skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oona's work is always amazing. Loads of interesting hardware stuff in her blog. I wish I would be better at some mechanical engineering/electrical engineering stuff, my work is mostly web-related or big data stuff, never really get my hands dirty :(
Airbnb Is Testing Out An Affordable Cleaning Service For Hosts In San Francisco
Well you can buy cookies, muffins and such with it too so maybe he's using it to feed himself.

But yeah I'm not seeing what the OP's benefit is unless coffee = same as cash for OP.
>What other terms could there be?

Absolute.

>we have lots of information on what is valuable out there and what is not

Again, that's now. Strange that you agree that we're talking in relative terms, but keep repeating this. Please understand that it's a meaningless statement in the context of this discussion. The very question is whether the water could someday be valuable.

>the people wringing hands...put all the burden of proof on everyone else

Of course, you realize I could say that as well; as in, "you guys are putting the burden of proof on the hand-wringers to show exactly when, where, and why we'll need it, else it's OK to destroy it".

>without any consideration of future technological advances of future technological advances

Why is it reasonable for you to consider future technological advances, but when others suggest the same, they're being "one-sided"?

>economic and demographic shifts away from the areas

Or toward the area, right? Also, who says the aquifer must serve the immediate area? We ship water from France and Fiji now as a "luxury". So, given that many are predicting a more global water-crisis, why is there reason to believe that our sources would be geographically bound when there is actual need?

In short, you're throwing out a bunch of hypotheticals, then declaring that's what the other side is doing. OK, let's call it a draw: no-one knows what will happen. So, what makes the most sense to do in that case? Preserve or destroy?

There is a certain arrogance that mankind has with regard to stewardship of our natural resources. Deciding that it's OK to destroy this thing or that one for some short-term economic benefit is short-sighted hubris at best.

>Greater Mexico City has been growing for how many centuries now? If they were saying that, they weren't doing a very good job of forecasting

I wasn't being literal. Mexico City didn't even know the water existed.

>wondering whether some random plains aquifer located nowhere important will one day be worth the expense of tapping into

According to the article there are 1,500 such "random" aquifers that are permitted for pollution in the U.S. [1]. Many of these are in drought-stricken states.

So, it's not just the one aquifer. It's 1,500. Again, it's the overall attitude around these resources that's short-sighted and troubling.

Are you willing to state that all 1,500 (and possibly growing) will never be needed? If not, which ones will be?

[1] http://www.propublica.org/article/poisoning-the-well-how-the...
Firefox user here, thanks a lot for all the good work!

If I may ask a question while you're here, do you know if there'll be anytime soon an indicator of the degree of security of WebRTC? Right now, I don't think there is any indication if the keys-exchange is done over HTTP for example or other, which is a bit problematic if privacy is important.

Thanks!
Most companies specify a 6 month probation period where the contract can be terminated with 1 month notice. That should be enough to plan ahead.

The customary 3 month notice only applies to "permanent" employees, but the company is free to specify a 1 month notice for those employed for less than 5 years if they are not confident.
http://meet.jit.si is alive since last year it's open source. It works well! Give it a try
For the vast majority of people and issues, the media is the primary source the populace can rely upon to gain information about an issue. Obstructing, impeding, suppressing or in any other way hindering the access of the press is tantamount to doing the same to the population at large. This is why the Fourth Estate is critical to any democracy.
SEO Moz 2013 Year In Review
How $5 can wipe out your traffic
What amount of security screening is going to stop a truck full of explosives from going off?
You get bigger if you eat more and you get smaller if you eat less. It's important to get all of fat, carbs, and protein for a balanced diet. Not saying that there isn't anything more to it, but for most people it really is this simple.
Smartphones for the Homeless
Baltimore local helps out a fellow redditor who's currently homeless by giving him a Nexus S (and back up battery) to access the internet for resources.
AROUND has always been around
I started questioning all the TSA security after I recently watched a demonstration on how you could make dangerous weapons with items you can purchase after you go through security. It is quite scary. The people that want to cause harm will always find a way.

