skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Webmail" generally implies that a large company owns and administers the server, and messages are stored on it indefinitely - in other words, completely out of your control and subject to the inherent corruption that centralization brings. Remember back in the day when you wouldn't take someone with a @hotmail or @yahoo address seriously? We shouldn't have stopped just because the domain changed to @gmail.
This is very true. My state just passed a law with overwhelming support that allows people to have guns in bars again. I did not expect it to be controversial to believe that drinking + guns + crowded rooms was a bad idea, but apparently I was wrong.
> PHP isn’t a great language, but it is a good language [...] it’s just as possible to write good, well-structured code in PHP as in most other languages

That isn't what "good language" means.
Uhm, whatever his other points may be, I can't take him seriously when he lumps all financial institutions together into one group that offers nothing of use.

Sure, you can argue all day against the usefulness of speculative speed trading firms - and even then you'd still have some decent arguments against you - but to argue that financial institution in general offer nothing of use is ludicrous.

Some relevant quotes:

Corporations are at least somewhat constrained by the need to actually provide some service that is useful to people. Exxon provides energy, McDonald’s provides food, etc. The exception to this seems to be the financial industry. These institutions consume vast amounts of wealth and intelligence to essentially no human end. Of all human institutions, these seem the most parasitical and dangerous.

it [the financial system] has interests that are distant or hostile to human goals
The mobile single-purpose app strategy
This topic is a landmine but I applaud YC for being willing to tackle it anyway. There's almost nothing that can be said on the topic without upsetting a large number of people.

Before switching to CS, I spent a couple years in nursing school. Upon switching to CS, my dad told me "good, I didn't want a son that wiped asses for a living". I don't claim my experience had any equivalency to what females in tech go through, but I can attest firsthand that gender biases in choice of profession can be really hard to overcome even in the minds of the people you love.
> 1. The VC ecosystem, as it stands, is almost completely unbiased and fair-minded with regards to gender and race. The massive disparities in terms of funding and founder backgrounds reflect that.

So I'm a little confused here, since no one who has participated would ever think this is even remotely close to true, I guess it's a rhetorical element.

But I can't quite figure out to what end. Maybe you could explain to me like I'm 5?
The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous.

Hence the behavior you see inside many startups - non-founding members questioning the mission/purpose/intention/success of the company is typically taboo.
WebP – faster decoding and rolls out across Google properties
So kind of like a science fair student that builds a nuclear reactor by using the material from a smoke detector, and sensitive enough test equipment to demonstrate that a micro chain reaction took place? To someone with appropriate knowledge, this would be nothing special -- but to the general public, "Nuclear Reactor!!! Lock him up!!!"
> Expert Sexchange

Hahaha! Bigotry is funny! Hahaha!
This is a decent list of SSH's abilities from 2011 when the latest version of OpenSSH was 5.9. There have been quite a few additions and improvements since then.

I would love to see a similar article which is aims to be up to date with useful and good practices.

Anyone know of such a resource?
Zend the organisation, is probably what Marco meant when referring to poor stewardship, instead of the OS project Zend Framework.

I like Hack because it explicitly doesn't support[0] a bunch of cruft from PHP. It feels a lot to me like the BC-breaking PHP.next people want - easy to switch to for modern applications, but not hindered by supporting PHP 4 code. Bit early to start pointing fingers at it's future though.

[0]: http://docs.hhvm.com/manual/en/hack.unsupported.php
White House poll about Big-Data usage; served over HTTP
Yes. It's an important life lesson.

Sometimes, you go along with obvious bullshit because there's something in it for you.
Java 8 adds support for type annotations, which enables developers to write code such as:

@Currency("USD") double amount;

These annotations can be checked automatically using a compiler plug-in, such as the Checker Framework [1]. The Checker Framework comes pre-packaged with a units checker [2] along with checkers for null pointer errors, locks, string formatting, security, and many more.

Java's domain-specific language (DSL) features aren't as rich as Scala's. However, you could implement some DSL-like features using aspect-oriented programming (AOP) tools or other similar compiler plug-ins.

[1] http://types.cs.washington.edu/checker-framework/
[2] http://types.cs.washington.edu/checker-framework/current/che...
Microsoft sells the Surface family, and a large collection of peripherals.
"The only useful banking innovation was the invention of the ATM." -- Paul Volcker
I've noticed semalt.com in my Piwik analytics a few times now. Going to try this rule out in my web root and see if they ever show up again.
You're right about Sparkfun being the responsible party - I misread the packaging, so sorry about that.

