skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Nothing similar exists in, for example, France, Russia, China, or India.

Not true. France does have an Intelligence Committee ("Délégation parlementaire au renseignement"). And there is a control organism like the FISA Courts ("Commission nationale de contrôle des interceptions de sécurité"); while legally their decisions are only consultative, in practice the government almost always respects them. And it denies between 1% and 2% of requests, whereas the FISA only denies 0.03%.

However I'm no expert, so I can't say how much power or independance they actually have.

You can read their annual reports (in French):

http://www.ladocumentationfrancaise.fr/rapports-publics/1440...
http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/connaissance/delegation_re...
If you actually read the comments on this thread, you'll find that pg stated the current behavior was actually his original plan: The pending mechanism is enabled by moderators on a per thread or per comment tree basis.
In this case, looping in the original email address on the SendGrid account before changing to a new one would have kept this from happening. SendGrid's support personnel should almost certainly not be able to change an email address without the change being signed off on through the old address first.
> Of course it's remotely possible that our society will reject the PhD due to rapidly rising educational costs, but I don't think that's going to happen.

A sizeable fraction of folks in Science/Engineering do not pay tuition for their PhDs, and receive a modest stipend for living expenses.
How about everyone just started following the CSV spec? https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180

Doesn't allow for tab-delimited or any-character-delimited text and handles "Quotes, Commas, and Tab" characters in fields.
To add to this: Cache and cache invalidation.

Without proper caching and a good invalidation strategy your databases will get pounded. Use redis and memcache to cache everything possible. Don't even connect to the database unless you have to. Ensure that you can invalidate any cache entry easily and keep things atomic so you do not run in to race conditions. Use locking to ensure that when the cache expires the database does not get a dog-pile with multiple copies of the same query. You'd think the query-cache in your database of choice may be just as efficient but trust me, it is not even close. You can also cache higher-level objects than just simple queries.

Depending on your reliability requirements you may even consider treating your cache as writeback and doing batched database writes in the background. These are generally more efficient than individual writes due to a variety of factors.

I've worked on several top-2oo ranking sites and this has always been one of the main go-to strategies for scaling. Databases suck - Avoid querying them.
The dude that said just said it was 'experience-ism', do I have to explain what nuance is? You've gotta help me out here, I can't do it all on my own.

All you keep saying is 'no its not'. And then trying to move on as if that's the final word. Not interested in talking to you bro, we're not going to come to any kind of understanding.
Did you personally back for the "change the world" promise?
as a developer, it's harder to find a clojure shop close to my location. More clojure I use, less java/c#/php/python/ruby stuff I am willing to do. This makes interviewing harder for me too. I might just jump back onto non-hipster languages to make my life easier.
EC2 does not have IPv6.
I remember watching a game around 15 years ago, Go professional (I forget who) vs a highly-ranked computer program.

The computer got a 27 stone handicap, and the pro still won by more than 361 stones. Both of those numbers are crazy.

The fact that computer programs are getting competitive is pretty awesome. 15 year ago, I wasn't sure they'd ever beat a competent human. But now I anticipate that 15 years from now (if not sooner) they'll be better than pretty much everyone.
But what happens in those rare cases where that first account gets lost / locked permanently?
That's nonsense. Facebook is in every home. Being bought by them obviously helps Oculus to be in every home. I'm not exactly cheering over this acquisition, but if one thing's certain, it means Oculus is going to be all over the goddamn world -- assuming you guys don't ruin it with your kneejerk assumptions.

This is really a branding failure. Facebook's brand conflicts with Oculus' brand. I'm surprised they didn't see that coming. Reality is complex, but perception is usually stunted. Facebook = evil corporation who only cares about selling personal data. Oculus = good guy, cares about us, cares about VR. This is a load of bullshit, but that's the branding perception. Try to change that, and you get chaos.
I renamed my blog taco.computer
Depth Maps Hidden in Google Street View Create Flickering Ghost-Cities
SF state senator Leland Yee indicted on charges of corruption, arms dealing
Hey, I'm extremely interested in open source computational biology/biochemistry and find this very interesting. What do you do to make money whilst exploring and contributing to these areas?
I'd like to remind everyone that some GNU labeled projects are not financially supported or commissioned by GNU. They are instead supported by individuals who, for whatever reason, identify with the GNU label and have decided to donate their work to the cause.

The comments on this post are super negative, and I think that is because people really don't like the GNU project. We don't even know if the author of this library is the person who submitted it to HN.

