skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're in the business of designing systems for users, I hope you'll reconsider your viewpoint. I'm a Rails developer, and the attitude you've adopted is very familiar to me. It's a kind of "trust your users" attitude that was prominent in the Rails community for a long time. Unfortunately, that led to several very, very ugly security issues.

What you're saying is that insecure defaults are OK, so long as they're obvious. The problem is that things are rarely obvious to 100% of the people, 100% of the time. A company the size of Digital Ocean has enough customers that if even 5% of their customers misinterpreted this option, a "significant" number of people would be affected.

Consider, for example, a user who sees the destroy page and assumes that "scrub" data is some extra, optional precaution, because "destroy" can't possibly mean "erased but recoverable". I mean, it says destroy, right?

Just a few days ago, someone posted a link to a blog post titled Toyota Manufacturing Principles. One of the principles mentioned in that post was poka-yoke[1]; otherwise known as mistake-proofing. A tenant so important that Toyota -- one of the most successful industrial companies in the world -- has made it a core principle.

One of my business partners has a favorite catch phrase: it's never a problem until it becomes a problem. It's his way of pointing out that just because something hasn't happened to you yet doesn't mean it won't be a problem if it does. Speaking as someone who has made their fair share of mistakes, I'd caution you to consider that advice carefully.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke
We already have 220,000 lines of (GPL) C code competing with NTL: http://flintlib.org/ :-)
I am completely unqualified to comment on these so feel free to correct me, but isn't libtommath a liberally licensed (WTFPL) that also provides efficient bignums?
As long as the participants were keen and serious, the conference still performed a function, as a useful practicum experience for them, and maybe even some learning and sharing got done.

It can be seen as a betrayal of trust to inject nonsense into the proceedings. Like somebody sneaking into the locker room of a ball team in uniform, going on the field and fooling around. "See, the players are not really good! I'm a fool and I got out here!"

Just representing the other side of the coin here. Just because its not prestigious, doesn't means its entirely worthless.
Bitcoin does not need "to get the fundamentals right" because Bitcoin is just a protocol, not a person. And the protocol works pretty well for those who use it and does not care if BTC is worth $700 or $10.

Here are the fundamentals if you want them:

1. You can really own bitcoins while you never really own dollars or gold. You can move them, store them, shuffle around, for a very small price and always have an ultimate control of where they go. http://blog.oleganza.com/post/67362431718/you-can-own-bitcoi...

2. Blockchain allows registering all sorts of proofs for many different kinds of protocols. It can replace DNS+SSL in a single solution where you really own your username like you own a bitcoin.

3. Bitcoin allows to program complex contracts to be enforced by the whole network thus reducing need for vaults, audits, lawers, laws, police force etc. If I lock up my savings in a time-locked transaction for 10 years which needs any 3 signatures out of 5 of my friends and relatives to redeem, there's nothing in the whole planet that can steal this money from me. Or, I can make a bilateral 200% deposit with a total stranger and trade under whatever rules we agreed upon without having reputation systems: http://blog.oleganza.com/post/58240549599/contracts-without-...

There's a lot more to it. It's not just a "payment network".
You consider the equivalence false, but would a visitor from another planet agree with you? More to the point, do average Muslims agree with you? I realize that Islam has its faults; it is a human activity after all. I realize that the ways in which some Muslims demonize "the West" differs in important respects from the ways in which some westerners demonize Islam. I'll stipulate that "Saudi" Islam has been a bad influence in your home country. But what the hell does that have to do with USA military action?

If Bangladeshis want to kick Saudis out of Bangladesh, they can damn well do it themselves. How pathetic would the USA have to be to fight a proxy war with that objective? Please, even though you find your personal opinions happen to coincide with the slogans of the USA military-industrial complex, don't imagine that entity ever has you or your home country's well-being in mind.
> It's not quite that simple.

That could be the catchphrase for the entire US tax code. :D
Not to mention their refusal to admit that they shouldn't be changing quotes in the first place.
If the founder is a developer, yes, I totally agree. But for business person, no, I don't. Just like OOP programming, I think a team needs to be comprised of unique committed talented professionals that can do their own job very good: marketing, sales, social networking, programming, designing, business managing, legal, etc. (skills might overlap).

Even if you are Jack of all trades, you won't have the time to execute all the tasks well on your own. If the developer looks down on you because you don't know how to code, then that is not your ideal candidate or your business or talent is not convincing enough.
The Nine Things You Should Know About the NSA Recommendations
Also it does not support his narrative.
I'd be interested to see a performance comparison. :-)
It's certainly disturbing to see someone you respect misinform people in order to advance a personal agenda.
Mac Pro Late 2013 Teardown
[Python 3 releases live in parallel to Python 2] In retrospect this was a mistake,
it resulted in a complete lack of urgency for the community to move

Adoption comes from solving urgent problems - not from creating them.
> But customer development is not the same as straight sales!

