skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think k we should spy on other countries and share his view of Snowden. I'm really glad Snow den leaked what he did, I just wish he didn't leak all of it. It does raise many questions on motivation. if he's disgusted with spy work in general he should just say so and be honest with the world. I could then have more respect for him doing what he did (and I do respect the conversation he's started.)
This article is missing more-than-anecdotal evidence that failure is good.

What are the total number of start ups in Europe versus the US? How many succeed, for some various metrics of success? What is the total revenue of companies started in the last X years? What are the returns to investors, both absolute and relative to the size of their investments?

Without knowing the outcomes of the different investment strategies, you can't pick a winner.
West Coast Wall Street
"It's like, if you — people of a certain age — would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn't have to take these drastic measures."
I am actually using AngularJS to rewrite an old project for a client. The reason I chose it is not because of popularity alone, but because it makes my code easier to read and it adds responsive interface to it.

Don't aim for a growing trend in regards to frameworks, aim for productivity and user experience.
What makes you think he leaked all of it?
You making a conjecture so to speak on flimsy grounds doesn't stop me from pointing out that it's bullshit. I'm sick and tired of being lumped into one big homogeneous pile because I'm from some part of Europe because of, what? You've read a book or two and noticed that quite a few European cities have an old and really nice-looking architecture? Try harder.
A US SaaS hasn't got tax, legal, culture issues when selling their products in Europe. So how can all of these be issues within the EU?
Isn't a conference for just Pythonistas considered segregation?

Definition of segregation for your convenience:

the action or state of setting someone or something apart from other people or things or being set apart
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The way in which SAS is like Excel is that everything is a table.

SAS is not very accessible, especially to non-coders.
Why limit yourself to a client side JS framework?

Certain server side frameworks such as rails let you build apps that feel very similar to client side js apps without having to use them.
The only similarity I can think of is that everything is a table :).
Seems to be a lot of patriotism in these comments. Today I've learnt that Americans are genetically superior to Europeans because they have genes that make them more likely to take a chance and Americans have "vision" where as Europeans don't (yes I've exaggerated these a bit).

To be honest, even treating Europe as a collective is silly. When each country has different tax laws, traditions, outlook on life; how can you really, meaningfully compare them?
Can you give good reasons why the United States should spy on other countries? Or let's make it concrete, I am from Germany, why should the United States spy on Germany?
>> an extremely well funded organization with zero oversight

> This is a false statement since the NSA does have oversight.

This is a worthless comment. Of these two scenarios, which do you find more likely?

A. Your parent comment knows just as much as you do about whatever "oversight" is notionally exerted over the NSA, but chooses to describe it as "zero" for rhetorical reasons, such as for example a functional equivalence to what might happen in the case where the NSA actually outranked everything else in the country.

B. Your parent comment actually believes that in the US government org chart, the NSA is at the very top.

I lean toward scenario (A), in which case your response has all the value of "does not, infinity!" In general, saying "what you said is incorrect because you're wrong" just makes you sound even more uninformed than the guy saying "but that's wrong!" If you've got something to back yourself up with, use it, don't just assert that it's there.

> This, too, is a false statement and conjecture.

Wow! Do you see any problems with simultaneously describing something as "false" and as "conjecture"?
Although be aware that -Wall and -Wextra activate different warnings on different compilers and even on different versions of the same compiler. E.g. gcc added lots of warnings to them in the last versions.

So your code might not compile anymore on newer compiler versions. This is not a problem as such but for example in combination with updates to your continuous integration environment, this might cause build fails.
As much as I hate PHP, I like Laravel.
How a Louis Vuitton bag can explain the higher education bubble
I think You are assuming that the learner here is already a (imperative or OOP categorized) programmer who is willing to learn these two languages.

For ruby still there would be some topics you need to know about before trying to learn language itself, if you are just starting out.
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This is the great thing about the pop psychology part of evolutionary psychology. Now everyone can make up any theory that they want relating to genetics, and just support it with their own arguments and/or common sense - no empirical science or investigation needed on their part. And now just say 'genetics' and their argument sounds like it came from some hard-ish science, and was not just conjured up by their own mind.
I think the line is usually defined as you have no expectation of privacy in public, at least that was the justification for the CCTV in the UK (and other English Common Law jurisdictions).

I don't think you should destroy anything, there are other ways to go about expressing disdain that don't lead to laws being broken.

