skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can you source a router and teach them to build their own internet over private LAN? There is a huge range of basic to one-day advanced things they could do with socket programming and building basic client/servers to have fun with. Then source some donations and build a neighbourhood mesh network.

Note: I'm a woman and started this way teaching myself C when young. Client/server tutorials were one of the most fun, I recall.
I agree that the Web is regressing on this as certain players have consolidated players and decided they can get away with it... I think all the Gawker blogs de-evolved some time ago.
I wondered this also. From interacting with people on careercup.com (which is absolutely flooded with people from India) it seems like they are pushed through a lot of written tests, both for programming and for general aptitude. Definitely a lot different experience they go through over there. Wonder if it has to do with there being so many people.
If the supply of labor is reduced, the price of labor will rise until demand falls to match supply. That means that some positions will go unfilled; positions whose returns don't exceed the cost of the labor. But we don't know the total value of that labor. The community could be worse off altogether with those positions unfilled, because price doesn't capture all the information - we don't use money for every social exchange, and nor can we reliably estimate the present value of future contributions.

For example, many US companies are created by immigrants (18% of Fortune 500, or 40% if you include children of immigrants). Steve Jobs was the child of an immigrant. Hiring a guy who is so enthusiastic about getting a job that he wants to live in a rural area and live on a pittance, vs hiring someone who's ambitious and hungry - who's going to create the most value?
I'm not throwing in on either side of the target="_blank" debate. I'm just saying that making assumptions that surely all/most uses know how to X, usually end in disaster.
So you can see what is on the screen. I used to have best Dell 27" and the Apple Thunderbolt 27" display side by side (the ones I had used the exact same panel).

The Apple was glossy and the Dell was matte. If you peer at the Dell, you can see the matte coating -- but everything was nevertheless much more readable for most of the day due to the glare from the glossy screen (it was an office with a lot of natural light). Only at twilight did the Apple provide superior visibility.

So matte finishes are extremely helpful in some circumstances (depending on the lighting and type of room), and some matte finishes are a lot better than others.
Electronics startups abound as barriers to entry come down
I actually don't find paid Wikipedia editing inherently troublesome. The process of discussing and editing a Wikipedia page is entirely open. So why should a company not be able to contribute to their page if the community approves of the changes - especially if that company is open about their involvement? Perhaps higher standards of review should be applied, but I see no reason to consider it inherently suspect. And we should all be realistic - you would be hard pressed to find a company, organization, or individual who doesn't try to influence their Wikipedia page if they have the resources to.
It's a fair question, but for me moving notifications (vibration and tones) from my pocket to my wrist has been one of the best things to happen to my productivity this year.

My job is to give people I'm in conversation with my full attention. Getting texts or whatever used to completely destroy my ability to concentrate, and they are almost always useless — but not completely, preventing me from turning them off. With my Pebble, I can casually stretch and glance at my wrist to make sure that the house isn't on fire, and my client has no idea.

Likewise, I've never had a phone that vibrated strongly enough to get my attention when walking or biking. This is usually when all of the important calls would come in. Now the problem is solved.

http://hackertourism.com/watches
Technology uses micro-windmills to recharge cell phones
Oyster: Netflix for books?
Anonymous reports vulnerability in Dropbox, threatens "database leak"
And you can turn it off.
The point I was trying to make is that he never once mentioned the word "hacker" in his essay. Didn't try and dive into it's connotations, and implications. Didn't want to even take a paragraph to capture the essence of being a computer hacker.

I'm guessing that it might have been in an earlier draft, when he decided that it was distracting from the actual point he was trying to make, which was relatively straightforward.
No it doesn't. You're a liar and a fabulist, and your pseudo-scientific blog postings don't deserve recognition. Stop spamming crappy blogs on a technology site.
Totally serious.

Try to imagine reading this as a female developer/founder. It's not that it's all crazy/insulting/aaargh, but enough is. And it's happening without our input.

So. Frustrating.
Is this the latest website or cached somewhere? Look different though. I don't quite believe that DNS would be hacked.

I was thinking that they should quickly point the DNS to a different front end server to avoid this type of unavailable. Guess they are doing their job.
Bear with me here-- I understand lasers to be highly specific wavelength diode light that is bounced around in a combination of prisms and mirrors to create highly concentrated, highly directional light.

In this case, it's then diffused again through a yellow phosphorus lens.

