skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Considering just how much more expensive AWS is, I have my doubts on this. AWS also really likes "hiding" costs, like bandwidth costs. It's not obvious that most sites will go over the bandwidth limit and pay extra, whereas for sites on VPS providers, this won't happen. In reality they have a billion different line items on every bill, and most are not mentioned on their pricing pages.

Expect to pay a LOT more than you'd expect to pay from the pricing page.

I don't get the whole line of reasoning : either your project is not important and having weekly or monthly backups is certainly sufficient. In such a case, having a script to backup a VPS is by far the most cost efficient way to run the project.

If your project is important enough to have a complex AWS setup, you have an admin anyway.

"But you can trust amazon". Well, no : http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-lost-data-2011-4 (note that disasters on VPS/dedicated servers are also rare)

If you're making complex AWS setups because "it's cool", then by all means, but keep in mind that you're paying a lot for the privilege. Don't do this on production.
The Internet of Things starts here
But it's possible to the same experiment with a battery and an electro-magnet, isn't it? (Not sure how the power-density of lithium-ion batteries would relate to floating 80 kgs down a tube... but seeing as people have demonstrated hover-boards, it should be doable) ? Assuming the purpose is a) float down tube, and b) SCIENCE! -- and not c) with rare earth magnets...
They don't even pretend outside of TOS. On the main page in the examples there is copyrighted material.

Also, how is paying somebody to brake the law for you not breaking the law as well? Out of all the ways to get "videos" of the Internet this must be the least secure nowadays.
It's -24C in Waterloo, ON right now. I think I might work from home tomorrow...
He did, and then benchmarked it against sin(), so it looked like that was the goal rather than a general polynomial evaluation function, and I'm saying there are faster (and shorter) ways to do that quickly.
Show HN: An API for gender classification
This is dumb. Using a service to pirate material? Jesus?

Another day another dumb dot eye oh...
Always good to lock up your kids when you aren't around. ;)
> Before you bash the free market and show me example of how it doesn't work, first look and realize that what you're pointing out to me is not actually a free market.

That could be said for Nazism, Communism, Socialism and possibly every other socio-political out there: It's not the system, it's the implementation that's wrong. But I don't buy it. I used to be liberal myself, but now I don't believe in the skilled vs the unskilled, it's more likely to be the trained who had opportunities vs the untrained who had none and most likely you and I are in the first category.

Out of curiosity though, could you answer the following questions:

* Do you believe that education, energy, water, garbage, railways, lines (as in phone-lines, the network) should be private hands?

* What happens when a player is so big that with every move disrupts the market? The state should step-in or let everything flow naturally?
I'm amazed at some of the complaints about the original article, I wonder if they know that their copyrights will end eventually?
But to put it into perspective, here are a few of the games released in 1994: Doom II, Mortal Kombat II, Marathon, Daytona USA, Super Metroid on SNES, Earthworm Jim.
It is still a plugin, it's just bundled/installed by default. I've worked with Mercurial for the better part of a year, I'm not clueless about it.

But yeah, since branches/bookmarks are an integral part of how you work with Git, you also have more options regarding branches/bookmarks in several git commands. Git allows you to push a local branch to a remote branch of a different name. This is helpfull when you're pushing to different remotes, and the some of the local branches should map to master on different remotes. But this of course requires more information to stand in git pull's documentation. There are, of course, other features as well.

Just because git push has some 'advanced' featues, doesn't make the actual push command difficult to understand though. Most of the time you just use 'git push', same as Mercurial, git just allows you to do more with git push than what Mercurial allows you to.
Should work with a paper tube and copper wire as well? [edit: not saying that would be cheaper and/or easier, just that it should be possible...]

[edit2: A stripped wire, that is - not one with insulation -- which would be more suitable for making a spool]
Somewhat tangentially, I wonder if some of the appeal of object oriented languages is that they usually explicitly mimic SVO. myArray.find(2) is closer to real natural language than array_find(myArray, 2).
its called Facebook Home
What reasons did you have for running Windows 98?
I have been using it since version 1. Unfortunately I have upgraded to KP2 which can't easily export/import to KeePassX which is what I want to switch to, mostly because I very rarely use Windows these days and when I do I don't really need my PW-DB.