But there's no arguing that Sparkfun isn't in direct competition; it's a multimeter, Fluke sells multimeters, the fact that they're not in the same price bracket is beside the point. It's completely rational that Fluke would not want to dilute its mark by allowing an inferior product to go out in the same trade dress, so I don't agree with your notion that licensing it out would be OK and I don't agree with the poster above that a sticker is sufficient. And again, bear in mind that Fluke initiated a trade complaint, but it's CBP that ended up with the goods in a warehouse asking Spark to make the decision to pay for them to be sent back to China or to be destroyed. They have no way of knowing whther they're destined for a cool little company like Sparkfun or some dingy hardware store that's trying to fleece its customers by selling cheap knockoffs.

Really, the issue here is for Sparkfun - trademark searches are free these days, Fluke isn't even seeking any kind of compensation for them, so I don't know what their excuse is for not checking. If they were selling an mp3 player or a coffee mug in the Fluke black-and-yellow trade dress, then yes I'd be for some sort of licensing arrangement, and I agree that those often work out better for the trademark holder as a kind of free advertising.
I've done business with IBM at a corporate level and I assure you that's not what's happening here. It's the clients whom are buying services from IBM saying "whoa, I'm using your services, but I don't want our data falling into the US govt's hands", that they are addressing. IBM is appeasing these clients by telling them they'll locate their data elsewhere, yet there's quite a bit of data attached to and flowing into those services.
Chilling Effect, Next Steps, Final Steps, Hope
Would it be feasible to write a virus that only exploits vulnerabilities more than, say, 18 months old, to either encourage or force sysadmins to upgrade?

If you get access, then you can look for ssh keys and whatnot to figure out who to send form letters to. "Your server is vulnerable to x, y, and z: please upgrade a, b, and c." It would be more fun if the virus tried to upgrade a, b, and c itself, though. Even if it fails, a broken server that used to process credit cards is better than a vulnerable one, right?
ok, try this

Harry: John punched me
Tom: I don't know, I don't have enough info here to know if you were punched or not
Bob: Are you saying that Tom is lying, or that he can't recognise when he's being punched?
> It’s developed and supported exclusively by one huge web company, and they may decide to deprecate and replace it in a few years

Other than the "web" bit, isn't that true of most new languages, where $proposer is google, microsoft, typesafe, mozilla, redhat, netbrains?

Should people feel more secure if instead of being built and used by one large corporation it was built and used by a single guy? Or should we prefer not to have a big company supporting it?
> being unable to get anyone to hold a private conversation with them

Are you really surprised, right after that "Glass wall" story was posted here about one woman's terrible tragedy of having to deal with a male executive who briefly talked to her in an office stairwell? Convincing herself the entire office was about to think they were having an affair?

And you're surprised men are less eager to approach women than men in tech?
scoff Your time is worth a pitiful $500/hour to you? ;)
The irony is, Gul recently approved legislation that allowed the Turkish government to ban sites like Twitter. He then tweeted about his reasons for approving the new law (see his Feb 18 tweets).

Now, he's tweeting saying that banning Twitter is clearly unacceptable. In other words, he's breaking a law that he signed into law last month.
Don't know if this is true story or not. I think the author is trying to cover his incompetence as a hiring manager.
Well, it's wrong in no small part because the financial industry does, of course, produce something of value. I don't really get how the hard core "finance is fucked up" people imagine that financial firms got started. Do they imagine they were just created by evil aliens or something?

Finance firms provide lots of very sophisticated ways for money to get from people who have lots of money that they don't currently have a use for, into the hands of people who have a need for money they don't currently have.

Note this is a weak claim. I'm not saying anything about the efficiency of this process or whether the financial industry is good or evil or anything. But you can't criticize the finance industry without at least understanding and engaging its outputs.
There are a lot of problems with these laws. The main problem is that such an AI would be completely dominated by the first law. It would spend all it's time and resources in order to even slightly decrease the probability of a human coming to harm. Nothing else would matter in it's decision process since the first law has priority.

Second, how would you implement such laws in a real AI, especially the type they are building? This requires defining increasingly abstract concepts perfectly (what is "harm"? What is "human being"? What configuration of atoms is that? How do you define "configuration of atoms"? Etc.) And this is pretty much impossible to begin with in reinforcement learners, which is what is currently being worked on. All a reinforcement learner does is what it believes will get it a reward or avoid pain/punishment. Such an AI would just steal the reward button and run away with it, or try to manipulate you to press it more. It doesn't care about abstract goals like that.
Are you merely being funny/sarcastic/something else I can't quite parse? Or is it lost on you that I wrote that piece?

FYI: I wrote some follow-up yesterday explaining more of the context: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/my-personal-...

