skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FWIW - the Real Names policy was never about providing Google with your name. It was about the name that was displayed to others. I was never a supporter of the real names policy, but I can still understand the motivations behind it - even if I think it was a mistake.

Quoting Yonatan (tech lead for G+):

> There were quite a few things we were trying to achieve, some of which turned out to be key and some of which didn't. Greater authenticity was actually one of the big successes: it set the culture to be one where people, by default, act as themselves rather than as a persona. That makes a huge difference to how people behave, and now the culture is stable enough that it's OK to relax that. Reducing trolling, on the other hand, turned out not to be as tied to names as anyone thought. We had lots of reasons to believe that might be the case at first -- look at YouTube, 4chan, and Facebook comments back then -- but in retrospect, the dynamics which control trolling seem to be somewhat different. Or to put it a little more bluntly, people are quite willing to be assholes under their real names, too. ﻿
For me, programming is math because nowhere else in my experience do I have the degree of certainty that I have in programming. The article seems to think that calculus is the archetype of mathematics, but integers are mathematical objects as well. As natural numbers, 1+1=2 - always. Just like programming. Except the natural numbers never fail due to a failed disk drive, power supply, fan, electrostatic discharge, etc, HOWEVER, those externalities are never a part of programming (just as sleep deprivation is never part of mathematics) unless you're explicitly modelling failures, and in that case, you're making a mathematical model of a system that includes failures. Outside of programming and mathematics, entities and operations on them are usually much less reliable.

When you program, you manipulate a mathematical object, not the physical embodiment of that object. If you're dealing with the physical embodiment, you're a chip designer. Even at the level of FPGAs, your dealing more with the mathematical model of the device than with the details of the device itself.
Works for me with pync: python -c 'from pync import Notifier; Notifier.notify("hello")'
Yeah, and I find it funny how many people equated to the policy change being a harbinger of an onslaught of trolling.

Meanwhile I have at least three Google profiles, all with obvious (to me) fake names that I've used for a long time, since G+ ever asked me to merge my Google Mail with them.

I think they're latching onto the wrong aspect of social networks, identity, and such in their complaints.

The real issues are that there's no signifier for "verified" individuals (like on Amazon, maybe by way of Google Wallet?) and no way to limit +1s or comments to such users. I think that's the only way to really impose the feeling of non-anonymity on a user's comment or whatnot.

Also, some of the complainers are just idiots who don't understand how to use circles to restrict interactions or comments on their content... which sucks because I actually dig Google's model there.
Would you be ok with being paying more for healthcare because you ate a candybar for lunch?
I don't think IBM was ever involved with Windows.
Cat Facial Recognition Robot (cloud-based image processing)
I've never found any one particular USB-Serial Adapter to be any more reliable. Currently using the Tripp Lite Keyspan, Model USA-49WG, SKU CU8037. Appears on the USB chain as: Product ID: 0x0131, Vendor ID: 0x06CD. Still kernel panics when I pull out the USB Cable.

I carry a Dell Laptop when going to customer sites+Putty for consoling into Cisco Routers because I've never found a Serial Cable/USB combination that doesn't cause the Macbook air to Kernel Panic.

I'll give the PL-2303 based device a chance - I see there is a nice comparison site here:

http://www.usconverters.com/index.php?main_page=page&id=60

I'll definitely try the Trendnet TU-S9. Here's hoping 4 years of weekly hell on my mac laptop comes to an end...

But, maybe I'll try upgrading to Mavericks - this seems to suggest that some progress has been made in the FTDI driver department: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/technotes/tn2315/_in...
Forcing me to use my real name on Youtube, will just prevent me from ever commenting on a video.
#1 Almost all games are created by PC, and port to console, not the other way around.

#2 Almost all games can play on PC, maybe just with lower setting.

#3 PC games are for people who like to discover => example how someone found out how to enable watch dog's E3 graph setting. But you have no control over console.