I'm syncing it via ownCloud for as a testrun (https, non-US site) and it works fine. Not sure I ultimately want to do that via the cloud though. Might just switch to using a USB stick especially since merging DBs works pretty well.
Torrent recall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall) is much higher than Usenet, even pay service which I used to have. Also, 5 MB/s down is more or less saturating my connection. I have no use for 16 MB/s down.
A lot of people mention ability to almost instantly stream the movie you want, but you can already do that using torrents. It's called sequential downloading. After buffering a few % of the whole torrent, you can start watching it with VLC (not sure if other players support it).
Credit card data breach targets Marriott, Sheraton, other hotels
You see odd but surprisingly practical inventions like these in China as well - as they say, "necessity is the mother of invention".
Being in the Clojure myself, I'd say the aforementioned "healthy respect" and "pragmatism" come from the fact that we all probably have migrated through at least a few languages before ending up at Clojure, which gives us a sense of perspective that keeps most of the zeal away.
Good! Now we agree: Anecdotal evidence
is junk! I mentioned the snow as a parody,
giving back in kind to a lot of such
evidence from the global warming alarmists,
e.g., their pictures of polar bears,
remarks on Arctic sea ice in the summers
(blown around in unpredictable ways by
winds and currents), snows on Mt. Kilimanjaro,
video clips of glaciers calving,
etc.

"Energy balance"? Sure, but that's close
to just a tautology. The 'rub' is
working effectively with the
collection of all the fine details that
determine energy balance.

For how to predict the weather 50 years
from now, when we can't predict it five
days from now, is a bit much to swallow.

Actually, the global warming alarmists
are no closer to good science and have
nothing better than the Lock Ness Monster
devotees.

Maybe 50 years from now the temperature of
the earth will be higher, lower, or just
the same as now, and no one knows the answer,
no matter what within the realm of reason we assume about CO2, methane, water vapor, sun spots, volcanoes,
ocean currents, snow cover, deforestation, etc.
E.g., the IPCC's Ramaswamy's 'radiative forcing'
fills a much need gap in the literature and
would be illuminating if ignited.

There has been a big crowd of global warming
alarmists: Some see global warming as not
a problem but a way to talk the public into
other things that they like such as 'renewable'
energy. Some are using global warming alarms
as a way to raise money, get government funding,
sell books, do venture capital deals, get
attention, get a professorship, etc. Some
people want to get some new taxes they can
use for whatever. Some want to 'stick it'
to the oil companies or whomever would get
hurt by attempts to respond to global warming.
Some people want subsidies for high speed
trains, wind farms, solar panels, biofuels,
high 'feed in tariffs', etc. The list of
reasons some people find to go alone with
the alarms is endless and with next to
nothing actually to do with science.
So, the whole thing is looking like,
say, the people who stand to make money
off the Lock Ness Monster. That was my
main point -- global warming alarms
will continue for much the same reason
as the Lock Ness Monster.
So, um, where does that leave us. Is that acceptance that it's just a nice quotable phrase with no real basis or what?

Why do you feel that teaching children about other cultures by direct experience is not "doing things". One can watch TV, read stories, meet people from all around the world but the only way to really understand your position as a global citizen and to appreciate the cultural wealth, the different challenges and the bond of humanity that we share on our small blue speck of earth is to travel - even just once. My ideal would be to sail as a family for a few months; but that again is not something we can aspire to without a vast change in wealth. As a child I felt I learnt a vast amount from my parents taking me abroad.

Tell me what things he did without finance?

It's a truism that we can't reduce our needs to _zero_ and live.

http://www.dnipogo.org/fcs/comments/c199.htm seems like it probably gives a good, though biased in Boyd's favour, review of his life. Notably:

>'John Boyd always said the choice facing us all is "To Be or To Do." Paradoxically, Genghis John did things — and still ended up being somebody.'

So he disproved his own maxim it seems.

