skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went back and looked, and the FAQ mentions that if you cancel your account, and return the device, you'll give a pro-rated amount. You have to click the link about canceling your account to see it:

> We'll give you a pro-rated refund on your subscription once the device is sent back.

That statement could be taken to imply a prepaid amount for a service could be refunded if the customer was willing to part with something of value - the drive. What it doesn't imply is that the device is leased. If anything, it seems like a simple incentive to get a canceling customer to return the drive - if they don't, you don't give them their money back.

I think you are continuing to make rationalizations about this whole thing. The indication is the slew of blaming statements in your response above to emil. See "launching a public attack like this on a holiday" for reference of said blaming statement. I think emil deserves to be heard here.

Simply acknowledging that the device was intended to be leased and clarifying that on the KickStarter page should do the trick.
The Greeks believe what their media says. So it depends on what media they are following. In general although politically active, knowledge about international politics is not wide spread so everybody blames mostly the Greeks. Half of them blame the people, the other half blames the government. I disagree and I believe that Greece for the most part wasn't master of its own fate.
Disclaimer: I am Greek
We can't really debate the issue given that some of us are seeing a huge font (much larger than the 'magazine held up to the screen'), and some a more reasonable one, all depending on the width of our browser window. Apparently it flips between the two sizes around 900px width.

I don't think that's what the author intended. Back to the drawing board I reckon...
Why You Should Get an MBA
This might at first sound like a xenophobic, anglocentric position, but it actually makes quite a bit of sense. There are a number of instances in which it is advantageous / critical to adopt a lingua franca -- that is, a single language that everyone in the world agrees to use for a particular purpose. In the case of domain names, Patrick is right: If we allow characters that appear to be one thing but are actually another, it opens up a whole bunch of evil possibilities.
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* Several years of experience as a professional freelancer and consultant, and several years of experience as a full-time employee developer before that.

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* Regularly architect whole systems. Well-versed in SOA.

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Good to see Feynman on the front page!
It should be noted that at the time JavaScript was developed, there was only the basic multilingual plane - the extension was only introduced with Unicode 2.0 in 1996.
"and the primary source of frustration is that they are mostly taken by various squatters and other scums of the Internet"

"Scums of the Internet"? Oh please.

Where are you getting this all from exactly? You've just decided that since you weren't able to buy a domain [1] that you wanted at a price that you could afford to pay that all domains "are mostly taken by various squatters and other scum of the Internet".

I mean "scum"? How unfair that something that you want isn't available at a price YOU can pay. And if that price was affordable that someone else wouldn't have beaten you to buying it (which is already what happened, right?). I mean it would just be sitting there because nobody else ever thought of using or buying, say "hackernews.com" until PG decided to start Hacker news.

Or perhaps you think that domains are a "public trust" and that there should be some official board designated that decides who is worthy of a particular domain and whether they are "using" that particular domain "the right way". You know to make things fair.

Is that it? Further you are talking about .com because in general and with maybe a few exceptions, you can find many names in other TLD's (you just don't want them) or make a slight modification and have the domain you want in .com.

By the way are you aware that google owns duck.com and refuses to sell it [2] at any price at all? (And has turned down $500,000 for it iim.) Of course they aren't "using it" [3] and only have it because they bought the company that previously owned it

At least if it was owned by a person such as you refer to it would be available for sale at some price.

[1] Or perhaps that wasn't even the case maybe you have just read about other people or know someone that this was the "aggrieved" party?

[2] I was involved in trying to do this. And I communicated and had back and forth with high level people at google who in the end simply said "sorry not interested at any price". And this isn't the first time this has happened with a company either.

[3] It redirects to google.com as if they need that traffic.
Infinite Jest actually covers this topic in a really comical way. The author talks about how people dislike the way they look on the video phones and therefore begin to wear masks that look like made-up versions of themselves. Eventually, they start putting up little pictures of themselves instead of actually attending to the video call, and video phones basically return to voice phones with a picture.
WePay is hiring across several positions:
- Developers
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Confirmed: Snapchat Hack Not A Hoax, 4.6M Usernames And Numbers Published
Right, I'd still need a bit of external test after isolated work in many case. But sometimes small abstract concepts will unlock and you just know. Aha moment.
That's not one of the 18 countries in the Eurozone, though. The Eurozone consists of: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain.