The point of the article, what caused my last failure, what almost everyone that bootstraps a business, and most of the ones that received investiment will tell you is that this phrase is wrong. At least in the context of growing companies (not mature companies in mature markets), if you separate the two concepts, you are dead.

And that means your sales force should never do just straight sales, and you must hire accordingly.

The worst part, I knew (at least in theory) it from the beginning. Not talking to customers is very attractive to developers. But don't mind, it didn't hurt much.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

You used a rhetorical flourish that made your argument sound more extreme than you intended, and it backfired when someone called you out on it. Rather than write a reply dripping with sarcasm and contempt, perhaps you should meditate on this incident as your personal failure to be a clear and effective writer.
see same old arguments. the question is what gives btc "value", not "is it programmable, secure etc etc etc"
Yes, hence the feature phone :), no GPS, no email, no browsing records, etc.
Driving is different. Thought `robot is better driver than me` is much harder to accept than `robot is a better surgeon than someone i don't know`.
Whats the real reason behind your New Years resolution?
Agreed. In an actual journal graphic competition, that one would not even be admitted to the contest. A time series with misleading scales? Its dis-educating people, not informing them. It correlates nothing; it scares folks with the exaggeration (student loans went from about par with annual income, to about 40% over; yet it looks like its 10X higher).
10 Clues That An Entrepreneur Is In Over His Head
I'm not sure what you're asking...Is there something that I need to fix?
Saying "I want to start a tech startup but I don't want to code" is as ridiculous as saying "I want to sell horses but I don't know anything about them and I certainly don't want to have to learn anything about them"

I disagree. Not wanting to code is not the same as not knowing anything about the product, or wanting to. There's so much more that goes into a successful product or company than time spent coding (marketing, design, testing, sales, industry/market immersion, etc.). As a developer and co-founder, ideally I want complimentary skill sets. Being able to write code may be an overlapping skill, but it's not required.
>the US suggested that huawei might be implementing backdoors in their product out of the box, is not the same thing as the US security agency actively searching for exploits for the product.

The US has also been adding hardware backdoors by intercepting mail as it travels across US friendly territories. Furthermore, the US backdoored RSA's RNG 'out of the box', and reports suggest it has backdoored other things 'out of the box'.

The argument as I understood it was this, US:
"China valves its 'dominance of cyberspace' over the security of both itself and the community of nations, therefore using hardware produced in China will probably make everyone, including the US, less safe".

It is a good argument in general form and it addresses an important need for security because this sort of gear is used in nuclear power plants, air defense grids, hydroelectric dams, etc (note that Hardware backdoors have covert radios for bridging airgaps). These backdoors, even if not exploited by the Chinese, could fall into arbitrary hands[1] and cause significant economic damage.

EDIT: People are downvoting this comment. As downvoting is your right please continue to do so but feedback is welcome. I care about understanding this issue and I want to know why you disagree with my comment.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnational_organized_crime
When terrorism in the big concern, droid strikes are used against real threats. General espionage is used to figure out what the real threats are.

I guess they'd still be hoovering up everything they could, just in case, if it weren't for the threat of terrorism. Public opinion is strategically important (if a foreign power starts a war, how will their people react?), but it wouldn't be so important.
I self-published both of my books, and originally fulfilled orders through ejunkie but now use Infusionsoft. Revenue is a little over $50k for each book (and growing), and each took about a month to write.

I really look at my book as paid lead gen for my more premium products. Take a look at my annual report for the year which outlines how I funnel customers through my products: http://planscope.io/blog/how-i-changed-the-world-in-2013/
I'm having my kidney removed for transplant in February. The hospital offered to have the surgery performed with robotic tools where I'm never actually touched by surgeons -- they are controlling the tools from a workstation.

These tools have come under fire because a certain number of surgeries have gone wrong using them, but it seems like when you compare the number of incidents vs the number of surgeries performed the percentage of error is significantly smaller than those performed by human hands.