I have not been outside the US, I am curious on the security around the world. Namely, flights headed towards US airports. Do they have to go through body scanners?
Great point.

Our API is awesome and not enough people know about it, which is why we just announced that we're hiring a developer evangelist.

http://www.meetup.com/jobs/developer-evangelist#job-title
There appear to be a lot of people knowledgeable on money transmitters here so maybe someone can shine some light on this: How are app stores/online marketplaces/AirBnb/Kickstarter not also money transmitters?
Quite funny - I know someone who uses a similar setup to send GPS Coordinates for a Quadcopter and a Plane via the audio channel of the video link (he flies the Quadcopter/Plane with video goggles) to the ground station.
There, an Arduino controls some stepper motors to point directional antennas at the copter/plane.

Project is at https://github.com/KipK/Ghettostation - video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiO4YCX7hJo - you can hear the modulation in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm0okv8mTsg
Those won't remain PCs forever. "Post-PC" devices are already making substantial inroads, just to a much smaller degree so far. How many business laptops meant for field use have been replaced with smartphones and tablets because all they're used for is reading e-mails and viewing maps and such?

There's no doubt that MS can coast for a long time on PCs, but if they do, they're never going to dominate they way they did in the 90s, and they will eventually go away.
Interesting, is your product like a "yellow books" for schools?
Thanks for the explanation.

That's something I wondered, taking a smartphone screen, but it seem pretty daunting, indeed. Such a shame in a way.
I wonder how much audio compression the signal can go through before getting lost, and if joint-stereo affected it. Might have to check out the data myself :) Props to Oona.
True, although that was after four failed attempts to move away from PHP and realizing due to incumbent inertia they had to find an alternative solution. Enter HipHop. I am sure that today if they had to start over, PHP would not even be considered ;-) My main point is that in "today's times" using Facebook as a excuse (reason) for opting for PHP is not a wise move.
Yeah, what individual would want to even bother with only 1% of AirBnB or Dropbox!
I'm shocked that on a programmers/hackers forum people would tell a guy not to start a business because there's "probable" illegality. This kind of thing is the basis of all FUD.

There's obviously enormous gray area regarding btc's legality. Get your advice from an professional lawyer.
>Its too much to expect the average person to understand rank structure. Many people see an intimidating looking guy in a uniform and assume he's in charge of a lot of really important stuff.

While I agree that military rank is complex, I'm pretty sure that most people are very clear that the folks doing the grope and grab at the airport are at the very bottom of the hierarchy.

Of course, I could be wrong, but my impression is that the objection many people have to the grope and grab is at least partially a class thing. Most people see TSA employees as "beneath them"

I believe this is exacerbated by our (fading) sense that air travel is a luxury thing, and that the employees who facilitate said travel ought to kowtow to me, not the other way around.
Improving Search: Named Entity Recognition and Inferred Faceting
How To Create Your Own Cryptocurrency
Bay Trail-I Mini-ITX boards go big on expansion
BlackBerry U.S. market share now 0%
Obvious answer: YC partners are not allowed to soft commit either.
Major global banks colluding, fixing currency prices
Add a Splash of Colours to Your Pebble Smartwatch – Coding Epiphany
I highly doubt you're interpreting this correctly, Rackspace was founded by OSS developers.
Line numbers in BASIC
Type hinting for scalar types has been on and off the TODO list for PHP for a while now. PHP already has type hinting for arrays and objects, but not for scalar types like int, float, and string. It's been on the roadmap forever but nobody seems to know when the feature will actually land in a stable release.