I'm not doubting the numbers in efficiency gain, but I'm having a hard time figuring them out. Seems that there can only be loss from converting this light "back and forth" (but more than likely I don't understand how lasers work).
Just as a random update, I've been monitoring this thread & twitter etc since the beginning and it appears that dropbox is sort of working now just on extreme delay. I have auto upload on my phone and it took about 14 minutes for the picture I took to get synchronized with my desktop (normally its almost instant).
We'll try not to be too judgey :)
Come on, you're not losing options, you just maybe have a lower % chance on average. Like any of these discrimination situations you're just at a disadvantage. Unfortunate and needs fixing but easily beatable.
Cost-benefit analysis of airport security: Are airports too safe?
For me, moving notifications from my phone to my wrist is worth using the Pebble. I'm not loyal to it, and would consider switching if I was given a compelling reason to. However, I don't know what that reason would be, given that it already does exactly what I need it to. Anything else would have to be something radical and awesome that hasn't been thought of, yet.

I wrote about the sheer number of smart watches coming out, here: http://hackertourism.com/watches
Qualcomm Will Bring Lytro-Style Focus Selection To Mobile Photos New Snapdragon
It didn't seem any more such a thing than a LinkedIn page or a resume?
HTML Popups have always been a problem and with re targeting the Ads are a menace. And some clever spoofing is definitely possible. A proper ad/popup blocker for native browsers would help.
More information at http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-10/considering-...
DiffMerge is my all-time favorite visual diff tool, with 2 fatal flaws that upset me so much...

1. Unable to edit text on the left side, only the right. >.<

2. Related to 1, unable to simply paste two pieces of text into two views and compare them, the way you could on www.quickdiff.com. You have to manually create 2 files each time.

So sad, because it is so good in all other ways! And it's not open source, so I can't step up and contribute. :(
People throw around offensive-sounding numbers of millions of dollars for college amenities, but often they work out to pocket change per student

This is not true, generally. The cost of running a modern university (property, plant, energy) is quite material. These costs are an order of magnitude above "pocket change".
When her entire raison d'etre at Wikimedia was to inject POV into Wikipedia (subtly/for a greater good/justifiably or not), it can hardly come as a surprise that something like this would happen eventually.
Most YC companies have at least two founders. Many have three.

PG's language here:

In the current YC batch, 16 out of 68 companies, or 24%, have female founders.

is ambiguous.

If we assume for the moment that the average YC company has 2.5 founders, this statement could vary between the 24% number quoted (when all of the cofounders are women) and 9% (where only one of the cofounders is a woman).

It'd be helpful to have that clarified.
I call fake.

See http://pastebin.com/64PAAV1c

Same data, one month old.
Dropbox Down
I noticed it too. But it does not quite make sense, because nobody likes to sign up twice using different email address immediately, even if they don't remember their password. This reminds me that the exposed the data might be fake too.
Sure, but how would that even work in practice? Ban every poster that seems like a man from that specific thread? Invite-only?
Haha, seriously? Did you really have to use a "citation" for a twitter link in your 10 word comment?[0] Pretentious pseudo-scientific nonsense. Only on hacker news.

[0]: No.
I haven't seen any proof from the hackers. The emails in the pastbin from @1775Sec are old. They are in this pastebin from a month ago: http://pastebin.com/64PAAV1c
Diversity, when it comes to sexes, is such a nebulous idea. Here is a comment I left above.

What amazes me is that in this whole conversation no one even mentions the differences between men and women, as these differences were shaped by evolutionary forces. In all our attempts to make women and men "equal", not just in this country, but across the world, women and men still go into different professions and do have different interests, and are good in their gender-specific things. There is a reason for that: men and women are different.
Surely, there will be women in tech and men in nursing. But the differences are there and they go back hundreds of millions of years, and they've been shaped by real evolutionary forces, and they play out every day in myriads of ways.
For all the scorn that Harvard University President Lawrence Summers got in 2005 for bringing out these issues, he was coming from a serious scientifically-based view on differences of sexes.
For those who want to understand how evolution shaped women and men, I recommend to start with Dawkins' books (The Greatest Show on Earth, The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish Gene), and then to read "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" by Matt Ridley, and "The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature" by Geoffrey Miller.
And, hey, I am talking to the audience here, since it is mostly composed of men (there is a reason for it): understanding the evolution of sex will make you better at picking up women!
On a Mac in Safari when I search using Google, immediately above the search results there is a line that has "Search tools" as the rightmost entry. Click that and a new line will appear underneath it with a date limitation drop down menu ("Any time" label) at the leftmost position. Use that to set search date limits.
For everyone linking to a certain Twitter account saying that Dropbox is compromised:

The Twitter account is lying. This is almost always the case (especially when there is some sort of Anonymous affiliation). Anyone can make a Pastebin of fake emails.