That said, I definitely agree that it is only a matter of time before a robot will be handling the surgery from start to finish, having learned how to perform the task by trained surgeons. The complications arise when the robot runs into difficult situations and things that happen outside of their defined work patterns.
Are you aware that the NSA is actively planting exploits into products by intercepting shipments? Your are not buying a Cisco product: you are buying a Cisco + NSA product, with a backdoor. Which is exactly the same as buying a Huawei product with a backdoor.
its not the question of "is it possible?", its just that these are always listed amongst the 'top 100 books of all time' and each needs more than just 'reading time' you cannot read Ulysses and 1984 the same month, physically you can, but that would be useless.
I agree with your assessment of the situation, but not with the conclusion that robotic tools are as effective as hands:

Robotic tools have been optimised for specific, planned and clearly-defined surgeries, and I know they can offer less invasive keyhole surgeries.

But, they do not nearly emulate hands in a general way - much bigger breakthroughs are required for robotic tools to be useful in emergency surgery.
Unrelated to the article: I nearly jumped out of my seat when I saw a link to Martin Sustrik's blog on here. I recently discovered his blog and really enjoy his writing. He's one of the main programmers behind ZeroMQ and is now working on a new messaging library named nanomsg, using some of the lessons learned from building ZeroMQ. It's a great read if you enjoy the melding of technical and social writing. Pieter Hintjen's blog is also very interesting[0] for the same reasons.

0 - http://hintjens.com/
Just another reminder of the old investing rule: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isnt true.
Video: http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1464870

See also http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family#The_Napoleo... is my favorite example of this. brilliant at every move - like some chess grandmaster of business.
Even better: use all that money and intelligence, not to hunt down and kill people, not to invade countries, but to help make the world a better place. Then less people might dedicate their lives to killing American civilians.
I think to your average person markdown looks like a step down from WYSiWYG, especially when there's a massively successful, user friendly alternative called Wordpress.

I think that's a battle already lost.
Perhaps the parent you're replying to means to say that the author doesn't appear to understand the distinction, because the wording being used doesn't make it a decision problem either. As long as we're nitpicking: decision problems have yes-or-no answers.
Moore's law has not much to do with computational power anymore, it's always been about transistor numbers in cpus. While this has traditionally mapped 1:1 with computing power, it doesn't work like this anymore. It's not an exponential growth in computing because our techniques of parallelism and algorithms haven't been keeping up with all this power.

Very interesting article nonetheless, just felt like clarifying this tiny point.
A Look At Africa's Innovation Foot-Print For 2013
The Visual Studio 2013 experience
It explains the NSA. Since they trust no one, they can lie to everyone.
And anyone who has done any serious reading of economics is well aware that Smith is hardly considered authoritative on any subject in economics. His only insights are almost word for word copies from Cantillon. I'm not the biggest fan of Rand but she's far from a joke. Her writings deserve to analyzed and taken as seriously as any other philosopher.

I don't know if PG is the right about everything he says or even most of what he says but he has inspired a lot of people to do things (largely for the good of society). A philosopher could hope for little more I suspect (not even suggesting PG would self-ascribe that term but I would ascribe it to him).
welp http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57614604-94/president-obama... now we know why
So you think the NSA is going to destroy consumer computing, then?
I don;t mind so long as I can stop running NAT so my test VMs can pull from github when everything else they do runs over v6... (actually buildbot doesn't work over v6 only either).
the investment banking model
I guess at this point, its fair to ask all those previous commenters who were telling us: "It just doesn't work like that.. We were in the dept of defense.. you guys don't understand" to comment..
In my experience of being a developer and building my own idea I actually found there were occasions when my inbuilt technical idealism caused me to make some wrong decisions on my product. I found it quite difficult to make product decisions independently of technical ones.

I've had some really good bosses who couldn't code, though there is certainly a skill in winning over devs when you're not a programmer yourself.

There are advantages to being a non-technical founder, if you're able to bring the right techies on board.
Where are people respected the most?
Be careful, you're treading into muddy waters, and it's not necessary for your argument.

Consider a few problems with your statistics. First, 20k of those gun deaths in the US are suicides, which distorts the statistics into pretending to show a certain level of gun violence that's not actually evident. Second, dying in terrorist attacks is not the same thing as dying at the hands of terrorists or terrorist organizations. There are tens of thousands of people being killed every year in Syria, for example, at the hands of al qaeda or other terrorist aligned soldiers. There have been about ten thousand people killed every year in Mexico at the hands of drug cartels in what is effectively a weird kind of civil war happening there. During the Iraq war and during the war in Chechnya terrorists and terrorist aligned fighters killed tens of thousands of people, many of them civilians.

Moreover, very few people die every year from jet crashes. However, that low figure is due to a truly enormous amount of effort and resources put forth, probably in the trillions of dollars per year range, to keep air travel safe and reliable.

That's the danger of using naive statistics and straight death-toll comparisons the way you are doing. Sure, more people are going to die from cheeseburgers than likely will ever die from terrorism. But A: overall that's a good thing, and B: it's not necessarily meaningful.

