skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Europe, and hell, the rest of world, have similar sane and insane political areas if I might remind you. Lots of the politics, especially the race/culture/nationalism politics, in Europe shock most Americans.
It's not a technological problem. The technological barriers have been taken care of. Google Fiber exists and is awesome and affordable. The reasons we don't all have Google Fiber level of service are political: regulatory capture, monopolies and oligopolies, conflicts of interest, etc.
Interesting. I was thinking about some of the open source implementations of LTE that have been posted here but maybe the wifi mesh approach needs tweaking. Also, from a business perspective, I think it would be cool if there was a way to make it sort of like a "co-op" so people who host hot spots or base stations would get some profit sharing or something?
You really believe that Facebook couldn't find a competent C programmer to make some changes to git?
Getting the right answer on known problems is a prerequisite to getting the right answer on unknown ones. At least, if you can't get the right answer it's very unlikely you can solve ones where the answer is unknown. Also, there's a good chance you didn't really learn the material. Having taught courses at all levels I would say it's relatively rare to assign problems that are truly hard. Most just are testing your understanding of definitions and if you can't get the right answer you probably didn't understand something.

Getting a PhD isn't just about "learning" but also how to create/discover new knowledge. If all you want is to learn something get a second undergraduate degree or read on your own.
The problem with fiber I think is that a lot of communities are "trench weary" and don't want more fiber providers digging up the streets. I think Google gets around that by hyping that they are coming to town, which is smart, it gets the politicians to back them.
A New Tool to Help Mathematicians Pack
Truly awesome! I am curious what part of the light spectrum did they use to take the picture? If it was said in the article then I missed it.
My Guess would be server updates. There was some Linux security updates done recently that required a reboot. They must have ran them.
Too bad there is not a tech way to work around them. Maybe using some kind of unlicensed wireless?
I'm not going to remember the word Jelly. It has been too ingrained in me to mean sweet, mucky fruit gunk. Please come up with something shorter, and if possible and I actually did cut the tip of my finger off, something that doesn't require three fingers to type right. ;p
Do you think the government would rather deal with more ISPs or fewer, insofar as surveillance is concerned?
Is this currently possible with NodeJS?

Javascript has none of the following:

- Macros

- Monads

- call/cc
Fewer killer jellyfish. For now.
List of Full stack Rails Developer Resources
The first comment on the page sums it up:

"America is the only country in the world where BRIBERY is legalized and stupidly called lobbying."
I'm just in the process of upgrading our office in the heart of Melbourne from ADSL2 to a 10/10Mb synchronous DSL. That costs us just shy of $600 per month. There is enough fat in that pricing that the vendor dropped around 10% off the list price with us just asking, no real haggling.

Our office in the heart of SF has 100/100Mb (admittedly, 'selected buildings only') for $50/month.

And this is just after us receiving an new government which scuttled the NBN that might have given us comparable service in 1-2 decades time. We're going to have expensive, slow internet for a long time.
my college fraternity chapter house is getting demolished and rebuilt this summer. it hit me like a ton of bricks because I have so many college memories there and was saddened I couldn't walk through it in another 20 years. I think i'll have to take a shit ton of pictures so I build a photosynth reconstruction of it :)
Sometimes I wonder why the alphabet soup surrounding intel-gathering isn't collapsed into one department, something that could be called "Homeland Security" or similar.
> we don't have the hatred of the Roma which is endemic to the European continent.

s/Roma/Mexicans; s/European/American;

Fixed.
Ah, but what is within reach of government regulation? Are they willing to, say, shoot down satellites?
> Does rough it mean suffer? I don't know if that's a point in favor...

I think it refers to enjoying the outdoors. E.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Crest_Trail
No, of course it's not wrong. You can argue until you are blue in the face. Go right ahead...
will you be adding it to CCAN (the C code archive, in a similar spirit to Perl's CPAN)?

see http://ccodearchive.net/
It's not technically unsafe, but it's unsafe from a UI point of view. It obviously confuses some inexperienced people (witness the confusion in this thread), making them feel helpless and like their work has been destroyed, even if it hasn't. Both git and hg actually have lots of fallbacks so that work is never lost, but without experience, these fallbacks may not be obvious.

Hg's rewriting extensions are sometimes disabled by default for this reason: until people understand how they work, they shouldn't use them. If they try to use them, hg tells them how to enable these features.
Its still one of the coolest and best paid companies out there! You really think they couldn't hire a few guys from core git team saying - "Dude, just improve git and we'll pay you?". You must be kidding
To The Moon looks awesome. Mind giving a few reasons why you liked the game?
I don't disagree but don't really get the relevance of your "Enjoy the cloud…" comment. Web hosting is something that needs some provider with terms of service and whether "cloud" or not doesn't seem to make much difference to me.
This question is actually really complicated to answer. The short answer is that we run perforce.

