skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay, I usually really don't see HN comments about UX and usability of linked sites as constructive, but breaking arrow keys for scrolling is perfect reason why I obviously won't read the article.
What absolute horse shit.
The point is that the government has not been empowered to monitor all electronic conversations, even when argued as "it's just everyone's metadata". Such monitoring is not natural common knowledge (of the "hey, anybody walking down the street could see you were talking to Joe" variety) and required an objective active threatening intrusion (of the "let us install a secret massive data tap in your communications hub, or we'll crush your business and throw you personally in jail" variety). The wording in the Constitution constituting a "right to privacy" was written by authors understandably ignorant of how incredible technologies centuries hence could/would be abused; had they foreseen such abuses, they would have tweaked the wording a small but critical amount to better specify granted powers and clarify the limitations thereon.

To wit: if Jefferson, Hancock et al knew how extensive & pervasive surveillance would be, they'd have made sure the powers granted to government would NOT have included such wholesale monitoring, and would have clarified it with refinements to the 4th Amendment wording.
TL;DR, starting with Line 1:

It’s a fairly pervasive myth within the US that the poor work very hard at unpleasant jobs. But this is nothing but a myth - according to the BLS report A profile of the working poor, 2009, as of 2009, only 24% of people below the poverty line were in the labor force (this means working or looking for work) for at least 27 weeks/year.

Even if one knew where in the BLS report to dig for that 24 percent figure (and independent of the fact that the author doesn't even mention whether it was was adjusted for traditional non-working categories -- e.g.. students, seniors, disabled, in or recently out of detention -- or not, as is standard practice when talking about unemployment numbers) there are so many plainly illogical (and just plain weird) assertions jumping out of this rant that you kind of have to wonder why he bothered.

For starters: that

"below the poverty line" === "poor in the U.S."

or, my favorite:

"in the work force at the moment" === "willing to work in general."

Really now?
How top corporations mask political activity 
Scores of blue-chip U.S. companies — including many tech giants — have quietly bankrolled politically active nonprofits to the tune of at least $185 million in roughly a single year. Not all of them disclose how much they donate.
Hammeroff's ideas are interesting and I would like to subscribe to his newsletter.
Can you give an example of a language rule which a Monad might implement? I sort of understand what you mean, but an example would help me (and maybe others?) form a more concrete understanding.

And if at all possible, don't use Haskell being unable to mutate state as an example. Maybe an example for Javascript or Python?
"This means that in total, about 17% of people below the poverty line are willing to work full time"

LOL:

% people working != % people willing to work

It seems the author has never met and talk (let alone be or lived among) poor people.
Only the breathtakingly ignorant social commentary embodied by TFA.
What kind of example would you like to see other than Maybe?
Live Coverage of Obama’s N.S.A. Speech
I just had several friends who were Architects take menial jobs after the housing market busted. These were guys who were 2 years removed from college, thinking they had paid their dues and were in their chosen fields.

Two are still trying to catch on to another firm somewhere and another completely changed fields to find a job. I wonder if they're including these people in those stats?
So what happens to my users if your service ever goes down or disappears?
> the period between the 1924 immigration restriction act and the 1965

Can you think of any other events in that time period that might have had some effects on the economy? It's not exactly an experiment with a control...

> I also see the value in other people, but in addition I see the value in nations and rooted associations and loyalties.

I suppose it's a bit harsh, but IMO that kind of thinking is what breeds mentalities like those that created what the NSA has become. My loyalty is to my family, my friends, of whatever nationality they happen to be, and after that it gets a bit vague. I'm lucky to have been born in the US, certainly, but it's one country of many, with good things and bad things.
If the WiFi network is WPA-protected, spoofing won't work, since during the 4-Way Handshake the client verifies that the AP knows the passphrase.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17935197/authenticating-c...
Lotus Notes. It Still Sucks http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b0128776...
Not large at all. One thermostat per room. With electric heat you have to put a thermostat in line between the circuit breakers and the heating element (radiant panels in my case). Centralizing the house on a single thermostat, like you would with forced air, would actually be incredibly difficult. It would also lose the benefit of fine control; one of the few positives of electric heat.
slavery is not only racial. The ottomans were more than happy to have white european slaves.

An indentured servant is not physically restrained from moving away, while a slave typically is. SO the jails are closer to slavery than bonded labor.
The tax-payers have subsidized massive broadband expansion that never happened. Many of the players pocketed the savings and just never followed up with their end of that deal.

Also, network congestion has nothing to do with bandwidth limits (data caps, really). If you are transferring large amounts of data at 3am on a Tuesday when the rest of the network usage is almost non-existent, then you are not impacting anything. If you are doing it at 8pm on a Friday night, you probably are contributing to network congestion. So, why apply the concept of a limited resource (data) across the board?