#4 Almost all console games are created by Pc, oh wait.
Show HN: A tool to turn Google voice SMS to a CSV
Is there an opposite of "Streisand effect" ? If not then we might as well call it G+ effect.

Google took some unreasonable steps to make G+ popular that is precisely why I stopped using G+. After G+ I have not commented on any of the YoutTube videos. When Google started uploading every photo on my android device to Google+ and downloaded all PicasaWeb albums on my phone I switched to a fake Google id to be used on my phone.
I now use Flikr instead of Picasaweb (now G+).

I now have around 6 fake Google Ids just to make sure Google+ does not put all my info in 1 place.

I am waiting for the day Google will make G+ Compulsory for using Chrome.
Vic did, in fact, approve this change well before he left. (It wasn't just an overnight switch flip, hence why it took a while to actually go live - policy documents have to be rewritten and approved, ux flows have to be modified, etc.)
Manage Your Product Portfolio With Master Releases
What are you implying, that Swisher has ideas that will someday pay off differently than the gig she has going now?
that only works if there IS a comparable competitor in your local market.
"Many eyes make bugs shallow", goes the saying; but it's true that that does require that people actually do look at it - and with the state OpenSSL is in it's clear people took it for granted for years. I'm as guilty of that as you. It was ugly and crufty and I'd assumed and hoped that it'd been thoroughly reviewed and was the way it was because it was being conservative with changes; turns out no, actually it's a giant hairball which they're now shaving, BoringSSL is trimming, and LibReSSL is gleefully taking a combine harvester to!

But reflect on this: we're looking at it now. There are more eyeballs looking at open-source crypto than closed source crypto. Reflect on that for a moment, and on the RSA BSAFE/NSA 'enabling' and the like, and remember that being well-funded didn't stop Apple's source-available implementation from going directly to fail.

I wonder, for example, what's really under the hood of, say, Microsoft SChannel/CAPI/CNG? I'm a reverse-engineer (which means I don't need no stinking source code, given a large enough supply of chocolate) so I may look in detail, when I get a large enough patch of free time. I've heard it's not as bad as it could be… but I know on this subject, for example it ships Dual_EC_DRBG as alternative in CNG (but uses CTR_DRBG by default from Vista SP1 onwards, thank goodness). The old RtlGenRandom wasn't too great, I know that much.
> And most of those R&D shops are attached to companies capable of doing something with the research.

This is false to a surprising degree. Consider that the vast majority of the semiconductor industry cannot "do something with their research". ARM is the oft-repeated example, but what is missed is that they are the norm, not the exception. Consider that the semiconductor industry has thousands of firms and only a handful of fab companies. Without the fabs, these semiconductor companies can do literally nothing, and worse, some fabs like Intel are direct competitors.
The popularity of "Sign In with Facebook" seems to belie that.
Actually, you forgot one step:
4. GSX vans pick up the goods and deliver to GSX warehouse
5. GSX van #2 pick up at warehouse and delivers to consumers. GSX vans have to do 5 deliveries per hour minimum (which is no too hard to do in a city like SF once you have enough volume).

The warehouse piece is probably why they cannot do fresh produce.
I don't mean that this move in itself will be disruptive in that sense, but rather that it is going to force the rest of the market (including the current leaders, especially Microsoft) to do disruptive things to compete.
Here’s How to Grow Your Email List 3 Times Faster – WPSubscribers Review
(OP here)

I built a feed compiled from a few different sources (places like Longreads and The New Yorker), and I check that feed for new entries once a day (scheduled rake task).

Thanks for checking it out!
Remember that the reverse would be true as well though. I could easily vet all the crazies out of a particular area. "This guy is a homophobe, this guy is racist, this guy a violent white supremacist as of July 15 2014. So I won't move into that neighborhood."