I had my reasons for my conclusion. I do not believe they were an overreaction at all.
He didn't even talk about how men and women express confidence differently. IMO the article was a waste.
The main cost for me is that I plan to move myself and company to Berlin, DE rather than Bellevue, WA. Given the vastly better hiring position, great universities, CCC, and overall benefits of being in Europe, this seems to be a negative cost overall.

So thanks, NSA.
Its great to finally have full time folks managing npm and to finally have the resources to do things right (eg. hire ^lift).

Thanks for doing!
I use curl_multi_* functions.
> This is exactly what the PHP world needed: making its already-fast performance many times faster (amplifying one of PHP’s biggest advantages over other common web languages)

I think PHPs speed is largely exaggerated here. The interpreter always used to be slow, and before the bytecode cache it was plain awful. Im pretty sure it only ever got away with it because so much of the standard library is thin wrapping. Is it really faster than CPython like for like?
Why Teens Are Innovators Of A New Public Form Of Privacy
McDonald's isn't "ok", but it's limited in how evil it can be because it has to give some benefit to other people. A hostile AI could be even worse, because it doesn't have that constraint.
Louis C.K. Network Adds a Stand-Up Special (Not His)
> It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right.

I love this kind of insight. I think that we, as humans, are very egotistical by nature. The time we're living in is surely the time we have all the answers and everything important figured out. We simply can't live with the feeling of "eh, it'll be way better in 100 years". We always need the feeling of certainty and ownership. Throughout history, we have always been certain of what we thought, regardless of how much reason we had to believe it.

> If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s-- or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.

Here's a similar thought: "What are the odds that a huge percentage of the people with a certain position were born together in the same geographic location at the same time?" If that doesn't make you scared of being morally brainwashed, I don't know what will.
If corporations are so evil why has their pay fed my family, paid for my house and created so many amazing products we surround ourselves with. It's ridiculous. Big organizations have problems, but to pronounce them as inherently evil ignores all the good they do. Maybe you have a different idea of good in mind, in which case we'll probably never agree on anything. When people organize they can create amazing things, and that's what corporations are, an organization of people: employees, customers, and investors. And they do amazing things. Go to a country that doesn't do so well at creating functioning organizations and see the difference.
Original paper here:

http://warrantless.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Surveillan...

(curiously, the linked article's link to the abstract says it cannot be found.)
I'm not much of a PHP coder, so I tend to watch these flamewars from a distance on the sidelines.

However, I've never really understood why people criticize or mock Facebook for pouring so many resources into PHP. For building cross-compilers, toolchains, and syntactic extensions on top of a language that is seen as a fundamentally weak foundation.

I mean, I DO understand all of those criticisms. I just don't get how the same people can then turn around and use CoffeeScript, TypeScript, Dart, and even Node.js on the server-side. Compared to a JavaScript foundation, PHP is bedrock!
Bob Doyle (inventor)
While I believe in all of YC's efforts to integrate women, I feel like one of the hurdles that they are ignoring is convincing the men. What do I mean by this? I mean that statements like "We want to fund more women because we are greedy in the good way," I believe in 100%, but not because I have some facts to back it up. YC, on the other hand, should have numbers and facts to back this up and I think it would make their statements that much stronger. Now, you might ask, why is this important if the goal is to attract more women to startups? The answer is that you want the women who do come to be playing on an even playing field: the VC's in the industry are still largely dominated by men. If you can convince them with numbers that they are doing the right thing by not having a bias against women, the women who try to raise money will do it more successfully and then encourage more women to try.
This is an interesting problem. Too many people just ignore their machine once it "works" and leave it to the wild, or their attention span drops and ignore it. The painful part is when previously "good" internet sites are now injecting sophisticated malware unbeknownst to the owner.
> There is at least a decent case to be made that Galileo was executed

Where do you get that he was executed?

Also, regarding differences between Copernicus's treatment and Galileo's. Copernicus didn't publish a lot of his material, nor was it widely known, until late in life. Galileo basically stepped into the controversy that had developed after Copernicus died. Essentially, there was little controversy in Copernicus's time because it wasn't widely known, and those that did know his theory didn't have a reason (yet) to view it as controversial or "wrong".
Why does it seem like a far more rational strategy to act upon?
Google Earth finds woman trapped on deserted island for 7 years
Just out of curiosity, would an colorblind setting in the graphic drive help at all? What I was thinking, for example, if you are red/green colorblind, then compress all the red values to one end of the spectrum, and all the green values to the other end. Or some other remapping scheme, based on the type of colorblindness.
>It’s developed and supported exclusively by one huge web company, and they may decide to deprecate and replace it in a few years as their technical needs change or its core engineers move on to new projects.