We are done with the lie from telecoms that data is somehow a precious resource. It is an artificial constraint used to justify both lack of infrastructure investment and jacking up prices on customers. This is no longer a point of contention as it is finally known industry-wide and covered by the press (finally) as of a couple years ago.

Think of data caps in relation to a freeway. That freeway can carry a certain number of cars at one time. That is the only constraint. Cars that are driving at 2am when the freeway is empty are not eating into tomorrow's rush-hour-drive freeway traffic capacity. It is a constant. Likewise, it is not your 300gb of data per month that is impacting the network. It is when you are transferring that data.

And, finally, since the telecoms claim that "only two percent of users use a lot of bandwidth" and that something like 95% of users do nothing but check their email and watch one or two youtube videos a week, then there should be PLENTY of bandwidth left over for these bandwidth hogs. The solution is simple if that is the reality (which it isn't): Make email the highest priority in your traffic shaping. That way, those horrible people consuming a ton of bandwidth are not impacting the flow of those 12 kilobyte messages passing by here and there.

Oh, and finally, people do not go over their bandwidth limits because of p2p traffic. They go over it because it is 2014 and Netflix movies run several gigabytes per hour and people consume a lot of movies/tv shows every month and multiple people live in a single home. They go over it because they listen to lots of podcasts or watch video podcasts which run a gigabyte an hour. They watch streaming online networks, listen to streaming music, use remote online backup services, use VOIP, watch youtube, watch twitch.tv, stream to twitch.tv.

Youtube and Netflix account for just over 50% of traffic.
P2P accounts for 10%.
The Real Truth About Startup Geniuses
Electric heat means they have electric baseboards in each room, making individual control logical and obvious, so eight rooms really isn't outside of the ordinary. Compare that to central HVAC where there's one furnace and at most you have electric dampers restricting flow to an area of the house (though few houses have even that).
I'm trying to understand if you can self-host the server-side piece of this. I've wanted to have a networked thermostat for a while, but all the ones I found connect to the vendor's server, which is silly. I'd like to be able to point the device at my own server so I have full control.

EDIT: Yep, the Common Questions section of their website[1] says that they'll be releasing an open source version of their Cloud. Awesome.

[1] https://www.spark.io/
I'm going to finish my beer right now.
It's funny how BeOS could handle playback of multiple videos extremely smoothly on a Celeron 400Mhz from year 1998, but modern browsers struggle with it. Of course, the complexity of the codecs has increased, but it's still kind of strange given the huge advances in hardware.
I was an "Embedded Systems Engineer" (EE/CS combination) for almost 20 years, but as the hardware systems became more and more commodity, I ended up spending more and more time on software. I still do occasional uC projects via my consultancy, but my FTE has been software-only since 2001.

An interesting aside is that I think the type of software I'm writing benefits from having a deeper knowledge of the underlying hardware.
I think this is in part due to people realizing how much data FB is keeping on them, and then selling. Educated people don't want to be a commodity. Older people are slower to learn/change, but young people are already done with FB.

FB is bloated and appeals to the lowest common denominator. They created a set of easy tools that make the internet more accessible to people that are not technologically knowledgeable. Skype and photobucket and twitter are far too complicated for someone who thinks Outlook is email and Yahoo is the internet. Once people master how to use the tools on FB many will realize that there are better alternatives, some that aren't going to track them all across the internet.

However, there is no single alternative that aggregates these tools in a better fashion.

I was just writing a proposal last night for a new social site to replace FB/g+ that is freemium subscription based with a key selling point that there is no tracking, no ads, and a high level of privacy. It would have a base set of features and that's it. No bloat. No expansion. Just sharing with friends.

It doesn't need to be a billion dollar company. Profit margins don't have to be huge. It just needs to be profitable and deliver a needed service to the niche of people that care about privacy. The rest will follow with network effects. If the tool is effective people will use it forever even without feature creep, i.e. usenet, IRC, HN
Excitedly tried it but it seems like you've falsely assumed I'm at home when checking.

After entering my ZIP I'm prompted with: "Your internet provider is Time Warner Cable, would you recommend their service to a friend?"

True, Time Warner is my employer's Internet provider, but not mine. Also, because this is a modal, I'm forced to pass judgment on a provider that isn't mine.

(edit: My bad; I can close the modal. Still, it isn't the most logical user action if I happen to be at work.)

I look forward to improvements. I'm not sure I'll get a lot of options in suburban Texas, but I'd like to see options anyway.
I made a port of some Scala Monads to Javascript. Mostly, Option and Either. Makes for some really nice, and you won't find yourself doing (typeof foobar === "undefined").

https://github.com/mbseid/Monad.js
The Cybersecurity Blogger Hackers Love to Hate
Go does not have a lot of new features, but mostly a specific collection of convenient ones (static compilation, GC, etc.) Not sure how many new languages have truly new features, vs. how many are improvements in productivity (human and machine).