The UK is one of the 10 countries in the EU but not in the Eurozone: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Sweden, and the UK.
Sorry what? Are you more interested in "keeping them reading" or actually making accessible web sites that are easy to read? What exactly does interaction have to do with it? When I'm reading a book, I really don't want to turn pages constantly.
>So they have been in a situation similar to the UK since 2004 until now?

Yes.. ..except not as many immigrants from 3rd world countries.
Er, banknotes in circulation is literally money printing yes, but not what people refer to when talking about "printing money". Most money isn't cash, and the amount of cash is fairly irrelevant in a modern economy.
Wow, I was surprised to see that Apple has patents on those, especially the one on pull-down menus. Wasn't pull-down menus there in some old Xerox computer?
Yet, we can all agree the Greek alphabet was first.

It is important to be first, because those who are first define the market. The market was defined in English, and what Patrick is saying, unfortunately for non-native English character set readers, is true.

They would need to invent their own separate internet, as your rebuttal suggests.
That's pretty harsh, although you may be entirely correct. I'm not smart enough to know. Please remember that the author did this for fun and despite whatever flaws it may have, it is still interesting to think about.

Is it impossible to overcome the flaws you pointed out? Is there a way to abstract away the risk from the end user? Are there other applications for this where trust is not an issue? At risk of sounding like an idiot, could some sort of distributed proof-of-work/proof-of-stake protocol alleviate some of the trust problem?
Nfl/Cfl Prospect Khalil Bass Highlights
--2014-01-01 16:45:59-- https://news.ycombinator.com/
Resolving news.ycombinator.com (news.ycombinator.com)... 198.41.191.47, 198.41.190.47
Connecting to news.ycombinator.com (news.ycombinator.com)|198.41.191.47|:443... connected.
ERROR: The certificate of `news.ycombinator.com' is not trusted.
ERROR: The certificate of `news.ycombinator.com' hasn't got a known issuer.
feeling that they are the protectors of society...

Not society, just the SNR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio).
I'm mid-thirties myself and am going through the same thing. I decided midway through 2013 that I just couldn't keep going. I left my job July 31 last year and thought I would build a software business on my own. I thought the problem was I just didn't like my previous job or working for others. The problem is that I really don't like large amounts of coding. I don't mind dabbling in small amounts of code now and then but large amounts of code day in and day out just burn me out.

For now, I'm taking up writing. Both technical writing and fiction. Writing Science Fiction is something I've always wanted to try. Long term, I want to move into renovating old homes and into farming. Specifically peppers. I like growing peppers.
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.

A big challenge with typography, and design more generally, is that sometimes what is objectively superior in some measurable sense (retention, reading speed, etc.) can contradict what a test subject prefers subjectively. I agree with your caution about providing too many options at the expense of simplicity, but when you’re asking a question that doesn’t have a single universally correct answer, I don’t see that you have any better strategy available. Interesting idea for the reading aid, BTW.
It applies, but California has effectively zero enforcement capability if you're operating out of say, Rhode Island.

The only outside scenario is if you get really large, and become a juicy target for the state to go after (and or eg you're large and doing something particularly aggressive in violation). The state simply could never afford the massive enforcement costs to go after every web site owner on earth external to California, so they'll obviously only target the big prizes.
If you think that Italy and Greece is third world you don't know what you're talking about.
Ubuntu has a dock-like-launcher and pull-downs in the menu bar. Interesting.
Signs you're veering from good API design
It's switching to mobile formatting. The text is smaller, but the phone is also closer to your face. I thought it was cool how you could switch layouts on the fly like that.
Lake Superior State University: Banished Words List
Thanks for the reminder of the name of this company. I was racking my brains to remember the exact name. I visited them back in the day (we were going to sell them IP location technology - deal never happened). They had awesome offices (foosball tables, nice cubes, etc.). Unfortunately they had zero ability to create user adoption. The lesson? Doing a proprietary thing that competes with a universally accepted thing is hard to be successful at. Even with $130 million in funding.
I largely agree with what you write, but I'm somewhat skeptical about blaming the ECB. The thing is, it seems that monetary policy is actually pretty powerless when your goal is to increase economic activity (rather than slowing it down).