His life seems to be rather defined by being involved in extreme expense of money - involved in development of fighter aircraft, part of the Pentagon. There is no mention of his personal life beyond that he smoked cigarillos until just before retirement - perhaps that was the only expense he allowed himself in the support of his 7-strong family? Maybe he grew his own tobacco? On land he acquired without money?
DuckDuckGo Goodies that every SysAdmin Should Know
I have tried pretty much every one of the well known password managers (that are open source and work on linux), but never found any of them very convenient to use.

Until I came across this: http://www.zx2c4.com/projects/password-store/

It is simply the easiest, most intuitive password manager out there. One of those things that, once you come across them, you wonder why it took so long for something this logical to come into existence. I am not associated with the project, but these are just a few things I love about "pass"

1. Command-line based: which means I can script it, I can run it remotely, etc.

2. Uses Git to store the passwords: full revision history, changelog, and remote push/sync features that git is SO good at. Other password managers have to reinvent that whole wheel and none seems to do a good job. This also eliminates the need for "hosted" solutions - which I just simply refuse to use.

3. GPG for password encryption: once again, such a natural, awesome way to do things. GPG is already the safest way practical way to secure data-at-rest. I can rest easy that no silly homegrown encryption system was invented. Also, as long as I have the keys, in the worst case I can do the decryption myself, if I do not have access to "pass".

The only thing I believe it might lack is the fact that the names of the entries are in the clear. Which means I cannot setup a github(private) repository as remote for my pass store: the passwords themselves would still be gpg encrypted, thus safe, but the repository will leak names of all websites and userIDs.

In anycase, kudos and thanks to the devs!
i'll leave this here: what box
I suppose I am being a bit of a blushing bride about the syntax as it isn't mine, just being good old-fashioned Erlang.

The demo doesn't show much more than hello world, because that's all there is at the moment - the focus has been on building the end-to-end toolchain and I am now filling out the features, but good suggestion going forward.
A history of data storage
ActorDB
A distributed SQL database with the scalability of a KV store.
What the hell ;) Support your local technical book writer!
Well my pet language Ivy http://sourceforge.net/projects/ivy-lang/ allows you to define new statements via delayed evaluation tricks (but without actual quoting):

fn myfor(&init, &test, &incr, &body)
*init
while *test
*body
*incr

var a

myfor a=0, a!=10, ++a
print a

& creates a zero-argument lambda function out of the argument. * is sugar to call a zero-argument function.

Also:

fn set(&x y)
*x = y

set a 7 # Set variable a to 7

It works because when variables are evaluated, the result includes both the value and the address from which it originated.

Anyway, creating a language is one thing. Creating a fast compiler for it is quite another. It's impressive how well v8 works for the dynamic language javascript, but the amount of work embedded in it is daunting. On my list of future projects is to try to make a simple SSA-based optimizer.
We've explored integrating other property types on Room77.com in addition to our hotel metasearch but there are some things we encountered that we need to work through first:

- Hotel metasearch is a real-time pricing and booking option. VRBO and AirBnB by and large are lead generation based so you don't have real time availability on a majority of the properties. This means that a lot of the listings may already be booked and you wouldn't know until you contact the owner.

- Location accuracy is a challenge. Home owners don't want to provide exact addresses due to privacy reasons so for a lot of properties, owners have chosen to provide an "approximate" location which leads to a lot of properties in a neighborhood sharing the same exact lat/long and a lot of stacked pins or clusters on a map.

For reference, here's a general idea of the number of property types: 300,000+ hotels, 550,000+ vacation homes, 300,000+ airbnb listings (lots of cross listing with vacation rental sites for sure), 50,000+ hostels = ~1M properties bookable after deduplication.
SEEKING WORK - Remote only

I am a full stack web developer with 4 years of experience,
My technical skills:

Programming:

•	Languages: C# , JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python, Google Go, C++

•	Tools: Visual Studio IDE (2008, 2010, 2012, 2013), Eclipse IDE, Code Vision IDE,IIS, Apache http server