(If Dropbox actually gets hacked, it's more likely to be by a state-sponsored organization, and definitely not by someone who is going to brag about it on Twitter)
It's just a DDoS Attack according to them
If you have a fixed workload (i.e. X servers always online) then take a look at reserved instances. The break even point is about 6 months for the light instances and a bit more for the medium ones. I don't recommend the heavy ones as the cost structure is different (you pay regardless of whether tt's on so ... if you later change your instance types you still have to pay hourly for the full term of the reserve).

Even better is if you can plan your infrastructure on AWS around using spot instances. They can be really cheap (we're talking a 5x times cheaper then on-demand and 3-4x than reserved). If your instances are used in a stateless fashion with all persistent state saved externally (DB, S3, etc) then you can do some pretty cheap scaling with spot instances.

One setup I've played with is a core set of non-spot instances phalanxed by a number of spot instances (at a couple different price points) for stateless web traffic. As long as the spot price stays below your bid you have significantly more instances available (which should give your users better response times). When the spot price rises your spot instances die and things slow down, but your app would still be alive thanks to the non spot instances. Again it takes quite a bit more engineering to get a setup like this but this is the kind of thing you need to do to take advantage of elastic computing.
Nice find. Someone should tweet this out.
With OnDemand VPN you can push a HTTP(s) proxy. Apple is awesome.
Have they actually done that to any customer?

That's a pretty novel interpretation of the GPL, and I doubt that it would hold up in court. Reading through the GPLv2 I can't see anything in there that even suggests Red Hat would be within their rights to do that.
RStats: visualizing app performance
Yes they probably could have. I'm purely guessing here but I suspect the founders had a decision just like the VC's. Does anyone want to keep this alive and try and salvage it? It would be doable but a massive grind for 18 months and we're probably never going to build much more than a $5 to $10 million per year business even if we really do make it. Or do we just want to chalk this one up and walk away and use the experience to try and hit a home run next time?
A LinkedIn page or resume posted to Wikipedia would be a vanity page.
I think it's safe to say using this would violate the TOS of pretty much all commercial software, anyway.
A Year After Aaron Swartz's Death, Lawmakers Still Demand Answers
Well, for one, Dropbox is claiming that it was not a hack at all.

See: http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/10/dropbox-offline-hacker-grou...

and also see dropbox's blog post, explicitly stating that it "was caused during routine internal maintenance, and was not caused by external factors"

https://tech.dropbox.com/
As someone who is changing careers from support/ops into dev at 30, age discrimination terrifies me.

I'm already having problems in my current career when prospective employers google me and find out I'm building up my GitHub account. They either think I'm going to leave immediately or they think that I'm trying to backdoor my way into a dev position at their company.

This happened to me twice this week and both places decided I was doing this before even asking me about what my goals were. I was laid off two weeks ago and really need some work, but it seems that right now I'm unhirable.
Clearly they have seen the twitter account claiming responsibility as well. It's been changed a little.

>We are aware that the Dropbox site is currently down. This was caused during routine internal maintenance, and was not caused by external factors. We are working to fix this as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Forbes: 30 Under 30 Who are Changing the World 2014
"DDG doesn't have local results "

(1) Many people don't search local often.

(2) People can type their location in the search engine for local results.

(3) There are alternatives like Yelp as you mention.

"DDG doesn't have recent news"

(4) !gn

(5) DDG doesn't give me news links when I'm not looking for them.

"DDG does not have the coverage to answer a narrow technical question"

(6) Google wins on your example but the answer for your example can most certainly be found in one of the top links on DDG.

(7) !so > site:stackoverflow.com

...

(8) "Duck Duck Go is a good search engine" is not incompatible with "Google has better search results than DDG" or "Google has faster search results than DDG".
While it's true that the Supreme Court often grants cert to overturn cases, I'm not so sure they'll come down on the wrong side of this. I don't have a lot to base this on, but I would prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt for now.
Re: the efficacy of wheatgrass
@1775Sec You only DDoS attacked them! You didn't breach the database! Why say otherwise!"

@YourAnonPriest don't ruin the suspense brother! lol it was a pretty massive DDoS too! We used all of our bots on it!

https://twitter.com/1775Sec/status/421848589480910848
Self-leveling compensates for car posture due to its load, not due to road incline. Think - full trunk with no passangers vs an empty trunk.
Should we be worried by that? I presume there's some qualitative differences between desk-dwelling bacteria and toilet-seat-dwelling bacteria.
Quantum Leaps does dual licencing for the QP framework and commercially licences exactly the same code that it offers under the GPL. http://www.state-machine.com/licensing/index.php#Pricing
"Email is the most failureprone thing out there"

I don't know where you keep coming up with that - Email is relatively easy to make highly available, and an Exchange Server in 2014, configured with even a modicum of skill, will likely keep running smoothly for the next 10 years. It's as close to 5 9s, of availability that you can get on a software system.

