skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SEEKING FREELANCER
(in Chicago but remote is fine)

I am looking for someone to develop an add-in compatible with Microsoft Word 2007 (and up) on Windows 7 (and up) (using Visual Basic for Applications or another tool of your choice) implementing Plan 9 Acme-style mouse chording for cutting/pasting in Word:

- After selecting text with Button One and while still holding Button One down (These chords also work with text selected by double-clicking, the double-click expansion happens when the second click starts, not when it ends):
-- Clicking Button Two cuts.
-- Clicking Button Three pastes (can be reverted by clicking Button Two immediately afterwards).
- To copy, click Button Two immediately followed by Button Three.

For more information on Acme-style mouse chording, see http://acme.cat-v.org/mouse.

If interested, please email me at acme.scs@gmail.com.
This mechanism is half way to a suggested scheme for domains that are less vulnerable to single-actor take-downs, posted here on HN a few days ago; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6964090 .

In short; instead of merely mapping to [hash].com the extension could map to [hash].com, [hash].se , [hash].ly, [hash].is, [hash].ch and then use a quorum consensus of whatever answer 3 or more of those names agree on. Effectively each TLD registry (and each of your registrars), along with their regulatory environment, would lose the ability to take down your name without international agreement.

For certain niches, such a feature might be a good enough value proposition to ordinary users to convince them to install an extension.

Other observation; 36-ary is probably a better encoding for the hash data than hex. DNS isn't great with lengthy answers and every byte is worth conserving. But it's cool to see something interesting like this in the form of a browser extension.
The currency is never the problem. Not having goods/services which are on par with other member states prevents internal trade. Not being able to devalue your currency prevents external trade. That creates debt which Germany and France buys and whoopdy doo, poverty and extremism.

The expansion of the euro into countries which aren't realistic trading partners is the problem but Germany and France love it, it means more long term wealth for them.
many packet/wire formats are conceived as structs when they are designed
IDN homograph attack.
What's wrong with this logic is the presumption that the intelligence community would share any effective results of their work with the public. That would be just plain stupid. Rather than an endless argument over disclosing and justifying results, it is far simpler to simply say there aren't any. Yeah, image takes a hit but those people are much less concerned with image than with doing what they have been chartered to do.

Anyone to whom any of this (other than the capabilities) comes as any surprise at all is naive indeed and probably has no memory of the hostile spy era that spawned and justified it.
Yeah, those Swedes are a bit wacky.
Lots of states have decriminalized possession of cannabis (see this map: http://norml.org/states).

Only two (or three, depending on how you view the legal status in Alaska) have laws that actually create a legal framework surrounding it (ie, "legalized it").
Time to make it dynamic, or just eliminate the year altogether
It's refreshing to see a front page without politics posts.
Well NYC is an embarkation point for international travelers to the USA, is it not? I'm not sure that searching a passenger on a train from NYC is inherently more infringing on liberties than searching a passenger on a van from the Mexican border, as both "start points" for travel are very much borders of the U.S.
Google Analytics for GitHub
a new operating system needs new tools. It should invent new languages for the compiler. The source code should be Unicode, not ascii.

I would be miserable with Unicode. My editor has to move across characters (multibyte gets ugly). My strcpy and strcmp would need to be changed.

I would allow employees to convert TempleOS to Unicode, but I would want nothing to do with it, then. It's the right thing, but I simply want nothing to do with it, LOL.

God says...
desert computers love be_quiet_bird I'll_get_right_on_it
Vegas It_grieves_me I_got_your_back come_and_get_me grumble
It does appear to be a brute force or phishing attack. These sort of drive-bys can typically be permanently stopped with 2FA or a password-less MFA solution like LaunchKey (Disclaimer: co-founder). LaunchKey has a free WordPress Plugin available, among others: http://wordpress.org/plugins/launchkey/

It is 2014, you better prepare a good PR response for when you get breached OR start implementing stronger authentication ASAP.
Elsevier employees should just quit and work somewhere else. It's just a matter of time before their business implodes. It will be a miserable process and anything to speed it up benefits everyone.