•	Frameworks & Libraries: .net Framework (3.5, 4, 4.5), Asp.net MVC Framework, Nhibernate ,Entity Framework ,Ninject, AngularJs, jQuery ,Underscorejs, twitter Bootstrap, D3js, RequireJs ,HighCharts,

•	Concept: SOLID design principle, MVC design pattern, single page web application, Service Oriented Architecture, Restful Architecture

Data manipulation & Analysis:

•	Languages: TSQL, PL/SQL, MDX

•	Tools: SQL Server (SSAS,SSIS,BIDS, SQL server Profiler), Oracle Database, PL SQL Developer, Power designer, MongoDB , MySQL

•	Concepts: OLAP & Data warehousing, Business Intelligence

Also I’m willing to work with other technologies and frameworks as well (Node.js, AWS, Java …)

Email me at hmd.ai.h At gmail.com
As a founder/cofounder, I wouldn't mind using my personal computer to save some investment early on.

As an employee, I would see that as a really bad sign; and would probably not feel secure about getting paid every month. If you are not able to buy a new laptop for your new employee, is it really needed to get a new employee at all?
Is this a trick question? I'd immediately assume War of 1812 (if you mean "at war against the British", vs. fighting as allies, which would be...today). There were stirrings during the US Civil War, but it didn't rise to combat.
anyone, please
Sequential downloading is considered by many to be bad for the health of the torrent [1], and many developers refuse to implement it into their software/libraries [2].

[1] http://wiki.vuze.com/w/Sequential_downloading_is_bad
[2] https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/452
Hiring Contractors: Employment Agreements
I'm a huge fan of outsourcing (elance) and have been working with numerous contractors through them for more than a year. I've spent thousands of dollars and completed dozens of mini projects, and plan on continuing to use their contractors far into the future. However, not once have I had the contractor sign any formal employment agreement/contract. There's a part of me that's saying "c0w, you need to protect yourself. You need contracts!". To those of you who have expertise in this area: what clauses should be in this contract to protect me? In researching this question today I've come up with the following list that seems to be a good starting point:

--Standard employment clauses
--Non-disclosure
--Non-compete
--IP and Trade Secrets
--Forum to settle disputes
--Non-Disparagement

What am I missing here? Does anyone know of any free sample contracts or templates I could use that are going to protect me and my interests?

I found a site called rocketlawyer.com and they have a number of sample agreements available for free. Has anyone seen these? What's the consensus on them?

https://www.rocketlawyer.com/secure/interview/questions.aspx?document=34044058&utm_source=1024&v=3#q1
https://www.rocketlawyer.com/secure/interview/questions.aspx?document=34044083&utm_source=1024&v=3#q1
https://www.rocketlawyer.com/secure/interview/questions.aspx?document=34044085&utm_source=1024&v=3#q1
https://www.rocketlawyer.com/secure/interview/questions.aspx?document=34044086&utm_source=1024&v=3#q1

Thanks,
-c0w
On the other hand, you also can't impose Google (and others) to sell porn. you may like porn, but some sellers don't like it. so what's the problem?
When several programmers develop on a mutual codebase, there is not one programming language where coding conventions are unnecessary. This is hardly an argument against Lisps. In fact the clojure code I read so far seems to adhere far more to conventions than code of almost any other programming language I have worked with so far.

Macros are pretty much like Classes, Gotos/Loops, Exceptions, Functions, etc in this respect, the communities have mostly agreed on conventions _when_ and _how_ to use them.

I think the argument that macros will make a codebase unreadable to other programmers is largely an exaggeration to turn a pro-Lisp argument against Lisp. Its a pattern I have heard a little too often:

"C++ is powerful" -> "C++ is too powerful"

"Macros let you express ..." -> "Macros can do just too much"

Now in my non-Lisp programming, I miss macros a lot. Especially those that are built into a lot of lisps and are quite "simple" additions. The Clojure threading macro for example, or `if-let` variable binding, or the awesome xml-templating languages that are realizable with macros. On the other hand, I have seen code that - for me as an outsider - came quite close to what you describe, just that it hardly was Lisp but PHP, Javascript, etc. Macros, like functions and classes are part of the vocabulary programmers build.

