skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I don't understand defenses of programming languages which seem to assume that syntax isn't a central issue.

That's an unfair criticism of the defenses of Erlang vs. people complaining that the syntax doesn't look like C. I think Erlang's syntax is wonderful on it's own terms. Criticism of it because it doesn't look like C just seems like it's from lazy people who have a very narrow view of how programming should look.

That's entirely separate from criticism by people like Tony Arcieri or Damien Katz, who criticize the syntax itself, rather than in comparison to some idea of what they think all languages should look like.
Mobile Web Siphons Revenue From Cities as Landlines Fade
The endless 5-4 decisions of late tend to contradict that. Most judges are predictable. Roberts and Breyer being an exception, and slightly less predictable.
Cloud vs. In-house: Which Hadoop Option is Right for You?
We're sorry. We're scum.
Chrome on iOS is Safari in a box.
It's also hard to market a system which introduces the New Shiny very slowly. How long did it take to get maps in, for instance?

I mean, I totally understand, and to a large extent approve of, their conservatism, but "this ecosystem is boring in a good way" is a hard sell to a generation brought up on 15 minute blog videos.
Government says climate change will make weather more extreme
In Deep – The dark and dangerous world of extreme cavers
I agree with you - using the same password in multiple places is a dumb thing to do. However, you seem to be totally missing the point made in the previous post, namely that people are, on the whole, pretty dumb. The vast majority do not share your understanding of computers and security and hence see no real issue, although this is very very slowly changing.

I disagree entirely with your statement that:
"This isn't human nature, but is simply accepted and defended behavior that gets caught out again, and again, and again."

This is patently false - remembering a different password for every single system, device and site you interact with is not a feasible proposition for the vast majority, especially if you require these passwords to be in any way meaningfully secure.

There are ways of sidestepping this problem, such as 1password and the like, but the ones that are most seamless are paid for services and hence the adoption rate among technically illiterate people is pretty small (I'd imagine, no stats here).

The real issue is that passwords are a broken way of authenticating. End of. Passwords that are easy to remember are trivial to crack, and passwords that are difficult to crack are hard to remember. This is the issue here.

People may do dumb things, but it is far easier to change your system than it is them.
Aereo should pivot to be a colocation company specifically for this equipment. Sell the device to the end user for $100, charge $8-12/month for "colocation".

What next? Illegal for a user to colocate their own antenna equipment?
And as far as capabilities go, the PDP-7 could address 64K of 18 bit words, more than double 1st generation microcomputers (those prior to the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh). Then again, I don't think it's generally known how much (very expensive, hand made) core memory was on that first UNIX(TM) PDP-7.

Maybe not that much, it next moved to the first model of the PDP-11, which had a max of 56 KiB memory of 8 bit bytes. Then to an 11/45, which could do 64 KiB of code, 56 KiB of data and 8 KiB of stack.
I remember looking for this when spritz first came out and thinking - oh great I have to wait for all of these different platforms to integrate the spritz API to use it. Glad to see there is a way to use it.
Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /pages/sliceofmit/2014/06/25/daguerre/ on this server.
A response from Jonathan Ellis, via jancona: http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/how-not-to-benchmark-cassan...
I only read the opinion summary and the concurrence, but from the summary:

> And, at least as to remote wiping, law enforcement currently has some technologies of its own for combatting the loss of evidence.

And from the rest, once the officers have removed the phone from your person, there's no longer a danger of you wiping it. Of course, I don't want to suggest in the least way that officers will actually /follow/ this guideline, and that lower courts will uphold it, but there you go.
might want to switch to relative line numbers. makes using 12j/k much easier in my experience.
I think you're right. DragonflyBSD probably isn't widely used enough to be trusted by high-budget HPC projects anyway, but I was under the impression their HAMMER filesystem was a cluster file system. Looking at the website now I can't seem to find support for that, though...
Sony was selling exactly this thing....9 years ago. They made LocationFree base stations which would stream your TV signal to your PSP anywhere in the world over the internet. That was incredibly impressive for 2005.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LocationFree_Player
The really obnoxious thing about the plugins is that they are (as you mentioned) friggin' uninstallable and cannot even be disabled (aka prevented from loading). Why? Who thought that was a good idea?