Sure, the board has fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to drag this out as long as possible. But the employees should just walk. Elsevier is a travesty and employees should feel ashamed to be associated with it.
I think they are trying ?author=1, ?author=2, etc
I see. So they have been in a situation similar to the UK since 2004 until now? Thanks for the info!

Edit: After looking it up, there are 28 countries in the EU and 18 of them are in the eurozone.
The is a horrendously horrible idea, for the same reason why unicode domain names are a bad idea. Domain names are important because they provide a reasonable amount of trust. If I type http://apple.com, I'm 99.99999% certain that I've connected to Apple's website. This gets nasty with unicode, because a person can spam your email account and get you to click on a URL which looks very similar to something like apple.com, but really points to a malicious site (thank you cyrillic characters).

Hash based domain names would be even worse. You have no idea what site is lurking behind some big string of hex digits. You could argue that a person should just compare the hash to some known set of hashes, but that's a. cumbersome and b. unrealistic. If it's done by humans, it's error prone (a malicious site could spoof the first few chars to point to their site), and if it's done by computers, what's the point? You've now effectively created a really shitty replacement for DNS.
Doesn't appear to be Linux only at all.
A GUI!? Oh, my stars...

Honestly, I like Octave a lot, and this new feature gives me the option to use it in collaboration with folks who aren't as UNIX-happy as I. I'm interested to know how "unpolished" the GUI is.
first thing I did to make it readable was hitting "ctrl -" three times. so the site kind of defeats itself in that respect.

I agree that there's an optimal number of characters per line, but it doesn't necessarily mean you need huge fonts. just make your content more narrow, or use a multi-column layout.
In this short, brutal life you have to seize any opportunity you can to celebrate.

Happy New Year :)
> If you're saying that absent any other reason, you would have to have recently crossed a border for the initial stop to be legal, maybe you're right. But random checkpoints for intoxicated drivers happen everywhere, and are legal.

As you point out, Border Patrol are fully sworn law enforcement officers and can therefore enforce other laws besides mere border protection statutes.

However the legal requirements to perform a search of a vehicle (incl. the need to have crossed the border) are different from the requirements to stop a vehicle to interview the driver (which any LE can do incl. Border Patrol), which is one of the reasons that DUI checkpoints are legal in some circumstances.
It would be interesting to me if you covered the generalizations. This field seems to have evolved entirely separately from the banditry I'm accustomed to.
Is it really ridiculous to suggest that gender differences would be minimized in a more equal society?

It depends on how we define "equal". Imagine a human society in which the physical strength of men and women are equal, and are kept equal through academic and government policy.

On one hand, that's an equal society. On the other hand, that's a tyrannical society which forcibly boosts girls and women at the expense of boys and men.

I think the Wikipedia article you linked to tends to support the theory that girls are receiving special treatment—countries in which girls are closing the gap in mathematics also tend to be the countries in which girls are extending their gap in reading.

You specifically mentioned Sweden as an example of equality. In Sweden, girls slightly outperform boys in mathematics, AND girls outperform boys in reading by a much larger margin than boys outperform girls in mathematics in any country.

Why is that touted as an example of equality?
2013 A Year of Viral Videos
I've been here since june of '07 via Justin.tv. Addicted ever since.

Back then I asked for feedback and it made to the front-page. The comments as I recall were helpful, though others were a lesson in thickening ones skin!
CompJournoStick 2.0.0 Released
Update by a watchblog:

http://ex-skf.blogspot.de/2013/12/ot-is-this-level-of-unders...
I nearly lost it at "inforamavores"
I have the opposite experience; from my (few) visits to Continental Europe, my impression is that foreigners are searched at random in arbitrary locations more or less at the whim of police. I've actually never had a bag searched in the US, but can't say that about Europe.
Basically, if you have anonymous, P2P, encrypted messaging you need to solve the problem of maintaining a public ledger of user names to public keys. There are several approaches to this, but one of the most compelling right now is using the exact same mechanism that bitcoin uses to prevent double spending. Twister has absolutely nothing to do with bitcoin, they are only similar in that double-spending a bitcoin is analogous to identity theft in Twister.
I'll put a follow up on some other sequential tests into my list of blog-posts-to-do and let you know when it happens.
Honestly, I'm not entirely sure, but email me and I'll put you in contact with the right people. Broadly, it's going to be engineering + data science, design, product management, maybe bizdev.
WANdisco - San Ramon, US and Belfast, UK

WANdisco (http://www.wandisco.com/) is solving challenging problems in distributed computing over the wide area network.

Our custom implementation of paxos allows HDFS to work over WAN by providing strong consistency and continuous availability. We are looking for engineers with a great understanding of concurrency and experience with distributed systems.

If you are interested, contact me at cos@wandisco.com
Good point, that's definitely another ability a country in ERM retains (though if done unilaterally it would still constitute pulling out of ERM as a treaty). That's what China does with their unilateral and occasionally revised peg to the dollar, for example.

I'm not entirely sure what the results would be, but you do lose some of the current benefits if people start believing the exchange rate is no longer really fixed. Currently the large amount of Danish-German cross-border trade effectively ignores currency exchange risk, because they assume the EUR-DKK peg as formalized through ERM is solid enough that it won't change in the forseeable future. So it's "safe" to have liabilities in DKK and revenue in EUR or vice-versa without taking any particular measures to hedge your risk. That was part of the goal of both the Euro and ERM, since being able to ignore exchange risk makes it easier for businesses to treat Europe as a single market. Once you change it once, then it might be a while again before businesses feel comfortable relying on the new peg.
Side note: It seems that since Oct 2011 HN front page has been crawled on a daily basis, and recently multiple times a day - that's a great thing!

https://web.archive.org/web/20110401000000*/https://news.yco...
EU and Eurozone are not linked. What you talk about is joining th EU, which Latvia is already a member of, and which doesn't imply using the Euro as currency.
Happily, in Haskell the standard array library does the struct of arrays format for unboxed arrays. It's super handy!
Radio station experiences major software meltdown during anti-NSA broadcast
In my experience, it's difficult — if not impossible — to please all of the people all of the time. My startup (www.BeeLineReader.com) has browser plugins that reformat text and display it using eye-guiding color gradients. We get comments from people telling us that the plugin's text is too big, and we get comments telling us the that the text is too small. I suppose we should be happy that the ratio of these comments is roughly 1:1 — maybe this means we've struck the right balance?

Similarly, we get people telling us that we absolutely must use serif fonts, and others telling us that serifs make text harder to read and must be avoided.

Since our startup is focused on enhancing readability, we take these concerns and comments to heart, but we have realized that much of readability is more subjective and less guided by universal, hard-and-fast rules. So now we offer multiple text sizes and are going to incorporate multiple fonts.

...But then you get into the problem of offering too many choices instead of telling the user what is right (the paradox of choice). Sigh.
JQuery plugin for turning form inputs into a js object
Innovation without profit would be success, but building things people buy isn't success because it's not innovative? What?
A single currency is the best feature of the Eurozone. Politicians can't pull devaluation stunts anymore, and dealing with a single currency makes trade in Europe a lot more efficient. The European Parliament and the Commission is the biggest problem with EU in my opinion.
CloudFlare - London, UK and San Francisco, CA, US
CloudFlare is seeking Operations Engineers and Junior Operations Engineers in both London and San Francisco.

CloudFlare's goal is to build a better Web. Our service provides DNS, CDN and security features and powers some very high profile sites.