A person who fears for life due to their personal identity probably would be a bit adept at vetting potentially dangerous areas.
There was a bug uncovered as part of the launch today where some of them aren't rendering properly - there's a fix in the works; the dot should disappear when it goes live without any action on your part. (Don't know when it will go live yet.)
This comment provides a lot of insight into the situation from the perspective of someone who claims to "install and provide tech support" for the Aloha POS system: http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/HP-Security-Research-Blog/Hacki...
"Cosmic" is not an energy scale — it's a word meaning "from space." It's not like cosmic dust is very energetic dust or, more relevantly, like the cosmic microwave background radiation is hugely energetic.
Thats appalling.

As an Australian citizen, who should I call about this to voice my objection?
To wish to work in order to obtain the minimum requisites for living such as food, and be locked in this dead-end must be unimaginably frustrating. The capacity of human adaptation is amazing given the lifestyle Nate (and others) endure for so long.

Its not like hunting or harvesting is longer an option, and all other legitimate alternatives are increasingly out of reach (e.g. cant get a job because you smell "funky", and can't get a bath because you don't have a job). The story about the stabbing in the homeless shelter only closes more doors.

And IMHO, this problem only really becomes a problem, when those who can solve the problem are affected: bums on touristic spots, bums in public bathrooms, mugging, drug-dealing, etc. So how is this scenario NOT an incentive for someone like Nate to purposely make himself a problem, either for direct benefit (e.g. stolen money) or the indirect one (e.g. better shelters to get bums out of the street)?
Stores, Stores, Stores Everywhere
Gaming segments are weird. Console gamers generally pay 'full price', PC gamers generally want to pay half that, and mobile gamers have trouble with the concept of shelling out double digits.
MTailor (YC S14) Offers Custom-Fit Tailored Shirts For Just $69
That's a trade secret.
I don't mean to be so dismissive but you kidding me right?

IBM and Microsoft signed an contract, that IBM AT clone computers would ship with Microsoft DOS and they would license (and pay for) every-single-copy of it. The openish IBM PC standard allowed for Microsoft to continually expand into their near monopoly on the Business, and Home PC market.

That agreement literally built Microsoft. When they signed that agreement, Microsoft didn't even own the rights to DOS, or had even made an OS. They just licensed a BASIC compiler.
2.0 is unfortunately missing inline images, the killer feature that's still only in the nightlies:
http://www.iterm2.com/images.html
Yes, I even mentioned that.
If the sender has an ASCII Wingdings, and the receiver has a Unicode Wingdings, the receiver gets a J (at least if the receiver is using Apple Mail).
"...the backwards case ... basically comes down to performing approximate eigenvalue decomposition..."

Hmm, not in general. (I've been working on various problem-specific versions of the backwards case for most of my career.)
And once again they miss the point that so many of us never touched google plus over.

The name thing was a big deal for many, but for far more was the banning itself.

Getting banned on google plus for whatever google decides on a whim is against its terms of use that day (e.g. stupid name policy) will also nuke your gmail.

Far too many people were dependent on a free service with zero guarantees back then, many still are - there is just no reason to risk losing your gmail over cat updates when facebook is completely separate.
Ask HN: Offered new job position, no pay rise. What to do?
Hi HN,

I've been working as an Application Manager for a few years now, basically babysitting a couple of enterprise applications, doing a little development and fixing lots of things when they break.

I'm actually a Software Engineer and am way overqualified for this position, but I'm in a very remote place, so options are limited.

We've been working on a "promotion" or "more senior/technical" position for a long, long time, and the offer letter finally came across my desk.

The description is much more senior, much more responsibility and accountability for performance and systems. It's also got components of mentoring younger staff and being on call (yuk!).

The salary they're offering is identical to what I've been on for the last 2 years. No extra benefits or anything.

Their justification for this is I'm at 100% of my benchmark for my current role, so I can't get a raise. In the new role, my current salary is only around 85% of the benchmark, so I would be eligible for a raise when those discussions come around again in a year.

I feel like they're trying to get me to do this without adjusting my pay accordingly.