This was a big regression for me when the super-annoying Git plugin was bundled with Eclipse -- having to manually remove bundles from the installation directory is not a lot of fun nor a very robust method of plugin uninstallation. :(

EDIT: I will of course try this release, but I predict that I'll be sticking with IDEA.
In defence of Wonga they seem popular with their million or so users - they have a NetPromotor score of around 70% vs around 0% for the regular UK banking industry. ( http://www.openwonga.com/uploads/openwonga_statistics_oct_20... ). Also for better or worse they don't lend generally to the destitute - they lend to people with normal income with something like an unexpected boiler to replace and tell the genuinely hard up to go away.
No, I wouldn't.

Why? Because I already can do this, and I haven't. The internet is full of survival gear/food packages, and I haven't bought any of them. Therefore, the odds of me doing it with your company is about zero. I suspect this holds true for most people; if so, what is your acquisition cost for a customer?

And then I wonder about your margins. You are selling 180 meals for $200, which means your food price must be somewhere around 50 cents/meal for this to be viable to you (and I think I'm being generous; I suspect the price has to be lower - see acquisition costs above). How are you providing all those calories for so little money? Your website offers to harvest my email, not inform me, so I am admittedly in the dark here.

Do I just throw the food away at the end of the year? What is the food - is it something I'd want to eat? Is this not a problem I can solve by going to Costco and buying a bunch of boxes of pasta and tinned tuna? These are the questions that run through my brain.

In a real disaster, my problem is going to be potable water.
Only if 'something secure' is defined overbroadly. Using Amazon, as an example, I can idle my session indefinitely, and when I return, it will even allow me to do potentially secure things like browse my order history, look at my account details and such, but before I order something, or change my password, it prompts for a login, except where I've just recently logged in.

There's a balance to be had, and while admittedly, getting the details right is tedium and minutiae, it can be done, and done right.
Would you link to the source you're referring to?
Elon Musk Plans to Colonize Mars Potentiometers Key to Life Support.
An Educator's Lean Startup Mindset
Benchmarking SQS
just a heads up. links on wingify.com are giving a 404
http://wingify.com/about
http://wingify.com/careers
I think many of us are finding ourselves in a weird middle ground. The younger generation has moved on to Snapchat/Instagram/whatever to chronicle their lapses in judgement and youthful indiscretions, which used to be Facebook's bread and butter. Meanwhile, grammy's using Facebook to play games and forward me click-bait articles (a modern alternative on her FWD:RE:RE:... emails).

I guess as a working adult, LinkedIn should be my go-to network, but no thank you. Hmm, maybe that's where Facebook is going with this.
I get better quality video from my antenna than through cable. In my experience the tv station uses less compression than the cable company. And since the switch to digital OTA video the picture has been rock solid.

I've had this experience in both Columbus, OH and Phoenix, AZ.
Right, it's just that the technology is forward-looking while the sales pitch is so regressive. I suspect the target market would actually like it less if they knew more about the technology.
Science is more than the latest study (health-oriented)
Blasphemy! Languages can only be criticized for not looking like C, and if they actually are C, they can only be criticized for using pointers and allowing memory management.

Downvoted to oblivion.
> Who is going to own the computers?

Most of the computational power I have access to, I rent from Amazon...
Noob's Guide to Twython: ReTweet Bot
I agree, and crazy workarounds like that aren't very nice either.

However, I don't think the two decisions are inconsistent. As I understand it, Cablevision was already paying license fees for rebroadcasting, and the case was just about exactly what they could or could not do with that license. Aereo's case is about whether they need to pay license fees at all.
(That was a response to a different benchmark, also done by Thumbtack, but it looks like it applies just as well to this one. See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7944226.)
Broadcast DTV usually looks better on an antenna than on cable.

