skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Make sure you're using the amd64 image, not the i386 one. Either the netinst or regular CD1 should work fine from a USB stick, if it's amd64.

I tried both i386 and amd64 about a week ago on my 2011 Macbook Air, and only the amd64 image booted successfully.

You shouldn't need rEFIt.
Also, immunogoblins and other stuff we do not know.
> ...and she wants them to "start participating in city life".

That sentence really confused me. Like, what does it even mean, to be participating in city life?
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.

I find it increasingly scary how people continue to defend the NSA's actions in the face of these escalating revelations. It almost feels like Stockholm Syndrome.
As someone who doesn't own a soldering iron, I've found the $35 Raspberry Pi board [1] [2] [3] to be an excellent choice as a low-cost low-power general-purpose ARM-based server.

It also has a number of GPIO pins, UART, i2c and SPI, which may be of interest to those who do own soldering irons :)

[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs

[2] A model with no Ethernet is available for $25, but Ethernet is kind of non-optional for a server :)

[3] The price doesn't include power supply, case or boot media.
I suspect because it may be that the days of Carrier supremacy are behind us, much like the days of the Battleship are gone.

A carrier is essentially a single large target that when taken out negates the effectiveness of your opponent. Not sure what its successor is. Probably some form of stealth ship (since that seems to be the focus) armed with smart missiles.

I heard the Chinese were playing around with torpedo/missile hybrids which apparently changed the game since they are apparently impossible/hard to stop. Its a fair assumption that the US has something similar (or is working on it).
I'm not arguing that bitcoin is very fungible; that is by design. I'm arguing that bitcoins, unlike gold, can be irreversibly destroyed.

Even the "leaks" from the gold supply are predictable and reversible. A lot of gold is used in electronics these days. It winds up either in recycling centres, where it can be recovered, or in landfill, where if the price of gold rises high enough it becomes commercially viable to mine the landfills.

Bitcoins cannot be un-destroyed. They are information without physical laws to guarantee their continued existence. Their manufacture and destruction are both one-way functions.

The supply of bitcoin will peak and begin an irreversible process of shrinkage.

Indeed, those who cannot steal bitcoin will be incentivised to cause the destruction of other's bitcoin. Call it the Bitfinger Scenario.
>Do you think 4-5 months learning Java, C# or C++ are enough to start taking on projects?

No. Neither is it enough time to do projects in Rails, Node or Django. Those frameworks are very complicated and demand that the programmer understand basic design patterns, OOP, and security.

Your logic of learning a framework over a language is questionable. I fail how a beginner to Javascript will be able to effectively write Node applications. Given the nature of the language itself. Same with Ruby and Rails, as with Python and Django.

Plus you missed a very important point. She wants to contract with big, established companies. A good understanding of C# or Java will get her good work opportunities in more places than any of the ones you mentioned.
I'd imagine it'll have uses in future encryption potentially, but at the very least it has scientific value in progressing what we know and can prove about prime numbers. That's more useful than countless SHA-256 hashes. Securing the network and progressing science is greater than just securing the network; especially since doing so uses lots of real resources in terms of energy.
Entropy will eventually destroy the entire universe.

I think 22M bitcoins, given that (with minor changes to the network) can be infinitely sub-divisible with last us until then.
The Saudis were helping the US since we are allies. 9/11 was a false-flag attack.

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/bribe/2009/04/loui...
Amazon takes away access to purchased Christmas movie during Christmas
> Imagine applying that idea to any other field, and keep in mind the unintended consequences

The difference from other fields, is that the consequences in other fields are public. If a soldier shoots someone, that someone is dead and can prompt an investigation.

If someone in the NSA abuses his powers, it is very likely that nobody will ever know. Or be able to know. No investigation will be triggered, and even if one is, it cannot possibly gather any evidence.
Why would they bother? They don't really have any big military goals I can think of that would require a carrier. Carriers are for open warfare with other nation-states, not militants, and that is pretty much off the table from the start these days.
Fungibility is not the same as indestructibility.

Subdividing a unit of value does not create new value.
Prepending the fallback style was the option I was considering, but it does really defeat the whole purpose of the idea. You'd end up with the same styles that you would have without variables, plus all the duplicate rules using variables, all for no gain.