It might be cultural but I wouldn't be freaked out by the petrol station camera. If they are scanning faces, then it is only to locate the head of a moving subject, there is no facial DB consisting of every citizen for them to draw from and if they are scanning license plates then there is obviously enough people pulling a runner to justify investment in newer, more expensive tools for an old problem, sounds fair enough to me. Isn't that the point of having a license number? A publicly visible identification number for a specific vehicle?

For me there is a difference in picking information up (in an automatic fashion) that people throw away willy nilly and getting information that is protected.
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Thanks Pete! I hope you do use a few.

As you may have seen in some of the comments here and on the article, people are requesting a subscription option (eg, pay $xx per month to use up to N cartoons each month). Would you pay for something like that?

> Diversity would be a huge asset.

Good insight, and I completely agree. That is why I brought onboard a second cartoonist, and will be inviting more soon. Within the next month I hope to double the amount of cartoons, and then 10x it the following month.

> My only suggestion is that you make the images on the "View all" substantially bigger so that you can scroll through all of them and read the captions without squinting. I found myself using the back button a lot.

Thanks for that suggestion. I always wondered what's an ideal size to make the thumbnails, and whether to allow page scrolling (next/prev when you're on an individual cartoon page), but this is the first time someone's mentioned it. So now it's definitely on my to-do list.
Religion is a set of rules people abide by, primarily ethical rules. Of course that has an influence on how "out-of-the-box" you can be.

The authority of law does not necessarily reflect the ethical thing to do, as I am sure you know.
In addition to my other comment. One giant difference is creating said file. It is trivial to output files like this from lisp. Not so much for java/scala/whatever.

Consider, if you were to do this the way you are describing. How would you support saving updates to the configuration from within the application?
Unless I am misunderstanding, all those apply to companies targeting Europe, which isn't the same as being based there.
Yes, they are

This is not all bad, since it would be harder for them to invest in companies like Color

They still invest in risky stuff, like a Sound startup in the most picky country w.r.t. intellectual property online http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundcloud (and what are the issues in Germany can be summed by this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesellschaft_f%C3%BCr_musikalis... )
I love that I can send it via AirPlay to my Apple TV. Lets see Flash do that!
We can only gain by spying on you. We have a military base with defense systems in your country. Your political decisions therefore will have an impact on the effectiveness of our military system to defend our country.
Great point, and I'm dealing with that issue by bringing more cartoonists onboard (tapping into their unpublished cartoons). I'm looking to double the inventory within a month and then 10x it after that... I want 90% of keyword searches to result in at least 5 cartoons.
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How about because "failure is good" is an absurd proposition? Failure in this case typically means people lost money and jobs. It also means customers probably got stung buying into something new and that could make them more hesitant to buy into something new next time, which is harmful to successful innovation.

Learning from failures is good, and might help entrepreneurs to develop a more viable proposition if they try again. But that still doesn't make failures good. It just means there is a silver lining for some of the participants, if they have enough left to try again later.

Hit-it-out-of-the-park success is good, and from an investing perspective funding a number of failures may be a reasonable cost of doing business if it means you get the occasional smash hit as well. But that still doesn't make failures good. It just makes them tolerable.

Moreover, the hit-it-out-of-the-park outliers in SV are mostly part of one big pyramid scheme these days. It may be a while before the bubble bursts, because at the top of the chain you've got the outlying outliers like Google and Facebook that really have managed to bring in actual revenues and build up huge war chests, but even then the theoretical valuations for some of these giants are dubious. There literally aren't enough people in the world to continue growing their core offering at historical rates in some cases, and attempts at diversification have mostly been failures propped up by those core offerings. Even if these weren't the case, the biggest giants in technology rarely manage to remain dominant for more than a decade or two before newer ideas from more nimble competitors start to intrude.

Meanwhile, smaller companies being bought for staggering sums of money when they have yet to demonstrate a viable business model for monetizing what they do is just silly in most cases. In the ones where it isn't, the acquisition is often for strategic reasons rather than a genuine investment in expected actual value.