I recently gave a pair of rabbit ears to my mother-in-law and we were amazed at how much better the picture quality was. She's lucky, howver, to live about a mile or two from the sticks. Most people need a better antenna.

Cable HDTV is often heavily compressed so they can fit hundreds of junky channels into a limited pipe. Particularly for sports where there is fast motion and fine detail, the difference is night and day.
The Goodness of Nations
A few years ago (2005-2008) they were more into communication, they made the first synchronous release (eclipse + lead subprojects). Since then they went under the radar.
In your vimrc add the following (version 7.3+):

set number
set relativenumber

This turns your line numbers into a hybrid mode that show the numbers relative to your cursor and the actual line number your cursor is currently on.
Why would the same not apply to the Internet cables the NSA directly taps all over the World?
Great post. Unicorn by necessity is a great way to become even better at the role you have. Having to wear many hats is an amazing opportunity for growth and improvement.
Ask HN: How much would ongoing part-time help cost us?
Hi,

I run a small non-profit using the internet to make the contemporary art world more transparent and accessible for the public. Thanks in advance for any advice!

I do all the coding for our projects myself, but I'm the director of the organization so it's quite difficult to block out stretches of time when I can focus. Right now we're working in PHP but the plan is to gradually move our projects into Ruby on Rails.

Therefor, I want to work towards hiring a part-time developer who can help me every week for something like 10 or 15 hours. Thus my question: I don't know how much I should budget for that goal.

I'd ideally like it to be a permanent position, rather than something freelance (although it might make sense to have a trial period on a freelance basis). I'd be willing to hire someone remotely from anywhere in the US, or hire someone in Chicago where we are based. Would remote workers command different salaries than local ones? I'm hoping to find someone reasonably connected into programming communities and current standards, someone legitimately professional. I'm entirely self-taught, so I know my code is probably wonky and in places overly complicated. Part of what I want this person to do is to clean things up and modernize them, so it has to be a programmer of decent quality (although ultimately the projects are fairly straightforward).

So: what should I expect to pay (total) for this work? Also, any resources about the best way to find this person and tell that they're the right candidate?

Thanks very much for any help!!
Forrest
Let me add one Vim tip that recently got me:

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Evil

Seriously, to me it solved all my issues with Vim. Now I have several processes attached to my "Evil", heaps of plugins installed, yet everything blazing fast. And the configuring in elisp started as a little awkward, but now it feels so much more sensible then vim-script (especially knowing that development on Emacs started ding the 70s).

With Evil I can say that --for me-- the Vim/Emacs fight is over:

Emacs now has a great editor...

...and Vim a proper "operating system".

:)
If that "proves" anything, it's only that public entities spend money according to priorities other than thrift.

But really, your response to a plea for a single example of an economically-defensible tunnel project was "tunneling consistently comes out ahead on a cost basis"? You never took rhetoric, did you? It's not as though I asked a question that someone "in the industry" wouldn't have the background to answer.
I appreciate your helping to knock some sense into me. I should know better than to go diving headlong into building large client projects in bleeding edge technology, heh
In addition to just the networking hardware, the networking stacks and topologies are very different. I would consider something a supercomputer if it was using a high-dimension torus topology, and some MPI variant, and a different internet / transport protocol (I forget the name, but as I understand it's a very different approach where there's much less decision making in the routers). On the other hand, what I would consider to be a cluster is almost going to use off-the-shelf networking hardware (as you mention), TCP/IP, and a simpler hierarchical topology with a switch or two per rack.
There are literally hundreds of alternatives sprouting from the ground as raw materials and services become cheaper and cheaper. Amazon certainly hasn't monopolised on the computational power market.

Increasingly, much of the computational power is becoming decentralised anyway with the blockchain emerging in new and creative ways
I was, um, joking.
>Imagine it's 1940 or 1950 and someone starts asking "Who is going to own the computers?"