I would be a nervous wreck if I woke up one day to find my personal work submitted to this site, and have it trashed as thoroughly as it has been here. You don't have to like it or use it for your next project, but for the love of God, don't call it a shitty ugly abomination (to combine some of the comments here...)
Yeah, it's not hard: until you want to reach mailboxes at some obscure providers like Yahoo or Outlook.
Well at least they'll know who to blame if it shows up on a torrent.
Facebook shares fall 7% on Oculus deal
Let's all start the .computer movement! If you get one share it with me and I will start a list of .computer internet places.
Amazon markets the story that they operate on thin margins (which no doubt they do in retail) but in AWS the margins are probably fairly attractive. They don't break this out in their SEC filings because (a) they don't have to, and (b) doing so would undermine their marketing message.

Economically cloud can make a lot of sense for several potential customers, including:

* those who have highly variable workloads (so they can spin up lots of servers to meet demand then spin them down afterwards)

* those who favor OpEx over CapEx (Like startups)

* and for those who are bypassing internal IT for TTM reasons (e.g. "shadow IT")

Another point to consider is that while AWS is increasingly dropping prices the same is in effect happening for people procuring their own hardware. The performance over price ratio (on multiple axis) is also improving for on premises deployments (c.f. Moore's Law).
Is it reasonable to expect Paas service providers like Heroku and Engineyard also to cut their prices, or is it asking for too much? On one end, it seems logical to me because their services are built on top of AWS for the most part, on the other, I am not sure if this might happen since their selling point is not the Infrastructure underneath, but rather the convenience and ease of getting something up and running. I guess we'll just have to wait and watch.
Definitely don't watch their tv channel...
Deliverability plays an immense part why people rely upon an ESP.
Oculus Kickstarter backers demand refunds
Well, frequently components intended to be used so broadly, and which become more valuable with more users (because more people speak the language) get weaker licenses. There are pros and cons to this from most perspectives, but it's a (weak) surprise.
You do realise that GPLv3 grants the user less freedoms than a license like MIT, right?
Omg, that's exactly the same thing but more PC. Whatever, I hate you HN. I'm taking my ball and going home.
God why is it so ugly. If they made it into a language that compiles into JS, it might be good, but why this?
Not exactly hacker news, but as Yee has been a fixture in SF politics for many years many SF-based startup owners and VCs probably know him personally.
Yes, SendGrid sends emails, but there is value add on top of that. (e.g. negotiating with hotmail to ensure your emails get through, webhooks, APIs, statistics, templates, etc.).

Yes, sending an email is easy enough. It's all the other stuff we have services like this for.
New Gmail Visual Inbox Could Mean Pay-To-Deliver for Email Marketing
404 Day: A Day of Action Against Censorship in Libraries
First question is wrong, I could have just sold short. ;)
Physicists Produce Antineutrino Map Of The World
http://www.lepetitballon.com/

http://www.bobler.com/

https://www.qunb.com/

https://www.bunkr.me/
https://sketchfab.com/

https://poutsch.com/

http://captaindash.com/

http://www.netatmo.com/

http://www.withings.com/

http://www.air-detox.com/
"as it's GPLv3 why anyone serious would use it for anything"

Serious people never set out to produce GPLv3 works?

I totally grant the "this doesn't look like it's actually useful", though, although I've not been neck deep in JS for ages.
I support this because I like tacos and I like computers.
https://www.interviewcake.com/all-questions
(link is commented out in the page source)
It's funy that "true==[[]]" is false but "false==[[]]" is true. Maybe someone could explain why "[[]]" is considered false?
My precious comments...
You live in a very different world from me if a "large bill" is an extra $40. For even a small company like who I work for, any fluctuations in our AWS bill under $100 would probably go unnoticed. Our total infrastructure cost (of which AWS is a small part) is in 5 digits.
Yeah; me too.
Make sure to enter the "lottery" with a company or app publishing account email if possible. Just polling people in the industry last time, people with emails from popular press and media often had no trouble at all. A possible reason is a whitelist for certain email domains.
Yes; same thing. Weird.
As an AWS consumer, I'd like to thank google's cloud team for making this announcement in early 2014 possible.
Sending email is hard and for most people not a thing that provide them with a proper ROI, because among other things...

- You need to make sure that your email servers IPs are not on black lists.

- That you use DKIM properly

- your multipart mime encoding is correct

- bouncing e-mails are handled...

- take care of scaling & operating the servers

- and so on....