So the bottom line is that European investors have less time for boom and bust than US ones. SV couldn't happen here, and we don't want it to. Culturally, while there are start-up incubators and the like around, we tend to be more interested in investing to grow something after its foundations and basic viability are already established. That could be demonstrated either through having a working business model that only needs cash immediately to accelerate growth that could have happened anyway, or through at least having a plan with clear potential to generate real money, for example. While I don't have any hard data to back this up, I suspect we also tend to put more emphasis on bootstrapping your own business or going to the bank for a loan rather than taking angel investment, and use more informal support networks such as old university connections here in Cambridge for the non-monetary benefits that angels might provide in somewhere like SV.
I really can't say. UIs are something I might be able to judge after actually using them for a while. But as long as these editors freeze for seconds whenever I try to do anything, and crash with OOM after a dozen or two minutes, I just cannot get far enough to say anything about the UI and workflow.
i think one of our biggest problems in american politics today is that the critical mass of popular support needed to affect policy change is untenably high compared to how easily people are split into partisan factions (or convinced to act against their own interests).
Don't forget to donate! :)

http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html

and

http://www.openbsd.org/want.html

Thanks!
Hey Chris, thanks for the note.

Yes, the business model for me is that I receive a percentage of all licensing fees, while the majority goes to the cartoonists. (Currently about 3/4's of the cartoons there are mine anyway.)

Regarding the issue with magazines: They don't care what you do after publication, they only care that they're the first to publish it. So you have it slightly in reverse. :)
I use of both Python (pandas) and base SAS at work for UK government.

I have lots of experience in SAS, and enjoy using it. The macro language allows for very succinct solutions to difficult data manipulation problems.

However, given SAS's huge expense it's difficult for me to identify any 'killer' areas where it's significantly better than open source tools. Indeed, I find pandas faster and easier to use for many problems.

I find it hugely frustrating that the government pays so much money for SAS licences and training when most people use it for simple use cases, where they would be better picking up transferable skills (e.g. Python, SQL, R).

My understanding is that that SAS supposed to be good at processing very large datasets because it uses RAM efficiently (only the PDV is stored in RAM). But in reality, a small minority of users are processing datasets that are too big for RAM (e.g. 16gb+) and there are probably better tools for the job in this use case.

One user here comments that SAS is like an 'improved Excel'. In fact, I find pandas much closer to Excel than SAS because (in ipython notebook at least), you get nice visual representations of your tables, and it usually isn't difficult to translate an Excel operation into a pandas one. I especially like the multi-index and pivot table based capabilities. With a background in VBA for Excel, it's also relatively easy to pick up Python.

None of this is quite so obvious in SAS, which has quite an unusual data step and macro programming language. It's very powerful, but is quite unintuitive to begin with due to a complete reliance on the program data vector.
I think there are two main issues that stops Europe from becoming a start-up hub, too:

1) a cohesive market, which is also your first point. EU is huge, bigger than US, but the market isn't very cohesive at all. The first time I heard about the EU Commission wanting to push for turning EU into a "federation of states", much like US, I was pretty pissed off, because I know that just means increased corruption at the top, with fewer people having more power over a huge region.

And I still think that's going to happen, unfortunately. But now I also think we can't turn down the advantage of having a cohesive market like US. Maybe if we can delay it into 2020's, by then the Internet will make things a lot more democratic, and it wouldn't be so easy to be corrupt at the top of EU.

2) I'm not so sure it's genetics. I think it's the culture, but not even the "entrepreneurial American culture", but the Silicon Valley culture.

First off, there's no "start-up center" in Europe, certainly not one as concentrated with entrepreneurs and especially investors, as Silicon Valley.

And second, people aren't used to "pitch their ideas" to investors, which are few and hard to find to begin with. There may be a lot of rich people, but they aren't actively seeking entrepreneurs to invest in their ideas.

So it very rarely happens. That's why you don't see start-ups that "change the world" from Europe, because while a start-up getting millions of dollars just based off an idea is kind of a daily occurrence in Silicon Valley, it almost never happens in Europe.
Which is why europeans are more risk-averse.
Nothing like joyless, soulless sex with robotic and submissive women.

Will they be doing a "first time" sex? You know, awkward, quick and potentially painful? Now that's something for an IPO.

Seriously, this sounds and looks stupid.
Snowden states he was able to look up information on any citizen, including the President, without any explicit approval or subsequent investigation. What evidence do you have to refute that?
Actually he is 100% right. It's a different cultural behaviour in Europe. In the last 15 years I visited most of Europe and major cities of the world and the mentality is definitely different. Americans are more optimistic than Europeans and they see risk differently. Also, take into account the past, the living standards during the course of history.