That's because type hinting for built-in scalar types is more difficult than it sounds in a dynamic language like PHP. There's been a lot of debate about what to do, for example, when you pass '123' (string) to a function that requires an integer, or even worse, when you pass 123 (integer) to a function that requires a float. Do you throw an error, as strongly typed languages do, or do you quietly convert that integer to the equivalent float, as PHP has always done? Or do you try to convert first and only throw an error when you can't? Above all, how do you do this without giving up all the benefits of being a dynamic language in the first place? Note that this problem has nothing to do with the '01' == 1 issue. Things can get messy even with reasonably straightforward conversions like '123' = 123 = 123.0.

The problem is compounded by the fact that even built-in libraries don't know how to make use of built-in types. For example, if you use PDO to select a row from MySQL where the 'id' field is an integer, and you write something like ($row->id === 42), you get false because all the fields are returned as strings. Meanwhile, the PostgreSQL driver returns boolean values as 't' and 'f' (string), not true and false (bool). This is retarded. I'm a big fan of the improvements since PHP 5.3, but both the language and the standard library still have a long way to go.
I tend to think Pickering v Board of Education makes the speech protected even if the speaker identifies himself/herself as a government employee. At least, I would argue that such self-identification is so crucial to the speaker's message and so valuable to the public as to be protected.

I suspect that Garcetti v. Ceballos doesn't invalidate this position. In Garcetti, the issue was statements made pursuant to professional duties. I don't believe a letter to the editor criticizing your employer could be considered an action taken pursuant to your duties.

I'm just speculating, though. I can't be sure a given court would agree with me. So any government employees reading this shouldn't take my word for it.
That's not it. Contributions on Rackspace time are also approved. We just need people to understand that the still will need to respect the priorities set by their managers. We don't want them to interpret this policy as allowing them to unilaterally deprioritize their assigned work in favor of hacking on $PROJECT_OF_CHOICE.

If your manager agrees that hacking on $PROJECT is a good idea, go for it.

VanL (I wrote the policy)
Sounds like a multi-user online whiteboard more than a email.

Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen when you invite your spouse to the wrong google "wave"
can this become/or is/ part of forensic science? if its possible to do the same on a mobile phone, and merely speaking into the phone, you give away your travel trajectory?
No, in this case it was intentionally encoded in the audio.
This is exactly why they shouldn't do any PR.

They should just try and make as much money as they can before they are rightfully forced into extinction.
And didn't the MediaWiki people say they'd prefer to not use PHP, but it's hard to change?

Pointing out that some large system uses a specific technology just means that it wasn't impossible to scale and use that technology. You can write a book with a quill pen; it doesn't necessarily make it the best tech to use in a modern publishing workflow. But if that's all you know how to use, don't let it stop you from writing.
i have a sleazy friend that hires people from overseas on fiver to drive him to the top of local search results and drive the competition to the bottom.

It's easy and it fits in with his personality! He truly makes $$$$$ sitting at home. He should make a Pay for Seminar
Where is toJson in the Dart Editor? (I'm looking for it in 1.1.1, but couldn't figure it out.) And does it have a fromJson generator too?
Maybe this is a stupid question, but why is it so bad to let people provide for themselves? Kansans should be prevented from running their own ISP? Why? Doesn't that idea seem contrary to self-governance? It's really depressing that people cannot legally say "screw you" to big telco/big cable and do their own thing. Somebody enlighten me, please.
Bank Stops Working With Bitcoin Exchange CampBX Due to 'Regulatory Uncertainty'
it should have been block scope.
+1 for #3 (blue LEDs). A couple weeks ago I spent a half hour taking apart an air purifier in my bedroom and disconnecting the blue LED because it was so obnoxious.
Supporting the Seahawks: Microsoft trumps Amazon for 12th Man passion
I can confirm that #12 is still flying aimlessly around Snohomish County (or was, a couple hours ago)
Funny, my degrees can be described the same way. BS in CS and MFA in Creative Writing.
> Now, there are a couple of nuances to this new policy:

> 1. Rackers are encouraged to contribute on their own time, and if they wish to contribute during work hours they must obtain approval from their manager.