CloudFlare manages a geographically diverse network of servers. We are looking for talented systems administrators to help look after our systems. We believe that a good team fit is just as important as technical skills, so have a great team.

https://www.cloudflare.com/join-our-team
DAVIDsTEA is also good, they have a few retail locations around.

https://www.davidstea.com/

https://www.davidstea.com/store-locator

$20 for 250g (1lb) of earl grey tea, for example.
Well, they did get royally screwed by our bank(s?) :)
formalizeData has been updated to support many more input types (I believe most of them now). I use it all the time in my backbonejs apps for pulling inputs from forms and converting to json before sending to the server. Feedback is greatly appreciated!
Yay, another third world country to join EMU.

Yes; Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece & etc are third world countries. These days I even want to add France to it...
Nice potshots at UC Berkeley philosophers...the ones from Stanford would have similar objections to the robot's actions
So the EU is basically the "United States of Europe". Remember, the US is a bunch of independent states (NOT provinces) who pool resources for the sake of defensive and economic convenience, just like the EU. Technically, the Feds are supposed to have very limited powers.

The situation in Colorado is analogous to The Netherlands explicitly declaring something allowed that the EU councils in Brussels have explicitly declared disallowed. One authority claims it's OK, the other claims it's not OK, and the citizen has to choose which authority they trust and/or fear more.
I have to say that I have gained a certain technical respect for Facebook after reading about React. I don't and have never used Facebook the webapp, so I really never developed interest in their technical stack (I vaguely knew it was originally PHP and they had done some work with HipHop etc.). But this seems like the first thing I've seen in a long time, maybe ever, that could actually make writing webapps pleasurable in the way that functional programming is.
"There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air a foot or two off the ground."

Curious as to why there is such an obsession with hovering vehicles in pop culture depictions in the future. It seems cool but that it would be inefficient even if we did develop it. (Using a crapload of power to suspend a heavy vehicle when it could be sitting on the ground just doesn't make much sense to me.)
Not only monetary policy, but to a large extent their banking system, and their fiscal policy as well.
Deleting your Facebook is difficult? I believe mine is hard deleted (not deactivated), and it was the same workflow as deactivating it, if I remember correctly. I just clicked "delete" instead of "deactivate" or whatever.

Facebook leaves the account deactivated for a week so you can ponder on your choice, but if you don't do anything, it was my understanding that the account gets deleted.
Evolution rejected by 1/3 of Americans
Probably just me but that sounds crazy (very possible you use it normally while I don't). I've deleted then returned to FB many times. Even when I'm not deleting my account, I always clean out my past posts, sometimes a few days later (after posting them) while other times I'll wait a few weeks. If I add a new profile pic, I usually delete the old one. Also, I talk to people via PM.
There was a similar charade a few weeks back when a PNAS paper about differences in the connections between male and female subjects (concluding that males connected more strongly front to back, females more strongly laterally) [...] roundly denounced as quite shoddy research

It wasn't roundly denounced as shoddy research, unless you're referring to certain groups being angry with the study.

Posts on Jezebel, Feministe and Tumblr were angry, and they tried to spin the results inaccurately. They claimed that the results indicated that female brains were different because of culture, and they claimed we should stop acting like there are innate non-physical differences between men and women.

Unfortunately for them, the differences in brain chemistry became pronounced not during the brain's most plastic years, but rapidly during puberty during the flood of sex hormones. And the study made that clear.

I don't know why the notion of different brain chemistry is so threatening to some groups, but it is what it is.
> #6: "Odeo up for sale"

Hard to believe that Twitter has only been around for ~6 years, given how much impact it's had.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070222055143/http://blog.obvio...
Dimagi, Inc.

Cambridge, MA

http://www.dimagi.com/

Dimagi is hiring for the positions of Mobile Software Developer, Full Stack Web Developer, Web Performance/Devops Engineer.