Point in fact, what could the ECB have done better? They could have reduced interest rates faster and more aggressively, but would that really have changed so much? What else could they have done?

I think the blame lies squarely on fiscal policy, namely the European obsession with austerity. Mainstream (that is, non-pundit) macro-economics correctly predicted that austerity would hurt, yet European politicians still follow that prescription.

In part, the structure of the Eurozone is at fault. If the automatic stabilizers like unemployment insurance and other social programs had been a part of a supranational budget, the crisis would never have become as deep.
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I dont really want my mid-level domains to potentially be hashes - I want domains at all levels to be intelligible and, optimally, to be named what they are, i.e. foodinchicago.com or food_in_chicago.com or food in chicago.nlp_name

Perhaps enabling spaces in domain names is possible? Since spaces in filenames are allowed I don't see why spaces in names shouldn't be allowed. And then you could have a default root domain for natural language names - .nlp, for instance, and then just assume that name when someone types in a natural language URI with no tld.

We could use something like NameCoin for this TLD to avoid collisions.
I started to build something similar myself. Just send a snap to "kittenbot", and you'll get a random kitten everytime you send a snap to it.
The most important thing you can do is to acknowledge that will-power is a limited resource and to instead change / design your environment. Figure out what the triggers are for the habit you are trying to change and eliminate those triggers as much as possible.

Cancel cable. Sell your video game system. Don't keep beer, candy, or processed foods in the house. Commit to a fixed schedule with a personal trainer. Don't spend time with people who have habits you're trying to avoid.
I wonder how hard it'd be to get JavaScript/ECMAScript onto a better encoding.. Do we actually have a "better" encoding?
>> Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army.. Stop spying!

Seems a strange message to send to a country that spies on it's own citizens (and where apparently the citizens are unable to prevent their own government from doing it to them).
Screenshot: http://imgur.com/Fr8um8B
I don't know much about economy but my understanding of it is that, given their accounts faking and the resulting over-inflated GDP the greek would have tanked either way. But the eurozone almost following them in the abyss and being in the hurt for years ? That entirely on us.
He's spot-on about robots: Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.
Well two things come to mind.

1) Who is going to complain and know that they entered if the reason they are entering is that they can tell that nobody ever entered (say by placing something type of tell tale sign on the door showing no activity as is done in nursing homes?

2) They almost certainly have a right to enter for some exigent circumstances (that of course could be fabricated) fairly easily should they decide they want to enter the unit.
That kind of behavior is referred to and might be permitted by the SCOTUS decision 'tptacek cied above. Relevant paragraph:

Whatever the permissible scope of intrusiveness of a routine border search might be, searches of this kind may in certain circumstances take place not only at the border itself, but at its functional equivalents as well. For 273273 example, searches at an established station near the border, at a point marking the confluence of two or more roads that extend from the border, might be functional equivalents of border searches. For another example, a search of the passengers and cargo of an airplane arriving at a St. Louis airport after a nonstop flight from Mexico City would clearly be the functional equivalent of a border search.[4]*

There are certainly important differences: the court gives the example of a search of passengers that definitively crossed a border and who are searched where they disembark.

That being said, since NY is a major international travel hub, the searches described in that article might qualify as "functionally equivalent" to border searches. In any case, I think it's a stretch to say that DHS treats everything 100 miles from the border as a "Constitution-free zone". Have we seen equivalent searches being performed in Georgia or Virginia?
And even when The Wire was made:

"[The Wire] is a treatise on the end of the American empire and who we are as a people and what we’ve come to and why we can no longer solve or even seriously address our own problems." -– David Simon
This wont work for tech focused startups. Google could never exist without writing a single line of code. Nor could Dropbox. etc...

Yeah maybe a retail/ecommerce website sticky taped using off the shelf parts with glue, but definitely no tech startup. A landing page offering something which isn't built yet might also work using wordpress et al. However you still need some tech knowledge to get this setup.