You can manipulate bits and bytes at home, great, but these robots are industrial producers that make things, are subject to regulations, etc. This isn't a question of who is going to own a dishwashing robot. Its a question of who is going to own the means of production.

The funny thing is that your answer is antiquated. What computer do I really own? My android phone that is controlled by google, managed by a telecom carrier, and all of my data at google. Or all the servers I work with that are VM's at some cloud provider? We're not landlords anymore. We're renters.
They may suck at marketing, but Mike gave me a pretty in-depth briefing. Have a gander: http://www.sdtimes.com/content/article.aspx?ArticleID=71423&...
The base price is the same; some just aren't eligible for a scholarship. How is this different than any other scholarship?
My 401K company, Kibble & Prentice, does the same thing. They make you call a phone number if you forget your password, and then the operator reads the password out loud to you over the phone. Freakin' amazing. I told HR and they said they'll change companies, but that was six months ago, so... who the hell knows.
They're not the same, but they are almost all covered under copyright, yes.
I haven't read the ruling yet, but it does include the fact that "collection" of the data without "search" is also illegal - right? Otherwise it doesn't change the mass surveillance situation much, and not that it's not illegal, because the Constitution does say "seizures", too, but I just want it to be clearly said by the Supreme Court so there's no doubt or room for "secret interpretations".
The appeal of these loans is that they are fast and don't require doing anything in person. There are already various initiatives to help people with budgeting, just financially irresponsible or people with gambling addictions don't tend to use them.
Interest rate is pretty much irrelevant. If the startup fails, they're not going to repay. If the startup succeeds then the interest is dwarfed by the value of the lender's equity.

If the lender is worried about interest rates and credit worthiness, they probably should not be pursuing a startup. The idea of a loan is that it removes negotiations over a finite pie that probably is worth nothing over the long run.
Love eclipse but it's definetly a Java/JEE/JVM IDE. Other projects (JDT,PDT,...) are just not that much maintained.

Netbeans while it has far less features than Eclipse in more balanced when it comes to web tech support.
What is it about GP's scenario that makes it a private performance? It sure looks like he's "subscribing to a streaming service that 'rents [him] an antenna'".
I did the same about 6 months ago trying to grab speedfan for someone else in the office. I never had any trouble before cause adblock and so didn't even think to be careful :(
Ask HN: Why can I upvote some of my own comments?
I was just browsing through some of my older comments, and I see that most of the way down the first page the comments cease having the asterisk in front of them and instead have an upvote link (the triangle).

I haven't clicked it because I assume it's a bug and I don't need to upvote my own comments.

The last comment with the asterisk was 33 days ago; the next one (first upvotable) is 48 days ago.
I'm not sure if that is true, an iphone 4 is available with a £20 per month contract and no up front payment for example.
Not really. Simply put, LE agencies have always been happy to directly and unambiguously state that combating crime trumps privacy, and now they will do so without hesitation.

It was only a matter of time until the issue of privacy was addressed, and now that it has come to pass then the issue will cause polarization in politics. Whether this is good or bad is up to you.
> We're not landlords anymore. We're renters.

This is why I like Plex instead of Netflix. Netflix has more movies after all, for a subscription.
I agree. I went all Linux years ago, and Paint.NET, minesweeper, and Irfanview are the major things that I miss.

GIMP doesn't take that long to start now, though. I missed Paint.NET a lot more when the GIMP took longer to load.
This is the first CAPTCHA replacement that I really like.

Adding a delay that costs computing power will both slow down and add real costs to spammers (though if it's a bot net they'll not care about the latter).

I really dislike how impossible CAPTCHAs have become, and the slew of startups working on advertising based ones is not the solution the users want.