My point is that generics are not a new idea either, and plenty of languages offer them. Go is not meant (anymore) to replace C/C++/Java or even Rust. It will never have all the features of those, and probably should not.

But it seems impossible to have a HN discussion on Golang without part of the thread getting hijacked with "But generics!!!" This make no more sense to me than considering other languages incomplete because they don't generate static binaries.
I did none of that. Are you asserting that a significant chunk of the poor are merely the retired, disabled and students? If so, it sounds like you are arguing that poverty is a much smaller problem than is normally believed.

The footnote referred to the previous link, fixed it now. My "qualifications" are irrelevant - my argument is not coming from authority.
Yes for the moment this is manually reviewed, we will try to make it fully automatic but this is a very complex topic.

We will write a blog post that explain the whole ranking.
This also doesn't get into the fact that transportation is a huge part of this. If you can't get to your job then you can't work it. Many minimum wage jobs are in strip malls with no public transportation. You can't afford to own a car on a minimum wage salary, so if you can't live close enough to a minimum wage employment center to walk, you may not even have the option to work.

And since most businesses and neighborhoods see apartments as undesirable in their vicinity, they're frequently not within an appropriate range of employment centers.
WePay simply has the best business / API combination out there right now. No monthly fee, sure that is important, but getting your money deposited to your account ASAP is the main value and no amount of tech, no matter how simple does what WePay can accomplish.

Writing some OAuth code is pretty much standard fare amongst the API providers....getting your cash? Now that's a different story.

There's no other API out there that is as transparent or seamless to a business, without the new business disruption of having to wait 1 week (or more) for the cash.
Debian.org's server seems to be having trouble. This is getting traffic from both HN and /r/linux.

Cache: http://bugs.debian.org.nyud.net/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=35...
You don't have to dive deep at all. It's literally next to the post button. It cannot get more surface level.
/etc/inittab?
Ah, yes, you are right--it was .net.

And that was my shortest email ever--11 characters complete.
So what if came to store with counter signals, broadcast fake MAC addresses, SSIDs ?
In the current implementation, it doesn't show them until after you type the fifth character, to prevent exactly this kind of attack.

They also replaced the hieroglyphics with a key chain, which implies that at some point someone actually redesigned this wacky features.
typical classy yummyfajitas rant. nothing much to see here
"But this is different. Why? basically, this dude really REALLY knows his stuff".

Err... What else ?
The "Facebook is uncool and dying" story trend is getting so old. It's not dying. The only metric that anyone ever cites is that young teens aren't signing up as often anymore, but they don't mention that user growth on Facebook is still strong, or that most of those young teens will sign up once they hit an age where its utility for them is higher (so an age where they don't interact with 90% of their social circle every day). They are still rolling out really cool new features (Graph search, user-specific trending topics). They are way ahead of the game in mobile (already moving to having multiple specialized apps for different functionalities that deeplink to each other, rather than a single app that tries to pack all of the desktop functionality into it).

Facebook is not dead, dying, or sick. It's in fantastic shape.
3D printing comes to my mind.
$5 off a $70 bill is not "good" for your granny. Frankly, any broadband wired home should get a trivial "email access" style service for a minimal fee just to cover the accounting and maintenance. Your granny should be paying $5 or $10/mo; not getting $5 off.
This article gave me idea for a new project. Yes, it's all clear in my head and I have to start working on it right now and abandon all other projects.

A site where you take responsibility for finishing your project. If you don't, you will pay heavy price. Lets say we will spam your inbox with a thousands of letters that remind you of your promises.
This phenomenon is well known and usually called a "Poverty Trap" or a "Welfare Trap".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_trap

One of the things that can mitigate this is the Earned Income Tax Credit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit)

Also, it is misleading to claim that "the poor don't work". This article only discusses people below the poverty line ($11,490 for an individual). If you work 1600 hours per year at the federal minimum wage, you earn $12,000. That's definitely poor in my book.
Blogger adventure: Kate Stull of *popforms
Looks nice. I'd definitely use this (just signed up for the beta) but I'd be interested in hearing how you intend to use this data and how my privacy will be protected.
I7, 32 GB ram, 7970 latest chrome dev and it was on its knees.
I'm not sure about that. Scala's Option monad is just a class in the standard library, not a language feature.

http://www.scala-lang.org/api/current/index.html#scala.Optio...
I think this is great but there are lessons here from desktop Linux, Facebook clones, etc, which is that retail is hard.

In order to ship a widely used operating system, you need a support infrastructure, consumer research, drivers for lots of hardware, warranties, marketing, payroll, operations, accountants, regulatory compliance. The product is almost the easiest part.

