skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
when i see the words 'challenge' and 'meditation' being used in the same sentence, an alarm goes of in my head.
i'm too tired to go into details right now, but if you're interested in where i'm coming from, or in meditation in general, i highly recommend giving this book a read:

http://www.amazon.com/Meditation-Without-Gurus-Clark-Strand/...

the first review sums things up nicely:

Clark Strand cuts right to the heart of meditation, without dogma, gurus, religion, beliefs, or any of the other gunk that gets in the way of sincere and honest practice. In a beautiful style reminiscent of Thich Nhat Hanh, Strand has created the ideal meditation companion and guide. While Strand is probably among the few teachers who would never invite a following, he most certainly deserves one. If you read no other book on meditation, read this one. If you have other books on meditation, put them on the back shelf and read this one. If you have never meditated before and want a book to teach you how, read this one. This is the only meditation guide you will ever need. It is superb!
Do you have a source for the above quote? I ask because it appears he liked using it: https://twitter.com/notch/status/412290357892636673

"I really like it." - notch
This is wonderful, I've always seen programming as the application of a given mindset (as opposed to the other way around) and for years since I was a kid, I thought biology, and in particular DNA, applied to the concept very well. It's not until watching the show Regenesis that I realized there was a field for it, Bioinformatics!

After years of being a senior dev and such in some web shop, I'm actually starting a job in bioinformatics in a few weeks, it's beyond exciting. It's articles like this that remind me why being a programmer can be interesting beyond the code. We live in very interesting times.
Paul Irish has compiled a list of "Web Browser, Frontend and Standards Feeds to Follow"

http://www.paulirish.com/2011/web-browser-frontend-and-stand...
To put it another way, "Correlation between certain tools and smart people does not imply causality." Or exclusivity, for that matter.
data-*

is for attributes in HTML. It makes sense for CSS properties, syntactically speaking to map these two in terms of prefix-solutions.
Two words of agreement: Dr Mandelbrot
git filter-branch will let you remove content permanently and irrecoverably if you really need to.

Regarding uncommitted changes: This is in the same category as forgetting to do your backup before starting to mess around, IMO. I would encourage anyone to simply get used to committing extremely often and just using a quick interactive rebase before pushing.
From Subroto Bagchi: Six ways to scale - YourStory.com
While I do not agree with much of the sentiment, I enjoyed the article.

My question to the OP: even if you believe that at the moment abuses are rare and that your colleagues are trustworthy and law-abiding, does the capability and level of information concern you in terms of the potential for future abuse it enables?
How many researchers are working at Apple Research? Like zero? Because there's no Apple Research? How many researchers are working at Google Research? Like a thousand?

I'd say that makes all the difference.
> Most of the other measures are justified with the "War on Terror", including the removal of habeas corpus, removal of the 4th amendment, gutting of the 1st amendment, removal of judicial review and oversight etc.

Your comment is utterly ungrounded in reality. The "war on terror" has had pretty much no specific effect on any of the civil rights you mentioned.

1) Habeas corpus: the most recent change to the law of habeas corpus was AEDPA in 1996. Despite having "antiterrorism" in its name, it's largely addressed at preventing convicted criminals from abusing the habeas process through repeated frivolous habeas petitions and treating habeas essentially as a federal appeal from valid state court judgments. The "terrorism" provisions are distinct and don't concern habeas corpus, but rather financing and immigration issues related to terrorism. The post-9/11 Supreme Court cases on habeas have strengthened habeas corpus, not weakened it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boumediene_v._Bush, and the predecessor cases Rasul v. Bush, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

2) Removal of the 4th amendment: the 4th amendment is probably not at the apex of its vitality, but it's on the upswing since 9/11. To the extent that it's been diminished over the years, that largely happened in the 1970's and the 1980's as a byproduct of that era's "tough on crime" movement. Even in the context of NSA spying, the legal basis for those programs are not rooted in anything post-9/11, but in the quite old third-party doctrine and this case from 1979 that created the data versus metadata distinction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland.

3) Gutting of the 1st amendment: the first amendment has simply never been stronger, and the U.S. continue to have among the strongest protections for free speech of any country in the world. Your comment about "protestors now labeled as 'low level terrorists,' and journalists detained under anti-terrorist legislation" is factually incorrect. What protestors in the U.S. have been charged with a crime based purely on their political speech? Some FBI documents stating that Occupy protestors might be a vector for domestic terrorism isn't a first amendment violation by any imaginable stretch of the imagination; to violate the first amendment, the "label" must have some legal significance, not simply be an expression of the opinion of someone in the government. Also, your question "what do you think would happen to Greenwald" if he traveled to the U.S. totally ignores the fact that the U.K. has historically had much weaker protections for free speech and journalism than the U.S.