Dimagi's mobile platforms are already affecting millions of the world's poor and underserved in half a dozen areas including Maternal and Child Health, Infectious Disease, Supply Chain (for medical supplies), Agriculture, and Small Business. Our online Mobile App–building and data collection tools at https://www.commcarehq.org allow our partner organizations to create for themselves at little or no cost what they would otherwise have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for in custom software development costs, which has made us the fastest growing mHeath and generic mobile workflow platform out there for the developing setting. Our team of talented engineers regularly travel to see our field sites and visit our teams in Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and South America to work on-site with our users and partners in building usable and powerful technology that makes a difference. Dimagi prioritizes global impact, employee growth, and satisfaction over the bottom line, making it a fresh, exciting, and genuine place to work.

If making a huge difference at an ambitious young software company with a fundamentally humanitarian mission sounds interesting to you, check out our jobs page at http://www.dimagi.com/about/careers/.
SEEKING WORK - remote - India.

Creator of xtopdf, a PDF creation toolkit for Python (used by Packt Publishing, the Software Freedom Law Center, ESRI.nl and others.) xtopdf can create both business reports and ebooks, and currently has support for the following input formats (more are always in the pipeline): text, DBF, CSV, TSV/TDV, XLS, XML, ODBC, SQLAlchemy, MongoDB, XML.

xtopdf links:

http://slid.es/vasudevram/xtopdf

https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf

http://www.packtpub.com/article/Using_xtopdf

http://google.com/search?q=xtopdf

Independent developer for the last several years, with many years of experience in many tech areas. Contracted/consulted to multiple startups based in USA, Europe and India. Earlier worked for large well-known US software product and Indian software services companies.

Elected as a member of the Python Software Foundation (PSF) in 2010.

Skills: Good - Python, C, Linux, UNIX, many open source technologies, many popular/mainstream databases, XML-RPC, PDF programming, file and data format conversion, data munging, command-line utility development. Fair: Flask, MongoDB, Bottle, various others.

Have worked some on Ruby, Rails and Java earlier. Server lead / senior engineer for two commercial Rails-based dot-com products earlier, by US companies. One of them was TaskBin - http://taskbin.com - for the first version.

Worked on a best-selling retail banking product (in C with proprietary DB and UI libs). Team leader for a database middleware product (in C) widely used in client projects by a top software services company.

Databases worked on: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Sybase, Informix, SQLite. Used relational databases in the majority of projects I've worked on.

Did a lot of UNIX support and successful troubleshooting for years (some years earlier), still have some of those skills, which are useful in development too. Had many times recovered clients' data from corrupted file systems or crashed machines (with no backups :), using various tricks of the trade learnt on the job, and solved various other software problems, often involving various interacting software components (from OS level through language compilers to application programs and databases). Wrote lots of utilities in C and UNIX shell tools (sed, awk, grep and friends) to automate various tasks (for both users and developers), convert data between various formats from one platform to another, etc.

Relevant links:

Biz site: http://www.dancingbison.com (see Home, Products, Services, About pages there)

Posts about Python:
http://jugad2.blogspot.com/search/label/python

Posts about xtopdf:
http://jugad2.blogspot.com/search/label/xtopdf

Blog: http://jugad2.blogspot.com

LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/vasudevram

Article by me about "Developing a Linux command-line utility" (in C) was published on IBM developerWorks and translated by IBM into Chinese and Japanese for those versions of their site. Some organizations have developed production command line tools using that article as a guide.

Contact info: http://dancingbison.com/contact.html (email, Skype).
Twitter: @vasudevram
Google to Discontinue Sharing App Bump (YC S09) on Jan. 31, 2014
Their per-capita GDP is ~20k in PPP terms, which is hardly third world.
What if a cop held a gun to your head and told you to drown those kittens?
Bitcoin does have a (non-turing-complete) scripting language built in for ensuring that transactions meet arbitrary requirements. I wonder what subset of proofs could be verified in that environment.
>The is a horrendously horrible idea, for the same reason why unicode domain names are a bad idea.

So, you suggest that non english speakers should just "learn it" to use DNS?
It's on the front page (below the fold) of Buzzfeed. I think it's gonna be a big deal. Privacy was a key selling point.
Knowing Latvian politicians and bankers, that can only be a good thing.
Happy 2014! Using sed to update your copyright notices.