It tells me I don't have enough disk space available. I go remove some files to make room. The total in Steam's dialog does not update. Their "disk space available" display is basically a lie, yet it's a lie that people simply accept as "how things are".
What about producing products that kill people (the infant formula in China with plastic in it) in the name of higher profit? Free market often causes irreparable harm. What about farming all the fish out of the sea? Another example of the free market.

There are some great aspects of the free market and some terrible ones.

People have been dealing with these issues for thousands of years. See those Sumerian? scripts proscribing punishment to a carpenter if a house he/she builds collapses.
Look up the statistics for how men vs women participate in direct violence and violence by proxy, and you'll see why you're wrong.
Yet you can't actually use Netflix on FreeBSD.
No you're right, it's Bitcoin with a few extra transaction types.

It seems like a pretty fundamental problem...Namecoin uses a system that enforces consistency, so you can't make it depend on a system that doesn't enforce consistency without breaking it.
the devil really is in the details, though, and it's worth seeing what these details are!
a) A predictable low rate of inflation is good for a currency.

b) Yes, that's my point.

c) I didn't say it was "valued in dollars" I said it was priced in dollars. Point me at a liquid oil futures contract not priced in USD that outpaces Brent or WTI and I'll retract my comment.

d) Wat.

e) I have $250k in the bank. Bank blows up. FDIC gives me back $250k. What don't you understand?
Define "long way"? HECO's price per kWh look pretty steep to me, $0.35 in Oahu:
http://www.heco.com/heco/Residential/Electric-Rates/Average-...

Meanwhile PV costs keep going down.
An Introductory 4.4BSD Interprocess Communication Tutorial
DLC - downloadable content.
The price per kWh is sky-high there - that said, I'm surprised with that high a bill. What on earth was using that much energy?
I don't get it. If it's not secure why can't the message be revealed? What's the value of breaking someone's crypto if you are still unable to see the data unencrypted? Was the recipe for decryption given, with the actual decryption being much harder (terms so narrow, as you say)?
In which a collection of keys are gathered and put to good use
Remarkably stupid. Did Joe or even John Kennedy philander more than J.P. Morgan? Has anyone in a hedge fund today the imagination to dream up the schemes of Collis Huntington or the first Harriman? Did John D. Rockefeller win a name for honest dealing?

And (as that proto-wasp Henry Adams pointed out) some things can be more harmful than simple corruption. It would be hard to find anyone now who thinks that John Foster Dulles's influence was anything but harmful. And how about Robert McNamara (whose name looks might Irish, by the way)?
I spend a bunch of money buying electricity to run my electric kettle but that doesn't mean there's a huge market for selling hot water.
If I understand correctly, it's because the frequency it is listening to is much higher than normal music. Also possibly because the algorithm is meant to deal with noise.
laugh-out-loud for 1970

Yep, that explains quite a bit.
[s]I may have misinterpreted this, but to me it seems as though all this provides is two things: 1) Netflix get some technology for free from which they can profit and 2) Netflix get to boast about using free/open software.

I think instead of a page thanking FreeBSD for software, Netflix, alongside many other large companies who use free software, could make more of an effort to actually contribute to the software proportionally to their use of it.[/s]

I apologise, clearly I had misinterpreted it and was wrong!
Peaker plants will be out of business before the base-load generators.

Unless we reconcile those, we'll see a death spiral for utilities.
Some of my arithmetic is off; I typed
too fast, and it's too late to edit now.
But broadly the lesson remains: 100,000
uniques can yield enough revenue so that
a one person company will be comfortable
financially, i.e., enough to pay the
rent, buy groceries, take a pretty
girl to a movie, and have cash enough for more
servers, and if those servers stay busy,
then he is on his way to more servers and
revenue and, then, hiring.

I, too, did mention that there are cases where
have to be in a hurry so that then some equity
funding could be crucial.

For the young, inexperienced readers of HN,
I'm sorry: HN is helping them get educated,
and there is a lot on the Internet, e.g.,
at Fred Wilson's AVC.com. But help for the
young or not, the projects VCs are interested
in are exceptional which, we have to expect,
filters out a lot of people for various reasons.
Tough to make a $1 billion; the economy is
not big enough for everyone to make $1 billion.

For being slow to market, my approach is to have
done some original research that few others will
want or be able to do, and until I am successful
nearly no one will try to do. Then if I am
successful, they will be too late.

But I've
had a long time, e.g., mud wrestling with
Microsoft's software, learning that VCs
don't look at projects anything like I do,
etc., without any significant progress by
competition.

A common claim is that any idea
entrepreneur A thinks of some entrepreneur
B thought of before. Of course, this is silly
because among all people who thought of
the idea, there has to be a first person
and, then, for that first person there wasn't anyone before. Again,
that first person is exceptional, as is usually
necessary to make $1 billion.

In picking projects, I would recommend
picking one where can do some original
research that few in IT are able to do
and have that research be an 'unfair'
advantage and a technological barrier
to entry.

Of the "tons of ways to approach a problem",
I would urge others to pick some ways
that help make the path to success easier.
E.g., now and for a few years, exploit
an 8 core server for $1500. E.g., if
have to be in a mad rush to get to market,
then pick another project. If have much
doubt about 'product-market fit', then
pick a project that right from the beginning
has very little such doubt, e.g., like
a safe, effective, cheap one pill cure for
any cancer. If need a big team long before
revenue enough to pay them, then pick
another project. My project, about to
have all the software needed to go live,
has several simple Web pages, two
more complicated ones, and
two internal server programs with a total
of 24,361 source code lines and
6,615 source code statements.
Not a lot of code. There is a little
more code that runs maybe once a
day in 'batch'. So, it's a one person
project.