As a user, all I want is ease. I'm fine waiting a few seconds... just don't give me an impossible task to perform or use the inconvenience you've created as an opportunity to advertise. All I want is to do whatever I wanted to do, read, write... I can wait a moment, just don't make it painful.
The ruling is not so much about whether they can search a phone without a warrant, but whether the resulting evidence is admissible in court for criminal cases. This will not impact NSA's collection since they have not been using it in court.
That's why I mentioned the VPS. A quick search for "Miami VPS" reveals $20 options which would do the trick.

http://www.hostvirtual.com/datacenters/miami
Thanks for the heads up. Fixed it.
Payday loans don't compound interest in the same way a real loan does, unless you miss a payment.
According to RFC 2617[1], Both Digest and Basic Authentication are very much on the weak end of the security strength spectrum.

[1]: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2617#section-4.4
Google Chrome Tip
Here's a (naive) question: In the US, is a Supreme Court ruling completely final ? What options, if any, are available to the losing party ? Is change through congress the only way to try to appeal rulings?

If there are no practical ways to repeal Supreme Court rulings, what happens when the Supreme Court makes a mistaken ruling?
This was a reason I made this project. Thank you for great feedback! :)
Privacy implications for product design
What tools are you trying to use that make it such a hassle?
Small Music Labels See YouTube Battle as Part of War for Revenue
Why not go with a minimal install?

Eclipse Platform and JDT runtime binaries do the trick here. Add-on must-have plugins as needed. Eclipse Standard has a whole bunch o' kitchen sink...
Present such a case to the Supreme Court and let's find out. :-)
I actually created something similar to this long ago (Jan 2013).

https://github.com/silasb/luvdns

That holds the Lua program to parse my domains [1] and also holds a Sinatra application that gets a post commit hook from GH and then it was as simple as updating the database that PowerDNS looked at. I don't think I ever ended up fully using it.

[1]: https://github.com/silasb/domains
Two reasons

1) Most people "all over world" are not US citizens and therefor not covered by bill of rights "that our founding fathers fought for" (according to US Government). NSA does (claim) to attempt to identify communications of US citizens it intercepts "overseas" and doesn't look at them without cause.

2) NSA breaks the law. Routinely it would appear.
I believe this referring to a discussion on an article about the use of Stingray-type devices (If someone can provide the link that would be great), particularly how their use was concealed from courts when obtaining a search warrant. Instead of telling the court that the information was obtained by use of a Stingray, they told the court the information came from a "confidential source"
It's different because the school itself is providing the "scholarship", which is the same as a white/Asian/male surcharge. It is legal for a non-profit to provide race-specific scholarships, which is what the United Negro College Fund does. But I don't think businesses are allowed to set prices based on race or sex.
go find solace with plan9
What does X represent here?
Only an author of Lovecraftian horror could give a keynote at a perl conference.
It's designed to look like Paint :)
The title is misleading. It should read "Warrantless cell phones searches illegal for people police arrest".
Simple: the NSA isn't a law enforcement agency. It's not presenting evidence in court.
The premise of this article is entirely wrong. We haven't had a 'massive deregulation', taxes across the west have rose, as has regulation and centralisation. THAT is why conditions for workers have declined. THAT is why the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer.
Antigate – Automated captcha recognition API
Have fun running bcrypt on 100TB of /dev/urandom. Insanely large password limit? Sure sounds like good business to me. No password length limit? Sounds like a DOS attack waiting to happen.
He is very insightful. I read ideas of his that I've never seen explored elsewhere. For instance, last year he had one where he speculated on how many human occupational specialties currently exist, I believe he pegged it at 100,000.

That may seem like interesting trivia without contemplation.
Where would one download those?
Google I/O 2014 – Keynote (live)
Disabling swap means setting swappiness to 0; I'm not sure how you can talk about "disabling swap" without talking about swappiness.
It's confidential, releasing it would impact [pick one] a) an ongoing investigation b) the safety of undercover agent c) national security. But, trust us, source had good reliable info.

[edit: to the totally confused. My comment is political satire. And it purposefully misidentified which "source" you were referring to for purposes of bitching about USA law enforcement.]