> 2. If a Racker would like to contribute to a project that is directly competitive with Rackspace, we’d like to understand why before they contribute.

2 has got to mean

"If a Racker would like to contribute to a project that is directly competitive with Rackspace [during work hours], we’d like to understand why before they contribute."

otherwise, i don't think such a policy is even legal?
Ask HN: What's the best approach if an idea needs the cooperation of a big corp?
Let's say you are in your 20, you are unknown and you have a big idea like Netflix or Spotify. How do you approach big corporation to get their approval? I think it doesn't matter how good is your idea, they will ignore you if you are nobody. You can't make a MPV because you don't have the rights, only a fake prototype. So, what would be the best approach?
Wait, what does your startup do? (AKA startup idea generator)
If I'm understanding this correctly, the chief change is that now a Rackspace employee who wishes to contribute to OSS during work hours only needs their manager's approval, as opposed to having to go all the way to legal?

This could be worded more clearly to indicate what about this is new; I can't think of an alternate interpretation that doesn't suggest Rackspace previously forbid employees from contributing to OSS on their own time, which I assume (and surely hope) has never been the case.
How A Small Seattle Museum Newsjacked The Super Bowl With A Wooden Mask
I think it is still the law, but like you said, the wholesale prices are set way to high to be competitive.
How can you achieve collectivization without any central entity like government enforcing it? And what exactly do you mean by collectivization in the context of the subject being discussed?

(I saw your comment and questions above, in the other thread, but I cannot answer them until I understand this one better).
It's the type data that makes this hard: JSON has no support for encoding new types into the serialization. This is a blessing and a curse: it makes JSON simple, but also inflexible.

Take this parting remark:

> So, here’s another thing I wanna add to my suggestion: consider adapting ISO 8601 for a default JSON serialization of DateTime, so the following just works:

> var dt = DateTime.parse("2014-01-26T11:38:17");

> print(JSON.encode(dt));

Ignoring the fact that it's a simple value you're attempting to encode to JSON, let's say this works. Do you get:

"2014-01-26T11:38:17"

Now do to the reverse: what does that decode to? Either it decodes to a string, and you've lost the type information, or it decodes to a date, in which case, what does `JSON.encode("2014-01-26T11:38:17")` decode to? i.e., do strings sometimes decode to dates? What if someone uses what should be a string to cause the decoder to decode it as a date? Now anywhere you have a string, it might decode to a date!

YAML has support for this sort of thing, with a syntax like `!!date "2014-01-26T11:38:17"`. (If you want a literal `!!`, it's always `"!!"`.) Notably, the Python library for YAML can do what the author asks: encode and decode arbitrary objects. (but it turns out to be a security risk to do so on untrusted data.)

> The Dart editor should be able to display a JSON serialization of anything the mouse pointer touches.

If my class contains a file handle, what's the JSON representation of a file handle? Further, if I send that serialization across the wire, how do you deserialize it? I mention this because you can't, at least, not really. Python's `repr` is a good example here. When it can, it gives you close-to Python syntax for the object, such as strings (`"hello world"`), ints (`1`), decimals (`Decimal(3)`), etc. Perfect for debugging. For things it can't, you get something like `<file object "~/foo.txt" at 0xdeadbeef>` — which doesn't parse (on purpose) as Python.

I'd venture to say that what you really want is the ability to introspect. Take your customer example: if you could introspect it, and see what member variables were present, you could build a function that might output:

{"type": "Customer", {"Id": 1, "Name": "Joe Bob"}}

Again, note the explicit serialization of the type here, in JSON. This is something I made up, of course, and not JSON. Of course, some language feature can make introspection interesting. (Can you even get a list of members? Some languages allow objects to make up members on-the-fly.)