If I were using a preprocessor, I'd just use the in-built variables of that preprocessor I guess.
Thinkgeek was always kind've pricey. Places like DealExtreme have replaced them for me, at a tenth the price. Sure, I won't have access to NameBrand(tm) branded things... but I look at the hundreds of dollars of stuff I bought at Thinkgeek... and it's all throwaway garbage anyway. The mug that faded on its first trip through the dishwasher; the heat-sensitive coloured putty that lasted all of a couple of days before failing; the usb single-can cooling fridge that doesn't work because there's no insulation and the contact point with the can is miniscule; the list of stuff that looks better on the website than in your hands just goes on and on.
The way we set ourselves apart from our competitors is three things: a) we were exclusively built for mobile; eg. the entire concept and architecture behind Quindo has been built with mobile in mind (things like simplicity). b) we are focused heavily on being "on-the-go", in the sense that the app is an enabler to ask as as you go about your day. and c) (most importantly) we are focused on short form. we want to simplify the quest for knowledge, and in doing so, we want content to be short form, yet descriptive and informative :)

Thanks for your feedback!
Help HN: CommonApp Essay feedback (US Colleges)
My email address is in my profile.
Leave a comment otherwise. I will find you :)
One really serious problem with this particular topic of discussion is that people keep conflating "homeless" and "poor". Homeless people may be almost universally poor, but most of the poor are not homeless. I will go further and venture that most of the homeless are not homeless because they are poor but rather because they are either suffering from either serious mental disorders or substance abuse or both. As a consequence, the ways you solve the "poor" problem and the ways you solve the "homeless" problem are different. So it really makes sense to figure out which particular problem you are talking about.
Presses are prohibitive to most, though in cities you're likely to find at least one shop where you can buy press time, usually that comes with all supplies other than paper.
You're speaking as if it were an ego issue alone, of not wanting to be "excluded" from the Google buses. No. These people have justifiable anger at what is happening to their neighborhood and rent levels. That is why they hate Google buses-- not because they want a ride in one. Don't make them out to be children just because they're not well-off. (I'm not saying you are, but that's a common sentiment these days.)
Maybe not shut down, but I imagine if the US did something truly bad (nuking an innocent country?), and there would be strong worldwide outrage to the point that everyone would boycott - or even riot - against American companies abroad, that would be pretty bad for US, and I assume/hope something they're not willing to risk.

That being said, the US is becoming quite a scary country, with how far it has expanded its military power all over the world, and the technological advancements (mass surveillance, drone attacks, future autonomous combat robots, etc), are only going to make this a bigger problem for the world.

The thing is it probably wouldn't be as scary, if everyone else could be assured that the US public has quite a good grip on its own government, and that we can expect them to act pretty rationally and reasonably. Unfortunately, that doesn't really seem to be the case, which amplifies the fear about US becoming too strong. For all we know we're just one president/government away from US starting to act truly evil (although many would say they are already doing that).
Its not about tracking for the sake of tracking. Its about finding problems in the development process and improving them. Its helps identify problems, and once identified you can make adjustments and fix it. In our sprints people can 'flag' stories if something is slowing them down, and normally you find it's consistent issue with multiple stories. If you remove it, then you have a instant productivity boost. When we implemented scrum we found a lot of stories were going back and forth between requirements and development stages, so we knew where the problem was.

It's also about guidance. The people implementing the project, probably don't have accurate representation of customer value, only the customer does. Teams often have vision of how things should be, but normally its inaccurate and you implement things with the wrong priorities. The constant feedback from the customer helps ensure the right things are being worked on.
Awesome news, I always wonder how the users react to these kind of switches. They switched everyone to open office, firefox and thunderbird while on Windows and then gradually switched to LiMux. It seems like they tried to make the DE very similar to windows NT to ease the transition[0].

[0] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LiMux.jpg
WIll be interesting to see how this fares long-term. The article doesn't mention why a custom distro was needed rather than one of the standards, and the running cost of now patching their own OS every time a linux bug or vulnerability is found.
There are markets and systems of debt arrangements that predate currencies. Exchange is not predicated on the use of currency as a technology. Currencies have held sway for a very long time however because they are an exceedingly simple and elegant solution for a fiendishly complex problem.

These days however we have a global network of universal turing machines attached to an increasingly large array of robots, and so things that are not algorithmically possible to do in a monetary system are now completely feasable and some of them may have considerably less friction.
(1) Past employers - previous bosses already know the quality of your work and may have work for you

(2) Past coworkers - they've worked with you and can usually recommend you for contracts/gigs

(3) Recruiters - get spammed on LinkedIn for full time opportunities? Ask if they have any contract gigs available. Most recruiters only deal with full time jobs, but some of their clients need contract work

(4) Agencies - find agencies doing similar work and ask if they have any subcontracting opportunities available. You'll get a lower rate and your client won't really be yours, but you can focus on your craft instead of marketing

(5) Gig boards - you'll usually have to compete with a lot of other applicants (craigslist, hnhiring.me, letsworkshop.com, giggin.com)

(6) Presentations (long term) - join local meetups/groups as a presenter. Give free valuable information. Use one slide to let attendees know you're freelancing/conracting/consulting

(7) Blogging, Mailing Lists, Podcast (very long term) - Continuously drip valuable information. Let your audience know you're available for hire

(8) Guest blog/podcast/interview - "borrow" an audience that would enjoy learning from your expertise. You'll usually get a bio section or segment to advertise yourself
Bluetooth LE / iBeacons
It is a term that fundamentally bothers me in terms of technology. In my mind, evangelism is about spreading the good news of God, especially related to preaching of the Christian Gospel. I understand the term being applied metaphorically to software and technology, but it rubs be the wrong way personally in that context.
> Suppose we all switch immediately to a gold standard. When the value of the currency rises too high, more people will go and mine it.