You can spent ( and waste ) a lot of time on this... especially if you are new to email sending..
TSV/CSV characters were also pretty much guaranteed to exist no matter what kind of terminal was used, and not cause any side-effects. No doubt some teletypes & dumb terminals used those FS, GS, RS etc. characters for special features since they weren't likely to appear in printed data. And I know those characters are used for other things in PETSCII and ASCII. 0x1C, the File Separator in ASCII, is used to turn text red in PETSCII.
Oculus Gains Facebook’s Resources
Facebook Denies NYT Claim It Will Rebrand Oculus
According to wikipedia:

The meaning of the key's abbreviation is not explicitly given in many IBM PC compatible technical reference manuals. However, IBM states that AltGr is an abbreviation for alternate graphic, and Sun keyboards label the key as Alt Graph.

Apparently, AltGr was originally introduced as a means to produce box-drawing characters, also known as pseudographics, in text user interfaces. These characters are, however, much less useful in graphical user interfaces, and rather than alternate graphic the key is today used to produce alternate graphemes.
The comments are super negative because it's a useless and ugly library, most of these things can be done with vanilla javascript.

I love the GNU project, but this thing is ugly.
My position: Milton Friedman had basic economic literacy but chose to ignore it at times, caring more about some other things (like moral and social issues – an area where he made some serious mistakes).

Many other people don't have economic literacy in the first place – and if they did have it, some of them would change their minds about Basic Income and other issues, rather than ignore economics to focus on their social-moral philosophy. One reason that would happen is plenty of people don't have a very strong social-moral philosophy in the first place, don't care about it much. And some would even change their social-moral philosophy itself, for the better, if they understood basic economics.

Spreading basic economics isn't a total cure-all alone, but it's a great step. Many people would notice the conflicts between economics and some of their other ideas. Some of those people would then have some success resolving the conflicts and reaching reasonable economically-informed conclusions.
If you invoke sending email through Amazon SES, it's free for the first 2K per day, due EC2 blocks being on spam lists.

http://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/

"You can send 2,000 messages for free each day when you call Amazon SES from an Amazon EC2 instance directly or through AWS Elastic Beanstalk."
Design better online banking at Standard Treasury (YC S13)
Good design is that the heart of our product offering. Developers, bank executives, end-users and many more audiences will use the sites we build to interact with and use their bank accounts.

As we have begun to launch API platforms with our banking partners, several have asked us to build new online banking platforms on top of our own APIs. We're seeking a designer who is passionate about creating elegant web interfaces to simplify complicated underlying systems. You will drive product decisions though designing dashboards, API documentation, features and solutions pages, new versions of online and mobile banking, and more.

We care deeply about having the best experience possible, and design is just as important as the API itself.

You will be responsible for designing and prototyping the frontend and user interface for all aspects of multiple co-branded and white-labeled banking platforms for some of the world’s largest financial institutions. You will take some of the most recognizing brands in the world and have to incorporate them into specialized designs. You will be responsible for incorporating the visual identities and branding guidelines of multiple banks into your designs.

Great candidates should be comfortable incorporating analytics, user research, A/B testing, and their own intuition and creativity to create delightful experiences across all of our partners’ white-label or co-branded platform experiences. You should also be capable of collaborating with people across the spectrum from platform engineers to nontechnical banking partners in designing new features and enhancing the user experience. Being able to build working prototypes of your designs is a big plus.

If any of that sounds interested to you, shoot our co-founder Zac Townsend an email at zac@standardtreasury.com
If "false == X" is true, shouldn't we expect that "true == X" is false?
"No, absolutely nobody ever said that."

http://www.woodweb.com/knowledge_base/Taking_Measurements_on...
Facebook Buying Oculus Virtual Reality Company for $2 Billion
I am founder and CTO of a growing startup (Comufy) and I very much see where you are coming from.

The truth is that managing people is hard. Every person is different and you need to understand the personality of each one of your staff and it is not easy. The way you communicate with each person is a reflexion of your understanding of their personality and sometimes you get it wrong.

Suppose that you just realised that despite your best efforts, what you have been working on for the past year will not sell. Your board is maxing pressure on you and you decide to explore a new avenue. You now need to communicate the news to your employees, without making them panic, and to try to get them onboard to your new vision. Well I can tell you it's hard, and it happens! It certainly happened to us more than I wished for. You are going to have to be a politician! You need to minimise the failure while painting a beautiful and bright future ahead, even though you don't know yet whether it will work. This is probably what you refer to as "Bullshit".

And then that's just managing people. Managing a company is so much more than this. You make a ridiculous amount of decisions daily, and some of them will not please everybody. And some of them you will come back on.