"There has been no big improvements to the reliability email the last 40 years. "

That's just silly. Take 5 minutes to read through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email and you'll see what improvements have been made in the last 40 years.
What an utter waste of capital.
We've heard that several large Internet companies were angered that their networks were tapped by the NSA for surveillance, and subsequently put a lot of effort into securing them with encryption. While it seems unlikely, it's conceivable that this has something to do with a response to surveillance, such as problems encountered while implementing encryption.
For one that is going to a court to subpoena records from Yelp it is, I wasn't proposing a way to stop fake reviews, just to meet between releasing data and unmasking people's names who may have written legitimate reviews.
Pathetic people spreading false news. We should shame them publicly. Anyone putting up false news is as guilty as, as shameful as, as fucked up as, as stupid as anyone sabotage security on purpose secretly. We have enough stupid political propaganda full of false statements in the news these days and we don't need more in our tech community on Twitter. What are they? 12 years old? Right, they say "don't feed the trolls."
So one of the things that's interesting here is the Amazon component. And the anonymity of Amazon vs a smaller provider. Let's assume for a minute the founders actually wanted to keep it alive (I'm guessing they didn't but that's a whole other story) You're generating revenue of say $40,000 and your Amazon costs are $30K. If you went to a small or mid tier sized provider and said "Good news/bad news. We're generating $40,000 a month and growing (oddly revenue isn't which is again another story) You're costing us $30,000 a month. If we can cap you at $20,000 a month for 12 months that frees us up $20,000 and we can keep 3 employees on in the short term and still grow the business. We can get through the rough patch and continue to grow and in a year from now we can adjust this upward and be worth more. If you insist on $30K, which is your right, we shut the whole thing down because we can't keep the lights on.

Now the provider is either looking at generating $240,000 for the next 12 months or losing everything from your account. He/she is probably doing the deal with you because much of their costs are fixed. But I don't know if/how you have that conversation with Amazon.

EDIT: Oh and fantastic that they shared.
Well, let's assume these lasers are 10x as efficient as LEDs used in headlights. Even if you lost 70% of the light in the process of exciting phosphorus, you'd still have a net gain.

My question would be: are modern headlights really that much of a drain?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemiluminescence
it is their IP, and it looks like their vaguely-newish home page redesign

[0]: http://dns.squish.net/traverses/df9a8b86bde047a12801bc04c96e...
this isn't a "progressive" issue, it cuts across partisan lines.
Hail Mary round.
Since the NSA "Muscular" program was known to have compromised datacenters upstream, that's little consolidation if DDG has any multihomed datacenter support and is not encrypting their inter-DC links or if the NSA has compromised your hosting provider directly. Given that they have been shown to actually intercept and plant modified hardware, there's really no guarantee that they couldn't plant a tap. Point is, if DDG ever got a non-trivial marketshare, there's little confidence that your systems are more secure than Google's, regardless of capturing search history or not, or if they could not be compromised by the same court demands that other top level providers are under.

DDG's safety from the NSA is inversely proportional to its success in the market.
I thought spending money to get your message across is free speech? Isn't the Wikimedia Foundation an American company?
What would you replace it with? It describes a particular, unique phenomenon where creepy guys on the Internet rush to the "chivalrous" defence of a damsel in distress. It's widely misused, but there's definitely something there that needs some term to describe it, and in lieu of anything else "white knighting" suffices.
Can cable companies really do this? I don't think they have the bandwidth. Doesn't Aereo give you the data from the antenna you rented? For n people watching the Super Bowl a cable company wanting to take advantage of the "Aereo loophole" would have to actually send n copies down the wire, requiring quite a bit of compression at best.
You're understating unintentionally.

Let's take "pocket change" to be around $100, an absurdly high amount for pocket change.

An order of magnitude above that would be $100 * 10 = $1000.
Deliverability of email relies on a number of factors outside your control.

You also mention competance, which is available in variable quantities. You might be able to keep Exchange 2014 running solidly, but I've seen people doing scary things with MS SBS Server 2000 (and the exchange that comes with that).
Holy smoke. That's depressing and fascinating all at once.
I tried
ping dropbox.com
and got this IP

Not sure about other things.

For sure not a phishing, but seems SSL problem for IP.
I'm pretty sure most DuckDuckGo searches go straight to Bing.
IBM unveils plans for Watson supercomputer