An interesting twist on the basic problem with fixed-price gold standards but you might be right for countries that have gold in the ground outside of controlled mines. But a fixed-price gold standard is a big fail no matter what price is set and subsequently has to be defended by the central bank. It worked "somewhat, sub-optimally, for a while" in the old days of a handful of developed slower-non-realtime economies that could coordinate policy and had the rest of the world colonized, today, no chance. Central bankers will never again go for it because they have learned that politics and private banking will always screw with the money supply for short-term objectives.. and no matter what fixed gold price you set, before long there'll always be a run on your gold. Better to mark reserves to market (as France has pioneered in the 70s and the ECB and others do today), so you don't need to constantly defend or redefine your fixed price, can manage the currency supply based on both long-term mandates and short-term needs and have its performance evaluated in gold and/or other currencies by the market forces, too.

"Any nation/state can put its economy/currency on a gold standard. They only have two requirements. Own a stockpile of gold and raise the price very high" ;)

It's funny that the "free-market advocates" these days favour a government-controlled fixed gold price, which they call "the return to an honest gold standard". Right now we have an "almost free-market gold price" in "almost free-FX-market floating (competing!) currencies". Not quite there yet according to some pundits but that's where the world is heading and has ever since the Nixon shock. Definitely a pretty impressive move that has emerged toward a "free market in moneys", what's not to like! ;)
I agree, both terms feel oddly specific to me when people throw them around casually, but the layman use is at least directionally correct.

Much more cringe inducing are all of the invented definitions of the Law of Large Numbers! (e.g. http://www.fastcompany.com/1825592/9-reasons-choose-corporat...).
We have noticed, and It lets you do a lot a previously impossible things in decentralized computing. Give folks a few more months to polish proof of concepts.
"Consider the ending of “Doctor Zhivago,” when a chance sighting of Lara on a city street leads Yuri’s heart to rupture as she disappears before he can reach her. Had the Internet been around during the Bolshevik Revolution, Yuri and Lara never would have lost each other. They would have been Facebook “comrades,” boring each other to death with snapshots of food (“Borscht!”) and ironic observations of proletariat struggle."

I've sadly not watched "Doctor Zhivago" -- but I do know that tweeting your every move while being part of a revolution is a great way to be put against the wall and shot before it is over.

I'm also a bit puzzled about the premise of the article -- while distance relationships may have been made more bearable than before, trying to maintain contact across continents is still a dreary proposition. You might walk around historical sites, tweeting images of what you see -- it's still not anywhere near the same as being able to truly share that experience with someone you care deeply for.

Other than that, good on the author for not letting go of his wife-to-be.
You can't measure the bitcoin infrastructure cost by the fees the miners charge. Miners are mostly paid with newly generated coins. Credit card companies do no have the luxury to create new money, so of course they will charge higher fees.
To the uninitiated, bitcoin solves the byzantine general's problem by having each "general" work on a mathematical problem that is known to take a certain average amount of time; and, when they solve the problem pass their solution onto the other generals who will then incorporate the answer to the previous problem into a new problem.

The "consensus" is intrinsically linked to the "math problem" so that the generals will always "trust" the chain-of-answers which is the longest; as it would be impractical / impossible for an attacker to counterfeit the long-chain-of-answers.

Bitcoin uses sha256(sha256( x )) < `target` as its "math problem" where X contains the a hash of the previous "consensus" and new transactions which should become part of the new "consensus". `target` is adjusted over time
Free Infrastructure Resources: Host, Network, Storage and more
Would I? Or do I?

Cognitive enhancing drugs (nootropics) have been in use in the workplace for quite a while now.

Reddit has a pretty robust community as well: http://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/
Carriers are there for an aggressive imperial power that needs to maintain its presence across seas. China doesn't really match that description today.
I'll bet life was more romantic before spoken language. People weren't busy talking or thinking in anything but emotion and memories of senses. Let's long for those days.
American nuclear missile launch codes set to 00000000
Right now, somewhere in Washington, DC, there are a bunch of rich men with white hair, white skin, and black hearts screaming and stomping around in their suits because they don't want poor people to have affordable healthcare.