I imagine that Nest understands all this. Putting a piece of hardware in someone’s house – one that’s connected to a furnace or which claims to protect against fire – means a lot of liabilities, broadly defined.

I’d love to see an open source version get to that level of maturity and support. It does happen but it takes a lot of people.

–

(Tangent, but when I started at Stack, a lot of people said they could (and did) build a clone in a weekend. Sure, as an approximation of the technical product. But that ain’t the ‘retail’ product, which is actually comprised of community, goodwill, SEO, quality control, and a lot of other things.)
Upstart also has features to handle this scenario. For my purposes, I don't really care whether they choose upstart or systemd, just as long as the init.d scripts go away.
MIT Sloan Students Meet Bay Area Innovators Tackling Huge Problems
When I live in the US, I live primarily in poorer neighborhoods. It's cheaper and I'm not particularly worried about getting jacked - I'm 6'5", somewhat muscular, and don't look like I'm carrying more than $12.
The crazy part about AOL is that it's still got a massively profitable division thanks to people who simply haven't switched off of it.
I won't call Georgia Tech second tier.
I get your point, but I think you're generally wrong. My criterion around that for donating is not, "Is this place perfect?" but "Is this place materially more screwed up than any other organization?"

I'm sure there are some people with unrealistic standards that would not donate at all. And I'm sure that there are plenty of organizations that take advantage of a lack of transparency to do dubious things. But the solution to that is more transparency. And more analysis of the transparent information, so that people can easily contextualize it.
American involvement in WWII destroyed a massive amount of wealth and lowered living standards for years. It was a huge set back, and I don't know why you'd seem to be implying otherwise.

> mentalities like those that created what the NSA has become

A cohesive citizenry with a voice in policy leads to illegal spying? WTF?
What eCommerce platform have you built?
Liked this, and have found the same. That even those with well-read, respected blogs struggle like everyone else to know what is the right next move.
Apparently they offer an in-house solution.

> MePIN comes as a distributed hosted service containing simple-to-use REST API and handy client side scripts. Hosted or in-house white label solution is also possible, contact sales@meontrust.com.
Excepting that your explanation is not at all true.

Even if you have mutable state you might want to use the State monad to implement it. Even if you have continuations you might want to use the Cont monad to implement it. No language has Parser built into the language itself—it's really just an invention available when you start to reify contexts as datatypes.

Monad is about abstracting over a common pattern of sequencing side effects. These can be available in the language or not. Once you reflect that sequencing into a monad then it often becomes reified in such a way that makes side effects easier to track and understand.
Tell the interviewer that the program is a remote learning program. What's wrong with that?
Even better than not sending your usage information offsite: not having the system stop working when spark.io goes out of business (or is purchased, or goes to version 3, or...) and stops their servers.
No[see edit], but they -- retired, disabled, students -- are significantly more likely to be in that income group, and all of those groups fit the pattern you've observed -- they spend more than they earn.

And I asked about your qualifications because you didn't do some very basic things to the data before drawing your conclusions.

[Edit: typically in studies like yours, YOU would quantify the number of retired, disabled, etc groups that may affect the results, and justify why you did or did not exclude those groups. I don't know what portion of the under 5k income group those people represent. You should know, and should have data on why this does not affect your results.)
Because they have been doing the injections for at least a couple years now and it was widely covered in the press when it started.

There's nothing, therefore, for people to do in this thread beyond devise their own discussions around what element of the old-news that they are most interested in.
This is stupid. The author clearly missed the word "PLAUSIBLE".
Yes, in any country where they will torture you you're fucked. In any other country you can put your hand on your heart and swear there is one volume, and you gave the correct password. Now it's up to them to prove you wrong.

I hoped this would b a technical article explaining a flaw in TrueCrypt, but it is just flawed logic based on a misconception that "plausible" means "full-proof".
This is exactly what the Lean Startup talks about. Granted, I feel like the post was targeting the topic of procrastination more so than anything else. By Sam's logic, brainstorming and analyzing your business's market would fall under the territory of "doing", while reading and writing on hacker news may not.
Make Your WCF Duplex Breeze By
It also serves the purposes of universities and research institutions, providing them with more students to teach, as well as to serve as research assistance (a/k/a exceptionally cheap labor). The perverse incentives exist up and down the system.
Presidential Policy Directive PPD-28 on Signals Intelligence Activities
Alternatively, move from a means-tested welfare system to Basic Income.
Can I also add don't hire solely by github? I know you people are makers and all, but building stuff alone is hard. Why not mentor people with empty githubs and fish employees from that pool? Set up a cool open source project, ask people with no experience to join, ask them to team up, then mentor them through, make them work for free but mentor them, then hire who you like and offer recommendations to other good programmers that you can't hire.