> Yeah, to me that looks like civil rights pretty much gone

You seem to be mostly regurgitating the utterly uninformed conventional wisdom that permeates places like HN and Reddit.
Apple has extreme market influence and has been able to accelerate some developments (smartphones, retina displays, tablets, really small form factors etc) but those things would have been there anyway, maybe a couple of years later.
They won't risk a flop product like Google Glass which is ahead of its time and dont really have a research program.
Google is Oak Ridge.

When I was growing up in Silicon Valley traffic was light, places were far, and there was nothing in between.

Silicon Valley was rarely the place you wanted to be, we all wanted out having been here our whole lives. We wanted New York, we wanted Los Angeles, we wanted anywhere but here.

Over the years that has changed.

You ask most people that work at Google the significance of the Googleplex and no one will ever tell you about the prominence, about how it used to the rolling valleys housed the SGI buildings.

But day in, day out, the buses flow. The cars flow. Once you're on campus it's a different world. Everyone's busy, everyone has something important they're insisting on doing.

The whole of Mountain View, and in turn the surrounding suburban sprawl has been turned into the tiny steams coursing into Oak Ridge.

The highways are jammed. The roads are jammed. There are more lines. There are more people. All eager to do something important. Meals are provided, the buses are provided, the interns get their limos to go to the local hotels

Slowly but surely, we got our wish. Los Angeles came to us. New York came to us.
> and not very welcoming to female employees.

Even with a female co-founder? You would think that this kind of behavior would be less common with one.

(Though it might not be entirely surprising)
That is essentially what these are. The default Lantronix firmware allows you to connect to the device on a specific TCP port and talk to the serial device on the other side. You configure them over HTTP or Telnet.
Moreover, Bell Labs' position as part of a state-regulated monopoly meant that the research created at Bell Labs was publically available. For instance, UNIX was given away, since Bell was prohibited from selling it.

I doubt that Google's research will have the same public benefit; it seems much more likely that Google will keep it for themselves.
On the same machine, it's going to be rare

But the most common occurrence of this I can think are online games.
We have created this myth that Flight 93 was heading for the Capitol Building based on media reports of what some bloke in Guantanamo Bay said after being tortured. It is single source evidence, 'speculative fictional history'.

The media have also speculated that Flight 93 was also heading for Three Mile Island (a nuclear power station designed to survive a plane crash) and Camp David (the President's holiday home where some Middle East peace deal had been agreed on with the participants having gone home decades ago).

It is tempting to believe that Flight 93 was heading for the Capitol given that there is some confession and it would have made more sense than Three Mile Island or Camp David. However this is flawed reasoning.

Had Flight 93 not been delayed at the airport and made it to its target on time then that target just might have been The Pentagon. Here it would have made a far greater impact. We know one 757 had hit The Pentagon to cause significant damage. Had another plane - Flight 93 - crashed into another 'wedge' opposite to the fire that did happen then there would have been a high likelihood that the entire Pentagon would have burned to the ground. The first fire would have served as an attack on the fire prevention systems allowing the fire from the second attack to burn unimpeded.

If we look at what happened at the World Trade Center two planes were used against one target. The Twin Towers might have appeared as two buildings, however, there was only one set of pumps for the sprinklers. The towers had been designed to survive impact by a plane but not the scenario of 9/11 when both towers were attacked. Also note that the second tower to be hit was the first to fall - in paart due to the lack of water pressure for the sprinklers.

Given that two planes were used for the one target in New York it is not unreasonable to consider that two planes were also intended for the Pentagon, with one fire able to knock out the sprinklers and another fire to burn the building down. This would have removed The Pentagon from the map rather than create damage that could be (and was) repaired.

Although there is a certain amount of logic to support The Pentagon being the target for Flight 93, this idea does not support the agenda of 'The War Against Terror'. Let's stick with the nursery stories and believe what the media say the interrogators water-boarded out of the guy in Guantanamo - Flight 93 was heading for The Capitol.
Is this the best defense of the actions of NSA employees publicly available?

He spends a lot of time denying pervasive surveillance puts us in a panopticon where the FBI and other LEAs can observe everything we do. And never mentions parallel construction once.

He tries to justify a Cold War sized, and then some, security state by invoking North Korea.

This is a big bowl of very weak sauce.

The director's standard of candor is "least untruthful."

I really don't care what a mid ranking employee says about what the NSA will and won't do. EVERY revelation where people in this forum have given the NSA benefit of a doubt in the form of "they could, but they wouldn't" has max'ed out at "would do, did do, and trying hard to do it more" once more revelations have emerged.