The long answer is that we run perforce with a bunch of caching servers and custom stuff in front of it and some special client wrappers. In fact there is more than one client wrapper. One of them uses git to manage a local thin client of the relevant section of the repo and sends the changes to perforce. This is the one I typically use since I get the nice tooling of git for my daily coding and then I can package all the changes up into a single perforce change later.

Google has invested a lot of infrastructure into code management and tooling to make one repo work. We've reaped a number of benefits as a result.

As others have mentioned though there are trade offs. We made the tradeoff that best suited our needs.
There are many VPS services for Linux. Amazon EC2, for example should let you use pretty much any Linux system image you want and they have many available for easy installation.

There are also some VPS services for OSX, which should be easy to find with a Google search.

I'm not sure if there are any single services that support both Linux and OSX.
This is what facebook means when they say atomic commits.
My comment was apparently lost in the crash.

I wrote an introduction to Distributism for open source software developers, and an introduction to open source for Distributists.

You may find it interesting. You can read it at http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-distributist-view...

Would be happy to answer more questions of course.
mq keeps its patches as an internal per-repo stack. This is much weaker than git's tree branches.

Here's an example: let's say I've been working on a repo, and have 2 current mq patches called A and B pushed. There's no way for me to pop A and B, then apply another patch called D in the current repo (at least as far as I could figure out). Also, even if there were, I'd have no way of then pushing A and B on top of D. The patches only work as a linear stack (D must come on top of B).
Try https://ghost.org/
A publishing platform which is beautifully designed, easy to use, and free for everyone. Ghost provide hosting solution as well.
As opposed to what, threads? They have contributed towards improving software quality? In most languages with mutable state they've been a disaster -- correct me if I'm wrong.

Adding threads in JavaScript would also be a disaster. Practically everything is mutable and there are absolutely no locking mechanisms.
Was looking for a description of how Yahoo! runs its tech stack, found this...
That's an interesting angle. My immediate thought was that it's different parts of the government making such decisions. But upon reflection I have no reason to believe NSA et al wouldn't try to influence such matters as they could.
Mercurial's branches are server side (learned that the hard way the first time I made a branch), git's are client side.
Actually, campaigns nowadays run on the concept of "bundlers," who are rich people who act as a funnel for their rich friends.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_finance_in_the_United_...
Let's do one for another country, say Korea.

- I understand that a significant majority of Korea's healthcare system is lacklustre, but cheap.

- I understand that a significant majority of Korea's only offer limited annual leave (1 week) (compared to Australia's 4 weeks).

- I understand that a significant majority of Korea suffers from an extremely suicide rate for a 1st world country.

This is a sample of why I don't want to live in South Korea even though they have the fastest, cheapest internet on Earth.

Or France

- I understand that a significant majority of France's healthcare system is quite good, but you pay out the nose for it in taxes even if you don't ever use it.

- I understand that a significant majority of the French support industry and infrastructure choking union strikes over tiny contract details

- I understand that a significant majority of France suffers from an extremely high racial segregation and discrimination problem

This is a sample of why I don't want to live in France even though they have the best cuisine on Earth.

Or Australia

- I understand that a significant majority of the Australia's healthcare system is lacklustre.

- I understand that a significant majority of Australians still support the Aboriginal segregation and forced adoption laws.

- I understand that Australia not only has a slow internet, but widespread and regular censorship of what sites citizens can go to.

- I understand that Australia doesn't even offer free speech protection.

This is a sample of why I don't want to live in Australia, even though it has nice weather.
It took fierce competition to even get broadband companies to advertise what they are offering. I had to deal with a very small local monopoly in Western Maryland that just advertised "faster than dial up," had typical pings of over 200. It was thick on the local board, had a deal with local government as the sole authorized supplier in the county.

Now I'm in a different part of the country, can get FiOS, but while Verizon's service always delivers over 50 Mbps on speedtest sites, it often chokes on Youtube or Netflix. When that happens, there's no simple way to determine if it's the provider or some random provisioner in the middle. This is the future of getting screwed by telecoms: worthless metrics and plausible deniability for service degradation.

I happened to get a deal by calling all the providers in the area, then playing their offers off of each other. I recommend everyone does this every few months. But the fact that was so easy doesn't really make me feel very comfortable. If they can haggle, it just signals how much rent they're charging from all the unwary customers.
Ask HN: Web crawler/data product ideas?
Is there a data set you would love to have but you just don't have time to compile?

Is there a data set that you currently compile manually that you can't live without?