While americans were chilling in the 80s and 90s, many countries of Europe were facing communism. People had a harsh life, the parents-grandparents had it, so of course they're not gonna have a Peter Thiel mentality when they don't even know how to shut down a PC. Some countries have an avg. salary of 200$. What the hell are you gonna buy with that? And I'm talking 2013 not 1990. So it's not like they're gonna tell their kids "sure son, after I worked at a farm all my life for 200$/month I strongly believe you'll make an 80 bill.$ company out of a damn computer. Let me go grab my savings and good luck!".

Too much to talk about but europeans know what I mean.
Makes sense. A farm is private property. You don't have the right to come into my house or my place of work and film me. (Even if you suspect I'm doing something wrong) Also makes sense that falsifying a resume in order to do so would be illegal.
I disagree. There are relative psychological scales, and then there are physical ones.

Anything critical under water (in the sky, ...) is life threatening, it doesn't trigger the same things in me (and I believe in anybody) at all.

A life changing event that will make you and the people you care about fall hard is one thing, death is another.
pg, please thank Jessica for putting this event on. My girlfriend is on her way to starting her first company after years successfully being one of the few women in the private equity sector as well as her graduate program at Stanford. I've only just watched the keynote from Jessica and this is exactly the message that not only she, but I, need to hear about starting a company (tech and/or financial for that matter). Hearing these stories builds confidence and it's what both of us need.
Well, I use spaces for marking whitespace in many cases. Just not for indenting, that's what tabs are for :).
The unsafe eval of objects in CSON seems to be an implementation quirk rathet than a feature.
They're working on a static parser.

Check out their WIP https://github.com/bevry/cson/issues/33
The CIPD is in the UK. The closest thing in the US is SHRM, which has the PHR/SPHR designations -- which are indeed often a requirement for senior HR positions (though I don't know that those designations have ever actually been revoked.)
There are already trespassing laws which prevent that. This is just plain thuggery.
I can't, I do the same thing. (use comedy shows as one tool to expose myself to "what's going on in the world").

It's a really sad statement on the current state of things; but there's a degree of personal responsibility in not taking this narrative unilaterally, we have these amazing tools of message boards and other channels with which to chat with people firsthand around the world, and while I can't say it's any substitute for proper reporting, it is certainly "another tool" for constructing a more accurate picture of things.
This seems a little sensational.
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Our "greatest threat to security" is that our people take their opinions from the mouths of celebrities and politicians, and not through careful consideration of the facts.

No they don't, they take their opinions from their parents and friends at an early age, then spend the rest of their lives choosing to listen to celebrities and politicians who confirm those beliefs.
By robbing strangers in dark backstreets I can only gain, too. Because a country can gain something is not a good reason at all. And how do German decisions affect the United States' ability to defend themselves? We are thousands of kilometers away. We could maybe decided that we no longer want US military bases on German ground - quite unlikely if you ask me - but even if so, how does that impact the ability of the United States to protect their borders?
There is something that annoys me about comparing the US to Europe here. I feel that the world is going through a process of learning how to create tech companies and that movement springs out of SF and SV. That is where the most innovation is taking place, in terms of technology and business development. The rest of the world, including the rest of the US, is following along and steadily catching up.

Being a member of the HN community for a while now has made me feel much more connected to this than was possible 5 years ago (I'm in Europe). In the co-working space where I work, everybody talks about lean startups, nodejs, go, etc. and a random discussion is basically indistinguishable from my few experiences in SF offices.

Now, when it comes to funding everybody knows that trying to do it locally is ridiculous if you don't have a good specific reason to do so, but this applies to major US cities as well, perhaps with NYC slowly catching up. I think this will change as well, as more and more entrepreneurs have succeeded by the SV model and go into investing themselves. It probably won't even out completely but I think it will become more uniform.
This already exists, in the form of Android. Is it ideologically perfect? Maybe not, but it's more than good enough for most people. Android is widely adopted, it's available on many different devices, users can install their own apps from a variety of sources, and there's a fair amount of freedom for developers to choose how to implement and distribute their apps.
"sexually abused", can anyone explain this bit?
Crimea, the Tinderbox
Of all things, you would think that the first amendment would protect such a thing, can any lawyer weight on that?

> The measure passed Idaho’s Senate earlier in February to the applause of agricultural representatives who said it would help ensure farmers’ right to privacy.

There is a certain irony in the US that everyone can get privacy, except private citizen.
How many teachers are male vs female? I feel like this is simply a statistic resulting from what each sex does more of professionally.

It would be like saying, "on average an educated man will write at least 8 applications during his lifetime, whereas you're lucky if a woman writes one". Completely ignoring the real problem, men outnumber women 9 to 1.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10475740/...