How can I word my reply in such a way to make it sound like I'm very interested, and really want my career to progress, but I also expect (deserve?) a pay rise.

Thanks,
It's quite easy to export moderately sized data sets to xlsx.

The trick is to allow the analysis to happen within the app, and not as vlookups and pivot tables in Excel (as the user is more comfortable with).

Ultimately, this is Microsoft's failing as Excel should have become a cloud/server-powered think-desktop/tablet app a long time ago with versioning and multi-user support. Sure that existed back in the late 90s with ODBC and data links, but it was too fragile and was not significantly improved in the decade and a half since.
I will never again in my life write code that deals with timezones. It was far and away the most wtf-dense thinking and coding I have ever done.
Just do it with Automator.
The process is proceeding as it should regardless. Anyone is able to put in a GIPA request, and they are allowed to refuse the information. As stated in the post an appeal of that decision is underway.

We need to start caring if the appeal is also refused.

Edit: GIPA is the NSW equivalent: http://www.ipc.nsw.gov.au/privacy/gipa_act.html
As a fellow Australian citizen, I would also like to know this.
You should know that's a federal crime, if you're talking about leaked U.S. classified material. Simply because you see the Washington Post printing Snowden's leaks doesn't mean handling and distributing classified information isn't a crime. It is still classified and carries full force even though it has been printed; no "cat out of the bag" defense applies.

Very importantly, I'm not stating an opinion on this legal situation, just pointing it out.
Numbers (Apple's spreadsheeting software) is with the exception of macros fully compatible with Excel. And like Office 365 is also online.
Crowdsourcing: How We Scaled and Established Our Development Processes
> You probably disagree with this, but the platonic ideal of the patent system, for many contemporary proponents, is enabling a world where everyone who participates in the incremental process of innovation can get compensated for their contribution, instead of a windfall going to whoever takes the last step, or more typically, takes a proven idea and throws UX engineers and a big sales team at it.

I agree that that's the platonic ideal of the patent system. (Though I'd note that its documented motivation is not to reward innovation per se, but to encourage the production and most importantly publication of it; reward is a means, not an end, and I think that's a critical distinction.) I also believe, and I hope you'd agree, that the reality of the patent system does not come anywhere close to that "ideal". Furthermore, I believe the harm and limitation to innovation far outstrips the encouragement, especially in tech.

I'm not going to comment on the more challenging issue of how to fund innovation in fields like medicine. However, at least in the tech industry, if the patent system evaporated tomorrow, the world wouldn't end, no company or product we actually cared about would go away, on balance we'd be better off.
"When we launched Google+ over three years ago, we had a lot of restrictions on what name you could use on your profile. This helped create a community made up of real people, but it also excluded a number of people who wanted to be part of it without using their real names."

I wanted to use my real name. My legal, backed by a name change order, mononymic name.

After watching them fumble it, trying to use a space or a dot, and being told to gtfo or change it to a "real" name (and once again, fuck you very hard Google, even the TSA is able to deal with this), I left.

And now I'm looking around for the giant hole in my life that can finally be filled by G+. ... looking ... looking ...
The story you told about discovering SQLI in Drupal simply isn't covered by CFAA.
Caveat: Up to $100. Still, a major online retailer accepting BTC is a pretty big deal.

I do find it amusing that they're marketing "mining starter [computer hardware] packs" -- anyone who is paying their own electricity bill is using ASIC miners, or at least graphics cards.
This is an interesting result. An old paper [1](1988) was my first exposure to asking the question about whether or not periodic pole reversals were tied to other cyclic phenomena such as volcanism, glacial periods, and mass extinctions.

I observe that the magnetic field has a fairly material impact on the upper atmosphere, so it seems reasonable to include it in the models on climate change.

[1] http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/30064982?uid=2&uid=4&s...
Visibility of the source code is a side-show in electronic voting systems. Even if the source code is published, there is no way to be sure that that is the code that is running on the hardware, or to be certain that the hardware itself has not been tampered with. Votes need to be printed out on paper, verified by the voter, and counted by hand.