Finally, remember that your boss is human too, and if he appears to be an arse at times, it is probably because he learned over time that being the best friend of his staff is a very bad idea. When a staff member is not performing, you are going to have to fix this. And pushing a staff member to improve is a lot easier done if that staff member thinks of you as his boss, and not his mate!
You Can Now Use LastPass to Log Into Android Apps Automatically
> I would probably also wager that we have more accountability over our intelligence agencies than Chinese people have over their intelligence agencies.

Neither citizenry has any meaningful control over "their" spy agencies. They're not your favourite sports team that you need to defend. If you harbour any illusions of democratic control: the elected class is a lot smaller and a few degrees more stable than the candidate pool. Before they get access to power, candidates tend to renounce any action against the NSA.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/jul/14/...
Pretty much because investors want a quick buck. They don't want to wait until Facebook owns the internet after mobile. That's way too far away and way too uncertain.
OK, I'm convinced. But don't forget about that deprecation team.
A decline in market value of more than $10B, implying that for the $2B FB spent, they will receive hugely negative value.

Seems extreme, although it was a bad day for tech stocks anyway, so the portion of the drop attributable to the acquisition is surely smaller.

Anyway, the market seems to be communicating that not only does it think FB got bad value, but that this deal is bayesian evidence that it is being badly managed.

EDIT: I still don't think 100% of the decline is attributable to the broader market move, because TWTR and certainly KING should be more volatile than FB. But, yeah, the story might not be as clear as I thought.
>I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.

I don't think that I would have believed this until I got into graduate school but it's really true. A PhD doesn't mean anything. If I told you that someone had a PhD, that wouldn't have told you anything else else about that person.
You're a troll, and I'm going to take the bait.

How is it rebutted by history? Tell me the specific historical events you have in mind.
No, the GPLv3 grants the user more freedoms than a license like MIT - they can demand the source from someone who has provided them the binary. It grants potential distributors fewer freedoms - they must provide sources and cannot distribute under incompatible licenses.
The linked page is only describing a price change in S3, not all AWS services across the board (most of what you're doing with Heroku would be incurring EC2 costs).
I have a Ph.D. in physics and now I'm a full stack web developer. :p While I would not recommend my path to anyone, for me it happened to work out. I am not claiming that it couldn't have worked out going a different route but I was really challenged throughout graduate school and it help me to realize some of my potential. I gained a good bit of confidence with regards to my ability to learning complex things, solving extremely tedious and difficult problems and generating my own interesting ideas.

All that said, I think pretty poorly of physics academia now. In retrospect, it seems like a small, incestuous group of people consistently reminding themselves that they are the smartest people in the world and are working on only the most noble and difficult pursuits.
I was pretty sure this happened a month or two ago, but I guess it is now official: http://www.businessinsider.com/klout-acquired-2014-2
Yes, this is part of what I'm trying to get answers to.

Do you tell the user on signup to print an in-case-of-emergency-break-glass password which is only ever to be used to get into a locked account and other special circumstances?

It may seem over the top but seeing as it's unique across service providers, I think it's a hell of a lot better than the overly abused "what is your mother's maiden name" type questions. I consider these questions to be in the same boat as sharing passwords between websites (since they are)!
I'm just estimating based on assumptions of possibilities. Even if I had evidence that Huawei has never abused their customers, and with evidence that the NSA themselves have used Huawei's accounts to abuse customers, it's still more probable that Huawei's accounts themselves are a greater threat than the NSA abusing them.

Now. Is it more likely that the NSA will abuse them? That's a completely different question. Probability describes the function of an outcome based on a set of fixed parameters; in other words, you can estimate how often a coin flipped will land heads 10 times. The likelihood, however, is based on watching it come up heads 10 times, and would describe whether the coin was rigged or not.

Based on outcomes, is it likely the NSA is spying on customers using Huawei's tech support accounts? The only outcomes we can see is one report from a guy who says he saw a Huawei tech support account exfiltrating data that an American intelligence agency would like to have. It's really not enough data to make many conclusions. The only likelihood we can determine is that Huawei accounts are used to exfiltrate data from companies that American intelligence agencies would like.

Like someone else commented (could have been the OP?) another possible actor could be a CIA mole or some bribed/corrupt employee. Could be a rival company, or someone who wants to sell the information. We don't really know. We could assume the NSA is the only organization with an interest in hacking Huawei because this is the only report we've heard about such a thing, but that's speculating about unknowns.

There's really nothing about this action that screams NSA specifically; it's just being correlated with the story because the data appears to be useful for American intelligence. To say that there is no data that could be useful to both American intelligence and other parties would probably be a stretch. The only thing we do know for sure is that Huawei's accounts were used to exfiltrate data; who wants the data, and what for, is a mystery. But what is certain is that you should be afraid of your Huawei support accounts.