The NSA can't be trusted with what it has.
Thanks for sharing your POV. Do you think Snowdon's revelations had any beneficial impact, or is your view of them entirely negative?
Starting with C would be good, but only if the teacher constantly supervises and reviews the code that gets written by the students. Beginners will inevitably do mistakes as they are learning, and the leaky abstraction between C and the underlying architecture would punish these mistakes mercilessly. Writing correct C code is one thing, asking "why is this language broken" because you returned a pointer to a local variable is another.
Seems like a good option for hardware devices like routers, firewall appliances, ... This won't be the next agile, ninja hacker, 1337 web development platform. But it could have it's own niche of the market.
Commodotized it? Google's remote driving apparatus costs a quarter of a million dollars per car.

Less than ten years ago remotely controlled vehicles had a hard time driving in a straight line ten miles in the desert. Google's have now driven millions of accident free miles.

Granted they haven't tackled a Michigan snowstorm yet but I think you have to admit they pioneered this technology.
This is simply not true except perhaps in that any research center will have an aggregate ROI counter that some bureaucrats glance at annually. As somebody pointed out elsewhere, Bell Labs' ROI was capped. Much, and I would argue the best, corporate research is done with almost no consequential oversight from the host corporation. This was certainly the case with Bell Labs, XEROX Parc, and other great research centers of yore just as it is still the case to some extent at Microsoft, AT&T, IBM, and Intel today (between re-orgs).

At present, PARC (no longer under Xerox) operates on something of an agency model and Google runs research projects like startups. This appears to result in a higher rate of short-term commercial success, but at the cost of fundamental research. That said, I think we've done a tremendous amount of fundamental research since World War II and now that the conditions for producing more no longer exist, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit – new configurations of things that already exist – hence the prevalence of startups and the perceived excellence of hybrid research models.
Is there something I don't know about Peter O'Toole, that explains the speed with which the article has shot to the top on here? I'm not trying to be the annoying "this doesn't belong in my yard" guy, but this is the first article I've ever seen be this successful while apparently also being completely irrelevant.
This is two years old. Another web application framework in C is Klone: http://www.koanlogic.com/klone/index.html
Definitely more interesting than the latest iOS fad.
For and on behalf of any genuine non-mathematicians, a couple of questions: (1) what would have to be the case such that his latest advances in proof assistance would not live up to his expectations (2) what things outside the world of abstract mathematics (such as in, but not restricted to the world of software) would change (such that anyone outside the field would notice) if they did live up to his expectations?
The NSA is not a law enforcement agency.

I am not one either. But I still have to obey the law.

Maybe that's not what's implied by that statement? But if not, what on earth is meant (more exactly, what was the author's intent in saying something that seems obvious and irrelevant if taken at face value; what am I expected to infer?)?
Could you elaborate on how prototype based OOP solves overlapping hierarchy and hierarchy modification? It is not clear to me, and it seems actually like multiple inheritance, mixins, interfaces, and/or type-classes would address multiple hierarchies reasonably well, while I am not sure how prototype inheritance does so at all.
Article I, Section 8 says that Congress has the power to declare war. It does not specify that this declaration need take any particular form. I've never seen a convincing explanation for why Congressional authorization such as the AUMF doesn't qualify as an exercise of Congress's powers under Article I, Section 8. Especially considering that the practice of Congress authorizing military actions without a formal declaration of war dates back almost to the founding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_Unite....
Many years ago I would run round Willesden Stadium and park and one day O'Toole sat in the stands watching his son at a track event. O'Toole wore a Huge floppy hat, cape and cane, and it took me a while to realise it was no more an affectation than my jeans and trainers. It just was on film, onstage, at home or at a track event he was the same person. It did not make for an easy life.

They say films have shrunk now, And I suspect this is true of startups as well as films - what it once took to build a billion dollar company from scratch has changed - stars like O'Toole or Jobs once cast impossible spells - but the magic seems less vital - an optional extra perhaps.

It's kind of an inspiring thought and a rather melancholy one altogether.
How is more "profound thinking" different from more planning?
Google is probably one of the biggest single contributors to pushing the web platform over and has been the largest contributor to the webkit project until they recently forked it into Blink.

Apple is great and all and probably everyone will agree they have far and away the best hardware and products, but Google pushes technology in ways just to get the world thinking of what is possible.
Bitcoins, Cash and Gold
These guys just don't get it. They're always saying the same thing "we don't want to look at it."

I want to scream "well maybe someday you will, and then you'll have it collected already."

What a dense mind, and I am not all inclined to insult people in fact I hate it, but in this case it is well deserved.
Thank you so much, kind American intelligence guy, for having the grace to not look at USA citizens emails, all the while not even mentioning foreigners, who should apparently just lie down and take it.
REHVA Organiza Seminário de Eficiência Energética de Sistemas AVAC
I agree; as far as I could tell from shopping for Christmas presents for my wife, ThinkGeek is largely a Dr. Who fan kiosk.
He was also a very effective Miguel de Cervantes/Don Quixote in the film version of 'Man of La Mancha.'