There is an old piece of advice that
a key to success in research is
good project selection -- similarly
for entrepreneurship.
Wish I knew. I know most people didn't use A/C at all, and I did, so that may have been part of it.
What's wrong with using the https on drj6nl5tupx60.cloudfront.net? Honest question.. no one is going to notice if they are getting assets on cdn.company.com vs drj6nl5tupx60.cloudfront.net, right?
Yeah, that sounds about right. I briefly worked at a startup where the founder had received funding from Mark while they were at a Superbowl party together. He'd be an interesting guy to meet.
Okay, so there would be no need for user interface and forcing user to learn all these things. They would arrange the inputs (say a row and columns). All the user needs to know is how to arrange the columns and rows and upload it.

Then the server would read the CSV, and process and execute it.

An example would be a bulk job processing service. Instead of logging in to a web app, clicking 'Add New Job', filling out all the required text fields (Title, Job Date, Description etc.), they would simply write it on each column. To add more jobs, just add more rows in spreadsheet.

Upload the data, and get back CSV file report of everything that was finished.

No learning curve whatsoever, everyone is familiar with excel spreadsheet. I agree that a lot of web application out there hinges on aggregating text input fields from the user and validating and writing it to the database after processing it through some server side logic.

This is such a great idea I think I'm going to implement it.
Couldn't you limit it based on credit card number, a corresponding phone number, a Facebook ID, verified address, etc.? Even if it doesn't fully limit it, it perhaps makes it harder.
Lacking coverage might be because of local laws – see Germany and Greece for example.
ARP poisoning with Python.
A Slashdot comment on Google Fiber "no servers" clause (2012)
He said strongest president not best. Simply look at the 1980 electoral map. . .
I presume you mean monetary contributions? Netflix of course will not have developers with OS expertise.

Edit: wow, I'm really getting reamed for this comment.
Startups should use a relational database
I completely disagree that leaders of a protest movement should say that violence is an unacceptable tool in their movement. For one, there is no consensus around what constitutes "violence" -- some people consider shouting to be a form of violence, others consider property destruction, and others restrict their definition to bodily harm. Then there's the question of whether self-defense justifies violence, and the related question of what constitutes self-defense -- if you believe you're going to be forced from your home, is it self-defense to resist?

There is a real history of "divide and conquer" being used by the state to publicize and in some cases invent real and imagined differences between groups. The memory of COINTELPRO -- specifically bad-jacketing and anonymous letters -- is very strong in today's Left (and understandably so, given the success of the tactics at neutralizing groups like the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement) and trying to get half of a protest to condemn the other half should rightfully be met with suspicion.

I don't think people need to answer for things they did not engage in or intentionally facilitate. Also consider: agent provocateurs have been used in the 20th century (a matter of fact) and the 21st century (perhaps merely a matter of suspicion) -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur#United_States and combining the tactic with your concept that everyone who participates needs to answer for everyone else who participates is results in some pretty unfair bullshit really quickly. Especially for any event that's publicized in any way, you really can't control who shows up and what they do, and it's unreasonable to expect people to.

As for the actual incident, based on one of the first-person accounts it sounds like the window was broken from inside the bus. If that's the case, that actually shows that the participant greatly increased the risk to themselves in order to minimize the chance of bodily harm. If you don't draw a distinction between actions against people and actions against property (a moral position that is strange to me - surely there's a difference between smashing in windows and smashing in heads!) perhaps that doesn't matter to you, but not everyone sees the same way, nor do people need to.

If you want to talk about violence, focusing on what you've defined to be the violence of the protesters is also greatly limiting the discussion. Evictions are characterized by armed sheriffs showing up to someone's home and forcing them out. I think evictions -- which happen systemically and all the time -- are much more violent than an occasional window being broken, and I don't think I'm alone in that belief. MLK also used armed guards to protect himself and while it's easy to find quotes of him calling the US violent, I challenge you to find a quote where he condemns members of the movement who believe in violence. He viewed non-violence as strategically superior, yes, but his cooperation and coordination with groups that support self defense only increased over the years, up until his murder.
Researchers Find A Cause of Aging That Can Be Reversed
I saw the FSI learning expectations referenced in an infographic. I couldn't find a live .gov page showing them, so this search result seemed to be the best option.
Sematic Web and the various implementation solutions
This reminds me of the separate California, floating island ideas. I think the real qualm is what principles those places will work against. Given the actors, they believe in free market all the way. That scares the crap out of me.
Hobbyist Myhrvold Challenges Papers on Growth of Dinosaurs
except for the flawed assumption that this happened due to some class problem - I agree with your argument.
For me, the best part of this article is how concrete it makes "this is challenging". I knew intellectually that making a film couldn't be easy, but seeing just this small bit of it broken down really drives the point home and makes it real.

That looks really hard to do.
Nice attention to details! interesting post
The problem is we're also learning corporate databases == government databases.
yes it'a a). If you're well educated you can easily make 10*$X per hour - a maid usually isn't.
He was also responsible for the New Deal, Social Security, and much of the legislation that enabled blue collar Americans to bargain with their employers among other things. But yea, he was a racist and once approved a plan to unjustly victimize and temporarily detain a minority group (which was incredibly humane when compared to literally any other world super power's camps -- think Nazi Concentration camps, Soviet Gulags, and the incredibly terrible things the Japanese did to POW's and millions of Chinese) so he was a terrible person and in no way ahead of his time </sarcasm>.
James Clapper needs to be fired