Being in a position to build an idea is a lot more powerful then raving on about not needing to write code to build a startup. For those that have read Founders at Work will know that ideas change. This means iterations. Many many iterations. Very fast. Testing the waters with a MVP... usually that requires writing code. Unless of course you want to move slow then yeah don't write code and hope for the best with the glue.
Or even ZCode32 to help with readability for when you need to copy written hashes. :)
DNSCrypt is useless. Yeah, they can't see that you did a DNS A record lookup for www.example.com, but they can still see your subsequent TCP connection to the IP you received in your encrypted DNS response, and see the HTTP Host header that your browser sends. Even if it's a HTTPS connection, modern browsers leak the hostname then too, due to SNI.

Signing DNS responses has much more value than encrypting them.

If you set up DNSCrypt with OpenDNS, you're not improving the situation. You're just adding an additional third party that can see what you're doing.
The Humble Programmer by Edsger W. Dijkstra (1972)
Pull-downs are entirely Apple's:

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_P...

and

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Busy_Being_Born.t...
Backdoor found in Linksys, Netgear Routers
Is it a bad time to learn Python?
The menu patent is for translucent menus "large, lower rectangle that conveys the impression of a translucent/transparent surface"
Wow, we're seeing evolution in action! See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6664587

I liked the jackboots in the previous version, I hope you'll find a way of putting that back in!
All that is of little relevance, because the crisis in Greece is not a crisis of inefficient use of resources. It is a crisis of disuse of resources. Just look at the unemployment numbers to see what I mean.

Had Greece not been part of the Eurozone, their currency would have lost value during the crisis. This would have driven a recovery as Greeks would have turned to producing more things locally, both for domestic use and for exports.
Well, we do have maglev trains such as the ones in Shanghai. I could be wrong but I think the main benefit is the vehicle doesn't need to overcome rolling resistance, making it easier to accelerate and allowing faster travel.
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There is some middle ground between opening up all of UniCode and just Latin characters.

It seems that generally a subset of sufficiently distinct characters should mostly suffice. I don't think e.g. Latin, Hebrew and Chinese have much visual overlap.
You'd be surprised how dedicated normal people are when they don't know that these simple things can be automated. I remember about 15 years ago when I was a freshman in highschool, and found my sister replacing every space after period on her 40-page thesis with two spaces. I told her of the find/replace all feature, and she was pretty happy. Over the years I've gone through a crazy number of incidents where normal people are spending tens of hours on things that would literally take me less than maybe 30 seconds to do.
Indeed :)

More of a provocation, since I don't really agree with the idea. It does seems like it sometimes, though...
"protects against DNS interception by my ISP"

Your ISP can still see the IP address of every web server that you connect to, and can still see the "Host" header that your browser sends in HTTP requests, and also in HTTPS requests (due to SNI) if you're using a reasonably modern OS/Browser combo.

All you've done is add an additional third party that can view and log what you're doing.
What's your vested interest? Drug law enforcement or treating addiction to a non-addictive drug quackery?
That article is behind a paywall.
> The currency is never the problem ... Not being able to devalue your currency prevents external trade.

So it is the currency that is the problem :-)
Couldn't this also be mitigated by making all domains mandatorily delegated from a national ccTLD? Eliminate/redirect apple.com to apple.com.us, then make sure it conforms to the rules for US domains (Latin character set only, etc) whereas apple.com.ru comes under the rules of the Russian registrar?
Thank you, Hollywood
SEEKING WORK - Remote

Located in Albuquerque, seeking a remote position with flexible-ish hours for 20 to 25 hours a week.

- +5 years professional web dev experience (PHP, Python, Javascript). I excel at large sized backend projects, but happy to take care of the frontend as well. Past experience includes anything from Magento, Wordpress, Zend, Kohana, Silex to Flask, PyQT, etc. etc. to large custom “from scratch” applications, intranet apps, etc. Personal pride and interest in best practices security wise.

- +8 years running Linux exclusively. Very comfortable around a command line. Happy to set up, secure, troubleshoot and maintain any server.

- Fluent in English, Dutch and Spanish (euro expat with permanent residency in the US).

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Looking preferably for a small team or a single position, as well as something long term or at least 3-4 months, not the job hopper type.

Happy to chat over Skype, provide code samples and/or do a test run together.