Would it make your life easier if you could avoid opening all those browser tabs every day/week/month and instead purchase a neat file (csv/google spreadsheet/something else?) with everything you need? Which browser tabs would this eliminate?
Interestingly, just yesterday Evan Spiegel (CEO of Snapchat) posted a screenshot of his e-mail introduction to Mark Zuckerberg (who is strongly rumored to have offered 4 billion for the company).

The screenshot is here: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BdU892zCAAEXy-q.png:large
Ok, that sounds like what I might do. I really wanted to get it setup tonight, but it's late already and I have training tomorrow in about 7.5 hours.
What parts? That's a very long post. I don't think the overall melancholy tone of defeat applies at all. Hg is a lively and healthy project, and the most frequently offered alternative to git with plenty of commercial backing (Facebook, Google, Atlassian, Microsoft...)
The entirety of the US is more comparable to Europe as a whole than to any individual European country.
"I get a job. My job offers health insurance coverage, which most do now. I pay a small fee (<$200) per month to get the coverage. If I get hurt I go to a doctor and the insurance covers the costs in full, so long as they accept that insurance. How is this not ideal? What would be better for the tax payer?"

How about just being able to pay that 'small fee' without having it tied to an 'employer'? The 'employer' is normally paying a lot more than your share, so this 'benefit' just means craploads more money going to the insurance company instead of your pocket to make your own decisions with.

"Covers the cost in full"? Really? Rarely, unless it's something extremely basic, and you've got some excellent plan with an extremely low deductible. Which it sounds like you might - for that $200 you're paying, the employer is probably kicking in another $600+ (wild estimate based on past experience and discussions with colleagues).

Being able to have basic medical necessities provided to you should not be dependent on whether you're 'employable' (and 'employed') at any particular moment in time.

"Employer-provided" health insurance is one of the worst aspects of the mess that is healthcare in the US.
The functional difference between free speech in Australia and the United States isn't that strong. On the idealistic part of the spectrum, the US does win, but in terms of how it affects your life, they're pretty comparable. It is interesting to note that Australia is consistently rated superior to the US on the Press Freedom Index, and both are outscored by a passel of European countries.

http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2013,1054.html
If you push while having open local branches, they get pushed to the remote (or at least that's how it was last time I used them). That's not what you want, in most cases (git branches are local).
Yes, "Just make one with a fake name!". It's pathetic
it's come to this, but I have found people don't really
care about privacy. I think we need another Mcarthy Era
in order for the masses to really take notice? Sure we
complain, but too many of us just go along with the status
quo. I gave up, and just use a pseudonym.
Thanks for the suggestion - in fact, I'll use it! I think I'll setup a wordpress blog tonight and limit myself to about 30 minutes to get content on a vanilla page. Then tomorrow, and in the future as needed, I'll invest the time needed to get a more intensive platform established (like Octopress as mentioned in an earlier comment).
So, it can have a massive impact, but it's "just a social network"? How do you know the massive impact is going to be positive, and otherwise it's "just a social network"?

North Korea is also a social network, BTW, and it doesn't give you cancer either, nor does it cause massive floods. Yeah, somewhat unfair way of framing it, isn't it? But then so is bringing up (somewhat) unpreventable illnesses and natural disasters, don't you think? And it's not like social structures weren't responsible for some of the worst things that happened in human history, dwarfing by far any flood.

Would you mind sharing some of the conspiracy theories? Most of the arguments I know are based around the abuse potential of large data collections and surveillance systems and the tendency of some people to abuse power (both of which have plenty of historical examples - after all, that's part of why democracy and the rule of law and separation of powers and all that was invented), but I can't seem to remember any conspiracy theories.

I agree fully that we should take action when something seems plausible and in line with the most accurate, unbiased information out there - I might want to add though that the level of confidence required should be weighted by the expected damage if something goes wrong, the larger the expected damage, the more cautious we should be (and analogously for the expected benefits, of course).

Also, in addition to some paranoid people, there are people who are concerned because of well-informed and well thought out arguments. I for one am very concerned indeed. That does not mean in any way that I can't appreciate some of the benefits (it seems to make electronic communication for the common user very easy, it seems, for example), but I also see large risks, and I think there are alternatives from the technical perspective that should be able to provide much the same benefits without the risks, which is why I think that society should probably try to get rid of Facebook, at least the way it currently functions.
No I'm really not. NPM is a good package manager. I'm sure it has good modules as well. But NPM isn't the only package manager out there. Other languages have excellent package managers too. Clojars, CPAN, Ruby Gems, even erlang has a package manager now.

Those are minimum reqs for a language and community. They aren't differentiators. Aside from their absence being a negative indicator.
Let’s Crowdfix the Data Problem Permanently
Those who seek to control you will do it by controlling your data. I have a solution that large multinational corporations will hate, because it will turn the tables on them and let us control our own data. Please read and help spread the word.
All sarcasm aside, this is really an important win. The purpose of law enforcement is not to enforce laws, it is to preserve disorder. I'm not saying that is their mission, but it does clear a big talking point out of the way for real change.

edit: misspelling.
> "Does rough it mean suffer?"