Hopefully, I've convinced you language design is hard. :-)
Linux’s ptrace API sucks
Thanks for the feedback! :) Many others seem to agree with you about the graphics, so we're definitely working that into our re-design, which is in progress now. I hope you try us out anyway!
I expected a mafia which extorts businesses get the "protection money" via PayPal. But this is more impressive of course.
This is one of the COBOL features that makes a lot more sense if you think of COBOL as SQL for tape drives than as something that is trying to be, say, Pascal or Ada and failing. (Along with, say, pretty much the entire DATA DIVISION...)
This is almost precisely the opposite of what we are saying. We are disclaiming ownership of all OSS contributions, inside of work or out. We just want to make sure that while people are on the clock, they do make progress on the tasks assigned to them, rather than on $PROJECT.
I have been seeing this and also hope there is some fix available.
Ok, that's probably enough for my learning purposes. Thanks!

Not having looked through all the problems yet - do they all have a reasonable test harness that gives you some sort of score?
Every full-time employment agreements I've signed in my career as a software engineer has had some sort of clause to the effect that my employer owns any work I do, even if it's done with my own hardware on my own time, if it is demonstrably in direct competition with my employer's chief line of business. This seems completely in line with that.

(Whether that sort of clause is enforceable in court is another question. IANAL.)
Startup NY – tax free 10 years
does anything actually work with dart2js?

All I seem to hear is people complaining about it.

Given so little effort is given to it, I halfway think they should just give up on javascript and javascript interop completely and focus on making dart awesome.

Anyhow, what you say is totally true, but surely iterating recursively over an object and dumping values into a json block would be trivial.

The hard part is deserializing that back into objects, but maybe you dont need to? The python json package does a pretty good job. You could just have it return a dynamic or something.
Don't miss this comment from a person who worked there:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7159513
Thanks for the feedback! Many others are saying the same thing, so we're including many screenshots in the re-design, which is in progress now. In the meantime I hope you still give us a try, or try a live demo here: http://goo.gl/BZ5GNd
That is rich.
Future of code editors for JavaScript: keeping it more DRY and easy Refactor
Would just like to point out that, if you are using a commonly used CDN, jQuery/Zepto will most likely be cached already in the browser.
Nobody is going to hire you on H1-B if you cannot communicate clearly in English. This question is ambiguous. Are you looking for a remote working job? Or are you trying to start a thread for H1-B jobs available?

Note that American companies cannot offer a job ONLY for H1-B applicants. So what you are really looking for is a job opening from a company that is willing to do H1-B applications, probably a company that has a history of doing that. Personally I think you would have more luck finding people currently on an H1-B visa or who came back to India after an H1-B, ask them what company they worked for, and then go to that company's careers page.
I hear that kind of sentiment a lot here on hacker news. It doesn't make sense to me in the context of also giving C, C++ and PHP a pass. Javascript is a paragon of design genius compared to those languages.

Especially PHP, which nobody is even forced to use. You could use any language on the server!
...but there are unavoidable severe limitations like slow js interop, large file size and poor browser compatibility.

Its really only plausible for very specific project where these arent issues.
Interesting, but neither the rotation nor pinch-to-zoom worked on my mac.
Fifteen Million Sign-ups in 5 Days: Bridging Technology’s Opportunity Gap
i made something similar, but multiplatform -> https://github.com/abimaelmartell/system_monitor
Can you talk more about your experience with GWT-RPC?
Spam is, by definition, unsolicited.

When you become an elected representative, you are implicitly soliciting comments and questions from every single person in the area you represent.

The spam analogy is not just wrong, but outright reprehensible. If you don't want to get lots of calls from your constituents, you have two choices: 1) don't piss them off in the first place 2) don't run for office.
I'm not saying Javascript is perfect. just that you can't draw many useful conclusions from a document that sets out to find specifically its weirdest (mis)features.

And actually you could avoid using "typeof" by using polyfills/builtins for the new "is[Type]" range of functions in ecmascript5. or a similar one from a library.