Still, when we had the source code for the Irish system (now abandoned due to our efforts) analyzed by a commission, it was found it had actual counting errors.

http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/www.cev.ie/htm/report/part4_...

Amazing!
The problem isn't that people don't know about them, but even if people knew about them, most wouldn't use their right. Legal protections really only matter after you have been fired. If you exercise your protections while you are still employed, in most states the employer can just wait a month or two and then fire you for something unrelated. Even if they don't fire you and grudgingly put in place the changes, chances are it will simply create a work environment of distrust. Not to mention your vertical mobility in the company is now ruined, since who wants to promote someone who rocks the boat.

In most cases, if you are lucky enough to have the freedom to do so, it is better to simply quit your job and find someplace that follows the rules and respects you from the get-go.
People change, organizations change and the world changes. To survive you must adapt. Why not mention the Microsoft investment in 1997? Or the partnership with Cingular/ATT in 2007? Or were those not really evil empires?
If I want to play the new Wolfenstein, or Watch Dogs, or any "new" game, chances are my 2 year old PC

My 5-year-old PC, which was nice at the time, hasn't hit a problem yet, with the exception of some games from the 90s. How many console games from the 90s does the XBox 360 take?

If I want to play a new game with all the dials turned up to 9 (or 11)

That's an unfair comparison, because the XBox most certainly, most definitely, and most absolutely does not have 'all the dials turned up to 9', let alone 11. The simpler, coarser graphics on the xbox are a common meme that's made fun of.
Good tips, but it would be nice to see some "good" examples next to the bad ones.
This happens to be the use case for multiple cursors in editors like Sublime and Atom (slide #2 on http://www.sublimetext.com/) - it's what's currently preventing me from making the switch to vim.
"I am advised that publication of the software could leave the voting system open to hacking or manipulation".

Well, if the problems are there, opening up the source to more eyes strikes me as the obvious thing to do; or should those with the knowledge of how to manipulate it as it stands be kept to the bare minimum? :)

But in any case, at least the meat of the implementation of the algorithm should be OK to release I would've thought - surely that isn't someone's intellectual property?

This is software we paid for and strikes me as pretty important to the democratic process, I'd like to have a bit of a look at it.
Don't have a promo code but I just wanted to say this is a really simple idea that makes so much sense. A very nice optimization.
Defeating spam requires changing standards and getting lots of different entities to cooperate. Google doesn't want to spend a bunch of money invasively verifying everyone's identity when their phone system and spam filters works fine. But it is theoretically possible.
The Australian software is not used for recording votes. It's used to assist the counting of physical ballot papers because the Senate vote counting system is extremely complicated. In this environment it's more straightforward to ensure the integrity of the software (as long as it's open and verifiable of course)
What you're describing is Facebook's seedyness. Your parent poster I think was describing potential user seedyness, which is currently mostly absent, or monitored against.
Bram Cohen's Straights and Flushes
Hi mjec, thanks.

I didn't know about this latest turn of events! This quote in particular is extremely disturbing... I noticed it in the FOI rejection, but now they're telling this to the Senate:

> In relation to the source code for the Senate counting system, I am advised that publication of the software could leave the voting system open to hacking or manipulation.

This was after the Senate asking, this argument has nothing to do even with the FOI request.

And a previous thread on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/29t2q7/aec_threat...
A counting algorithm is a trade secret? How did this even come to be?
It really needs a section for "Operating System". Windows isn't free, and most build-your-owns will be a Windows machine. Other appropriate options should be available (linux/bsd/etc) along with a 'no OS' options, for people who might already have a free license.
I think I'd try negotiating directly with the operator:
"How much commission do you get if I don't cancel? Oh, $50? Well, tell me your paypal or bitcoin address and I'll send you that much if you disconnect this right now..."
What about support for Windows Store and Windows Phone? Those platforms need something like this too.