More importantly, there are much more direct and more substantive attacks against NSA surveillance effectiveness, TSA screening, etc.

For example, with regard to TSA screening it's notable that the TSA has not thwarted even one terrorist attack on a plane since 9/11. However, there are many documented accounts of TSA failures to prevent weapons of various sorts (knives, guns, even bombs) from getting on planes. And there have been attempted attacks on planes which the TSA did not stop but which passengers did.

The case with regard to the ineffectuality of the NSA's surveillance efforts is even stronger. They put out a list of foiled plots where the NSA surveillance had some role and it is wall to wall bullshit. Most of the "plots" are little more than entrapment, and there appears to be no case at all where surveillance was the lynchpin that made the difference between shutting down a plot when that plot would have gone undetected without the surveillance data. Worse yet, there are several examples of cases, such as the Tsarnaev brothers, of outright incompetence where the FBI/NSA et al had a case handed to them on a golden platter and they screwed the pooch and let someone they were warned about end up murdering American civilians. And one has to wonder if those sorts of failures, which vastly outweigh the vast majority of phony "successes", happened because federal law enforcement agencies were too focused on this high-tech bullshit instead of actually doing their fucking jobs.
Netflix kind of works, but the geolocation is borked, so I had to turn it off (it thought I was in US and then denied access).
IANAL. First of all a cease and desist doesn't require you to do anything. It's merely a threat. That said it seems pretty clear that you're violating copyright laws. The DMCA only applies to user generated content (UGC). You're not letting users input their own links to 3rd party content, you're finding the links yourself. It doesn't matter where you get them from. Not only that but you're not linking to this content on other sites, you're actively playing it for users within your app.

It's very cool you built this in HS. Let the whole thing be a good lesson in building apps and dealing with the law.
> Are there really? How common is "common"? This is the first I'm hearing of it, and I'd like more than the author's word. Perhaps a study? :)

Speaking from my own experience in Slovakia. It may be different in other countries.

> The answer has to be education - anything you can do, the "alternative science" crowd and profiteers can do, too. Unfortunately, neither I nor the essay's author seem to have a great cure-all answer for people who don't have the time, interest, or intellect to educate themselves.

I don't have an answer, but a suggestion: Let's make the processes such as publishing and licensing part of scientific method rather than a matter of political discourse. We can perform experiments to find out which processes do work and which don't. Once the successful processes become a part of the canon, violating them by a publisher or a licensing board can be pointed out as not compliant with scientific method.
Robots have been taking over jobs for a long time. The problem is that people have too narrow a definition of "robot". Is a Bobcat a robot? A job that 30 years ago might have been done by a row of men with shovels can now be done faster and far more cheaply by one guy with a Bobcat. How about a forklift? Hauling 100 pound bags of stuff around used to be a major source of human employment. Now, we put those bags on a pallet and carry them with a forklift.

Is a food processor a robot? A century ago, fine French cooking was defined by its labor-intensive sauces, manually grinding and sieving vegetables down to liquids. Now, it can be done in seconds by a cheap little machine. Meanwhile, two people and a Hobart can wash all the dishes generated by a large restaurant. Is that Hobart a robot?

Automation doesn't just replace labor. It allows new forms of labor. Most of us here work on computers. What would we have been doing 100 years ago, before there were computers? Would we have been clerks? Adding numbers manually? Artists drawing things by hand for print?
Does anyone here have The Linux Programming Interface in ebook form? In the past, I've preferred to have reference style books in hard copy because there's nothing quite like thumbing through them. I've had my eye on this book for a while and at $40 it seems tempting even, as an ebook.
This is a key reason why I feel it's important to be working in technology, especially as a developer. It will take longer before your job is automated away.

My wife works in a position that I feel could be automated, and it's scary when you give it much thought.

When the time comes that there are people who are able to work because their skills keep them valuable and people who can't work because their skills are no longer needed, I know which side I want to be on, regardless of any sort of moral implications.
Let me have a little fun with it. Glory to Arstotzka!
- Arbitrary written content with mixed in assets

Nothing works here.

You're right. Offering a simple way for a non-technical user to manage (locally) his layout is the challenge of most WYSIWYG.

I don't use Medium but was quite impressed by this quick demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO8hysXMfvQ

Check out around 2:00 how images are inserted within the text. The interface works because it offers only 3-4 possibilities: zoomed in/normal size, full width/left float. Also, there are only 2 levels of heading.

This limited interface is a great compromise between a content-focused experience, and some layout flexibility.