Thats an interesting sentiment. The exact same could be said for languages like Go (Google), C# (Microsoft), Rust (Mozilla) and platforms like NodeJS (Joyent). In any case it doesn't seem like too much of a worry. Cassandra came from Facebook, and was well done enough that another company came in and picked up development when Facebook left it.
Your comment implies this is a PR piece?
And being into the same topics, watching the same movies, reading the same books...
IBM had the same issue, and it was politely resolved. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138866 “I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil.”
The only potentially troubling thing I could find in the VS 2013 EULA relating to privacy is that

Microsoft automatically collects information identifying your installed Microsoft product, the operating system of the device, the CPU architecture of the operating system and data regarding the success or failure of the installation of the software, data identifying the cause of a crash in the product and information about the product license which is in use.

. . . .

Microsoft may use the computer and services information to improve its software and services. Microsoft may also share it with others, such as hardware and software vendors. They may use the information to improve how their products run with Microsoft software.

In principle, this could be interpreted quite broadly ("selling detailed information about our installed base to third-party marketing software firms helps us pay for improvements to our software").
Linux worm diversifies to mine cryptocurrencies
Only available in US and Canada, though.
Yahoo, Google and Apple also claim right to read user emails
There are more women in the world than pacific islanders, but if we only address the women aspect, are we not going to end up recruiting primarily white women? If the field is currently friendly to white men, and we make it more friendly to women, we wind up with white men & white women, not white men & all races of women. Right?
I'll probably do what my parents did to me, call Santa a "fun game".
Hacker News is a funny place. I saw the story and thought "Ha! That is only a small part of it. They should read Nagel's 'What is it like to be a bat?'". Of course the top rated comment would already say that - obvious really. Also sometimes sentences here end with ?'". and make perfect (I think) sense.
> Writing list(, $b) = array(3,4) is not allowed. Instead use $_, i.e.: list($_, $b) = array(3, 4).

Not that I think the former is good practice at all, but isn't the latter a kind of weird use of what is a valid variable name?
Uhm, well, the financial industry isn't parasitical and evil nor does it have interests that are distant or hostile to human goals. It's just another profit oriented industry that offers services which plenty of entities find valuable enough to pay for.

The financial industry is as evil as any profit oriented industry can be and to single it out as something completely wasteful and parasitic is unreasonable.
There was a bug that was overwriting --access-log (-l) option. Should be fixed now in master
Answer to your question: michaelochurch ?
Ask HN: Motion activity analytics for mobile app developers
How interested would you be in understanding what your users are doing (physically) while using your app? How compelling is the idea of an SDK that provides activity classification out of the box?
Politics is the mindkiller and all that.[1] For almost every X where you can say, "Were you to advocate X in the late 19th century, it seems nearly everyone would have laughed you out of the room. But that sentiment has reversed here in the 21st century.", it is a good thing that opinions on X have changed. This heuristic isn't perfect, but it should cause you to think more about X.

1. http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/
It's not as if government spying prevents anyone else from doing it. And in any case, 'because it's happening anyway' is a terrible argument, you could just as well say that about any crime you care to mention.
Yes, I agree. Maybe the FISA law should forbid the press from even reporting on these things.

That would be consistent with their rationalization for muzzling the tech companies who give up our data.

After all, the bad guys now know where not to store their data. Heck let's just have the government take over internet and shut down all private websites. Total information control. That'll stop terrorism!
Pixel and Dimed
Like this new way of surfing through images, very clean
Forget God -- a belief in any transcendent property or existence or even a rejection of pure reductionism is typically greeted with a scowl and an argument which boils down to "Come on. . . . you really don't believe that."
Set up and understand websockets with socket.io (SSL support)
Parsing is such sweet sorrow
Score: 30896, I quit
This is even worse, because the video still doesn't tell you fuck all. Is it a web service, desktop software, a browser plugin? WTF?
I've explained the difference further in a blog post: "Holacracy vs. Hierarchy vs. Flat Orgs" https://medium.com/holacracyone-blog/d1545d5dffa7
I think I have a different perspective on this topic than most here. My wife has founded multiple companies. I also have two daughters (and a son). One of which is very interested in programming. I'm older, but back in college and early professional life I worked with a number of women. Myself and my colleagues treat them the same as the rest of the team. There certainly weren't a lot of women, but we didn't treat them any different.

But the current generation of young techies seem to be outright hostile towards women. All you have to do is read some of the comments on HN whenever a topic in this area arises. From some of the things I read in comments I seriously give pause on whether I should push my daughter in programming/tech. Some women can tolerate this hostility better than others, but I don't see it going away anytime soon. I really think the problem is with the attitude of the modern young techy towards females. I don't know where it comes from or how to fix it. But it worries me.