I stopped reading after that sentence. This article may have a linkbait headline, but its only intention is to get its Republican hating, ultra-liberal agenda across to anyone unlucky enough to see its somewhat intriguing title and click on it. Too much of this stuff has found its way onto Hacker News recently.
Dogecoin not notable
However, performance is shite. I ended up going for a native install and you can appreciate the difference. That is, if you run Gnome 3 (which is a pile of shite as well). When on other DMs, if you can call xmonad a dm, virtual box was just awesome, for exactly the reasons you mentioned.
Reading this reminds me of Paul Erdös's amphetamine habit. Excerpt from "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers":

Like all of Erdös's friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979, Graham bet Erdös $500 that he couldn't stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdös accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham paid up--and wrote the $500 off as a business expense--Erdös said, "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month." He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it.
Nobody works in a vacuum (there's a bad joke about vacuum tubes there..)

Arguably Bell Labs didn't invent the transistor. To quote Wikipedia:

The first patent for the field-effect transistor principle was filed in Canada by Austrian-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld on October 22, 1925, but Lilienfeld published no research articles about his devices, and his work was ignored by industry. In 1934 German physicist Dr. Oskar Heil patented another field-effect transistor.[2] There is no direct evidence that these devices were built, but later work in the 1990s show that one of Lilienfeld's designs worked as described and gave substantial gain. Legal papers from the Bell Labs patent show that William Shockley and a co-worker at Bell Labs, Gerald Pearson, had built operational versions from Lilienfeld's patents, yet they never referenced this work in any of their later research papers or historical articles

Arguably Bell Labs didn't invent the laser. To quote Wikipedia:

Simultaneously, at Columbia University, graduate student Gordon Gould was working on a doctoral thesis about the energy levels of excited thallium. When Gould and Townes met, they spoke of radiation emission, as a general subject; afterwards, in November 1957, Gould noted his ideas for a "laser", including using an open resonator (later an essential laser-device component). Moreover, in 1958, Prokhorov independently proposed using an open resonator, the first published appearance (the USSR) of this idea. Elsewhere, in the U.S., Schawlow and Townes had agreed to an open-resonator laser design – apparently unaware of Prokhorov's publications and Gould's unpublished laser work.

....

Gould's notes included possible applications for a laser, such as spectrometry, interferometry, radar, and nuclear fusion. He continued developing the idea, and filed a patent application in April 1959. The U.S. Patent Office denied his application, and awarded a patent to Bell Labs, in 1960. That provoked a twenty-eight-year lawsuit, featuring scientific prestige and money as the stakes. Gould won his first minor patent in 1977, yet it was not until 1987 that he won the first significant patent lawsuit victory, when a Federal judge ordered the U.S. Patent Office to issue patents to Gould for the optically pumped and the gas discharge laser devices. The question of just how to assign credit for inventing the laser remains unresolved by historians

Personally, I think the work Bell Labs did was incredibly important - much more important than the work others did. They were very, very good at taking half-assed physics ideas and publications and turning them into something useful.

Google is very very good at taking half-assed "computing" ideas and turning them into something useful.
I always thought Hamsterdam was too farfetched to start with. I really couldn't see that working for more than 5 minutes with all the parties that were there to observe it.
Some marketing department probably.
Yes, but why can Loren Sands-Ramshaw use a blog, where he critics his employer and also use Kickstarter without getting fired? Not that I want him to get fired, but I worry that he risks his job in telling us this critical information!

Aren't those things, a spy shouldn't have? Is the working strategy, filling the web with disinformation about NSA employees, or is it to never use the web with a real identity for the period of contractual employment?

I mean, from a technological standpoint, every single HN member would love to work for the NSA. Because they have an extremely sophisticated set of technology that people would like to get their hands on. (Well, that's at least what we think they have). Keep in mind though, that in reality only a very small percentage of HN would actually like to work for the NSA! This is not because of the recent revelations, but because the government in general has not a positive image for most hackers.
What each section basically says:

1. We collect all of your data

2. That's okay because we're the good guys

3. Btw, there are bad guys hacking us and have in the past downloaded TBs of data from our systems

What happens when a bad guy gets access to our data? Whether from within or out?
Yup. Utilite: http://utilite-computer.com/web/utilite-specifications. Dual GbE, though one is limited to around 470Mbps because of a limitation of the board.

I have one. Great specs, but I am not totally happy with the ubuntu 12.04 that comes with it. GCC is broken, for one thing: http://www.utilite-computer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=1.... Hoping this gets fixed soon.
Font Awesome Easter Egg
Cubieboard 3 (aka Cubietruck) will do 1gbit as well as 1 sata port.