So next time when you criticize macros, talk about something that is worth debating, like the fact that they can be unsafe (hygiene), they are not intuitively writable like functions, they might make debugging harder, etc.
...except life is rarely that simple. For example, nearly all countries where the state delivers healthcare centrally have far lower costs than countries such as the US, where healthcare is delivered privately. This seems to fly in the face of your thesis.
I would take the question the other way around.

Why would a .NET developer use linux in the first place?
I don't mean to belittle anyone, but I see no open source tools that consume the OSM data and output polished maps, or tools with which we can polish those maps ourselves easily.

Mapbox comes to mind, but it is a proprietary service, not open source.

I guess I'm wondering why enabling people to build an entirely free/oss mapbox isn't near the top of their priority list.
We are a remote team and this is our setup:
- we use hipchat for real-time chatting with the team. We prefer it not be integrated into our pm tool.
- we use Brightpod as our pm tool of choice. Not only does it have kanban boards but also lets use message (not real time) our team members.

Good luck!
We’re Losing the War on Microtransactions
that's the spirit
Which outside the US isn't that great. In Germany it only has the railway data, but no buses or trams, which makes up most of the public transport in smaller cities and even important connections in larger ones.
10 Server and network monitoring tools
What's worse is that Hollywood and Netflix are now trying to push DRM to the web.
It's obfuscation that is dependent on fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), not the other way around. Therefore, Barak's impossibility proof is irrelevant to FHE.

With respect to FHE, before 2009 we already had some tools. We had RSA, which is multiplicatively homomorphic (this property is the reason behind the need for good padding!). We also had Paillier, which is additively homomorphic. We even had Boneh-Goh-Nissim, where you could do any number of additions plus one multiplication! In 2009 Gentry completed the picture with a partially homomorphic system, based on lattices, where you could do a number of additions and multiplications before losing "precision". Perhaps more importantly, he also gave us the bootstrapping notion, which allows you to achieve a fully homomorphic encryption scheme from a partially homomorphic one, provided you have enough "precision".

Now, what the article talks about is not strictly covered by Barak's theorem, since it's a different notion (also defined in Barak's paper): indistinguishability obfuscation. Barak proved that black-box obfuscation is impossible in the general case (i.e., for every possible program). Black-box obfuscation is the usual intuitive notion we have of obfuscation: given an obfuscated problem, you can't obtain any more information from it than if you were just querying it as a black-box.

Indistinguishability obfuscation is more subtle: given two different programs that compute the same function, you can't tell whether an obfuscated program is the obfuscation of the first or the second one. This at first sounds pretty useless as an obfuscation scheme, since it gives us few guarantees, but the authors took advantage of this notion to get some useful functionality out of it (namely functional encryption, and later other things).

Even more impressive is the fact that they now have managed to prove that a variant of the original scheme is actually black-box secure [1]. How is this compatible with Barak's result, you ask? The black-box proof of [1] is in the multilinear model, which means it is under the assumption that the attacker can only do a limited set of (algebraic) operations. A poor analogy would be to show that some code obfuscation scheme is secure, but only as long as the attacker is limited to using static analysis.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/631
s/problem/feature
Whilst no single weather event can be linked directly to climate change, this is, surprisingly, consistent with a global increase in temperature. Whilst the rest of the Northern Hemisphere is warmer than it ever has been, Canada and the North Eastern US freezes due to an alteration to the jet stream: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZGsdnYqbjk
Things could be looking up for Australia's startup ecosystem
Is Edward Snowden a prisoner in Russia?
ebook later, get it out there asap, would like to read. My thinking is very similar to your own.

Its actually something we've been doing for an API at work. The main reason was so we can easily port legacy code [read hundreds of includes/ and that type of fluff] into a PSR compliant system pretty much on the fly without having to jump through all the hoops of a framework - all while still having access to everything in packagist.
I prefer supporting those that sell DRM free from the beginning. Fortunately I like Science Fiction and at $4-6/book, with a bunch of free full length samples, there is nothing to loose. http://www.baenebooks.com/c-1-free-library.aspx