With a few seconds on your favorite search engine, you could discover that "rough it" is an idiom commonly used to refer to camping in a nature-heavy setting (without electricity/plumbing.)
Node.js 0.11 supports generators, which appear to be very similar to what you're describing: http://blog.stevensanderson.com/2013/12/21/experiments-with-...
One thing to note about a lot of "infrastructure" businesses is it can make business sense for them to offer deep discounts to large customers to cover their overhead - they then make their profit by selling whatever excess capacity is left over to smaller customers.

I.e. imagine you want to setup a new courier business. You convince Amazon to move all their shipping to your new courier company, by giving them a price which is almost unprofitable for you. You then make your profit on the excess capacity you have, by selling it to individuals who need shipping at more profitable prices.
The actuarial profession effectively requires a lengthy apprenticeship before practice rights are granted. A typical actuarial student starts their first entry-level actuarial job with only an undergraduate degree, and then spends the next five to ten years working full time under the supervision of senior actuaries while taking the examinations that eventually lead to being admitted into the profession. I do not know of any other profession that works this way.
Yep, exactly. Some matters are just "big enough" that you can't go rogue without answering for it. After all, the heads these agencies (NSA, SEC, whatever) are all presidential appointees.
They came from a datacenter world before they moved to AWS. The problem was that they had a traditional enterprise IT organization with big process and relying on Oracle, SANs, and all the same old enterprise IT solutions. It was built to run a company that was focused on operating warehouses and logistics, and not an agile web company.

Moving to the cloud was as much an organizational transformation as it was a technical one. And the move to AWS has paid them dividends in organizational and technical agility, as well as execution speed. I will never believe that it saved them money when compared to a well run physical infrastructure that was more purpose built for what they do, but they did not demonstrate the ability to run a physical infrastructure well so it's kind of moot.

It worked out great for them and gave Adrian some great stories to share. Congrats to him on the move to Battery, that's a fantastic team.
4 weeks paid annual leave

plus 10 days paid sick leave (cumulative) plus 10 paid public holidays per year
God save us from the evils of complentary free WiFi
Wondering what 'national security' actually was, I find this on the Wikipedia page for it:

"There is no single universally accepted definition of national security."

With 'law enforcement' you have an idea what the laws are, you know what the word 'enforcement' means and you can therefore have an idea of what the FBI is supposed to be doing.

What is this 'national security' thing they speak of? Does it mean it is okay to do COINTELPRO style stuff?
For detecting hashes? As in, SHA, or {key: value}?

If the former, you're possibly better just looking for high-entropy chunks of data of the right size. Of course, that'll match all kinds of encrypted data, but there may not be much you can do there.
United Stated Office of Unspecified Services (U.S.O.U.S.) would be my first pick.
Ha, come on, is this oppression? And the problem we all have is that this guy is taking it out on the clerk, who has no responsibility in deciding this, has no control, and present a reasonable solution despite not having too.

The guy who went there for ice cream is more to blame than the clerk in this issue.
Recruiting spam hits jelly
So basically you want the compiler to solve the halting problem for every function it compiles.
I heard a story from a friend the other day who told me about a terrorism investigation in his apartment building. Apparently some guy doused a hotel with gasoline. The NYC counterterrorism unit traced him using image search on Facebook using a photo from the hotel security cameras. They found a picture of him on his mom's Facebook page, got her phone number, and used that to locate him.
The risk you describe is a real risk. But we mitigate it at google with strong code review and high bars for our our core libraries teams.

All of our core libs are owned by a team and you can't make changes to them without permission and a thorough code review. Our perforce infrastructure allows us to prevent submits that don't meet this criteria so we get the benefits of ownership only we use ACL's instead of seperate repo's. It has so far worked very well for us.
"subtitles" ? I'm not seeing that anywhere here nor on norvig.com. link?
We advise a lot of small businesses and are seriously considering recommending the adoption of this if it helps them get likes to their fb page. Capturing fb likes from existing and happiest customers is a challenge for every small business.
lol at calling all the providers. the free market fails if left alone, under shady regulations it is almost a joke.

i found a aDSL number for ATT that was not advertised (and you reached a person on the first minute!) that was the result of some obscure regulation that they had to provide dsl without charging for a phone line if so i wanted. it was a very good service. as i was next door to their trunk.

i moved, less than 20miles, but another city. called att to transfer service, the rep read something and the burst out a sad "ah, sorry, this is verizon territory".

and that is exactly what i get here. verizon. nothing else. the 2nd or 3rd biggest city in los angeles, and i can choose, verizon.