His interview on Letterman [1] is an interesting combination of brilliant charisma and comedic timing with obvious cognitive decline. The last part of the linked clip seems appropriate, given the circumstances.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMUQZ7VTqh0
As a community grows, the perceived relevance of a celebrity death scales non-linearly.
I'm happy to upvote authors who want to talk about making the work environment better for everybody. But I'll also add that in my opinion this is a poorly structured essay.

The crux of the problem with process is premature generalization. People see a couple, or 4-5 examples of something, and then want to make a rule for all projects in an organization. There's waaaaaay too much variance for it to work like that.

Readers face a similar problem when reading about success in startups. There's a ton of books on how to make a killer startup -- but most all of them rely on a few examples or a handful of stories. They're long on selection bias and short on usefulness. Orgs do this same thing all the time.

There's also a mismatch in the model many technologist bring to organizing the work and the work itself. Since we work with things that move data around and functions that perform data changes, we begin to feel that a well-run organization is built on certain data and functions. It's simply the analogy that is most convenient for us. In reality, we're finding psychological and social factors are playing a much more important role than sets of rules, processes, or data structured and handled in certain ways. This is a big change for many to accept.

Still, always good to hear more voices. It continues to amaze me how you can take a kick-ass team of 5 guys and conquer the world. You can then scale that up to a kick-ass team of 100 guys -- and create one of the most miserable work experiences ever.

Shameless plug: for those interested in reading some of the stuff I've written about this, check out my blog devoted to the topic: http://tiny-giant-books.com/blog
How do the templates work? I've only ever used ClearSilver templates with C.
I really enjoy reading tips like this. The mnemonic I use for looping over multi-dimensional arrays in C is: the right-most index should be the inner-most loop:

for (i = 0; i < M; i++) {
for (j = 0; j < N; j++) {
x[i][j] = ...;
}
}
The Emacs/ELisp API, however, is far better. If we assume for a moment that ELisp and Python are, for the act of writing a editor extension, in similar good shape. Then it is still easier to write a good plugin with elisp for emacs than with python for vim, because the API that emacs offers for the integration of scripts is really, really fantastic. Vim doesn't offer anything like that.
Not to mention other members of the Five Eyes who are not restrained from reading US intercepts.
> I use the term "look" deliberately: the Agency makes the distinction that looking at data is surveillance, while gathering it from locations outside the US is not. We gathered everything, and only looked at a tiny percentage of it. I am okay with this distinction both because I don't mind if my emails are copied to an Agency database and likely never read and because from a technical standpoint it would seriously impair our ability to spy if we couldn't gather everything.

I'm not mad at NSA they're just playing their role, they're grabbing everything they can. But, it should serve as a reminder of the goals we should all (civilians) strive for: encrypting everything. I think lot of individuals are working on these problems right now and I'm confident great tools and protocols will soon be created/improved.

edit: downvoted for proning mass encryption, great.
Lufthansa airlines convinced 42 Swedes to change their names
I know a lot of people who routinely edit their local history before pushing changes to a shared repository because they don't want other people to see their true "dirty" history. This is insane.

This is no more insane than editing a source code file before you save it to the file system. Git is used as a development tool as well as version control, and developers are therefore encouraged to commit often, even if the code does not actually compile yet. There is no more need to fill the published history with all of these WIP commits than there is for me to know about every goddamn keystroke you made while you were dicking around with that config file.
$5 for a calculator with updateable functionality?
That's totally useless :(
it always made me wonder why computer literate people obfuscate their email in such a way that a single regex could pickup about 99% of them.

personally i don't obfuscate my email at all - good spam filtering is much more effective than trying to hide your email address.
In our project we've ended up with our controller code being defined outside of the .controller call (we're using TypeScript, and someone wanted to use the class syntax). This means that our controllers are accessible directly, and for a unit test, they're just functions we can call.

So we just pass our own mocks in, it's much simpler than trying to use Angular's injector mechanism.
Yes, Candy Crush, especially when King is apply major pressure to Nintendo, a 30 year incumbent, on their home court[1]. I understand most people don't understand the video games industry.

Second, don't take execution lightly. Execution is everything. Again, the last few major tech products in silicon valley aren't moonshots. Most of the them are ideas that could have built 2001. Square could have been released on Windows Mobile 6.

What I'm simply trying to argue is that Google Research isn't inherently better than Apple's workshop. Moonshots are great yes, but its a bit too early to be sounding the bells. Microsoft Research had a similar position in the past and everyone thought they were ushering the new age, but it turned out to simply be PR. "The World of Tomorrow" at Disney Land (which probably hasn't been touched in 5-10 years) is chock full of a Microsoft Research moonshots that never caught on or weren't really practical. I see Google Glass heading a similar direction.