skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is a poor argument against "nothing to hide".

It starts with eight paragraphs attacking a strawman: "Can I see your credit card bills for the last year?" As though anyone seriously thinks all financial data should be public. Everyone has something to hide from you, obviously, the issue is whether they have anything to hide from the NSA.

After reflecting on the ethereality of privacy, the author argues from fictional evidence, reminding us how evil surveillance was in Kafka and Orwell. The proponents of "nothing to hide" do not live in a dystopia. You don't need to convince them that surveillance is bad in North Korea, you need to convince them that it's bad in a liberal democracy with independent press and functioning courts.

The author explains that governments collect far more than most realize. This is very true, but it does nothing to defeat "nothing to hide", whose proponents should be fine with an NSA that is literally omniscient. Nobody believes government data collection is morally justified because it is ineffective.

He worries the government will gain an incomplete view of suspects, persecuting innocent people who would be exonerated by details they can't see. In the real world, law enforcement doesn't get to decide who is guilty. If their incompetence leads to investigations of innocent people, the result is an embarrassing defeat in court once more evidence comes to light, which they are obviously motivated to avoid. Arguably, one way to prevent prosecution of innocents is to ensure the government has more surveillance, so law enforcement can correctly distinguish aspiring meth manufacturers from writers of Breaking Bad fanfics.

By the time the author gets to his strongest point, that data scooped up by intelligence agencies might leak to the public, he does nothing to support that such an event is likely. How many instances are there where real people have been affected by leaks of data collected by the NSA/FBI/CIA? There may be good reasons to worry about such leaks anyway, like known leaks from private companies and local police departments, but none of these are presented.

Of course, the author objects to demands for the "dead bodies" of privacy erosion: "But if this is the standard to recognize a problem, then few privacy problems will be recognized." Yes, and that's the point: Proponents of "nothing to hide" believe there is no actual harm to anyone who isn't guilty, and the author presents no counterexamples to dispel this belief.
Traction… We All Want It. This is How You Get It
I've had very different experiences working in the EU (Belgium).

On my first day of work, I received a document containing company rules and guidelines. Overtime is never paid and it is considered "an engineer's pride" to fix any bugs in his own time. Of course this overtime isn't limited to bugfixing, and when there's a deadline coming up (there's always a deadline coming up) or when someting just isn't working you are expected to do whatever it takes to get things working.

One of my colleagues received comments on a recent evaluation after he refused to come in on a Saturday because there was a problem with a display driver on a project he hadn't worked on for weeks.

The 38 hours we work each week is more of a guideline than a rule really. Unless of course you want to work less, in which case that would be grounds for immediate dismissal.
They're being outlawed in Czechia, too.
What have they done? All I see is renderings.
Speaking of what the article was and was not about, is it weird that it had exactly 0 mentions of Ripple, given that Stellar is a very recent fork of Ripple, which has itself been around for a few years?
> it is certainly not worth implying its worth _not_ being nice to someone about it for referencing it.

That is just you reading things into that which i did not mean to imply at all. ;)

I have strong things to say about TIOBE, which could be expressed with extreme accuracy in a very concise manner, and match reality with no deviation. However to do so would be considered impolite by many who have not yet delved into the details of what TIOBE does. As such the above is my attempt to do so politely, sacrificing some accuracy.

As you showed me with your lead though, i seem to have already lost a massive amount of accuracy.

> TIOBE isn't great, but at least you know what their algorithm is

That property is not helpful when they themselves are unwilling to warn readers about the brokenness of their algorithm, and their definition also does not make this obvious. In fact, TIOBE happily publishes their "results" as facts and many people believe them.
OK, this is cool. Dirt simple (well, at least the user), cool concept, obvious value (or at least obvious intrigue factor), simple clean web site.

Nice job.
Is there any evidence anywhere that the NSA is even 2 years ahead of anything? From what I've seen, the NSA doesn't have especially advanced technology, they just have a huge budget and they can exploit trust relationships that normal attackers can't (forcing companies to comply in their schemes, tapping backbone routes on the internet).

Frankly, that's also the most plausible situation independent of what we've learned anyway - it would be fantastically hard to advance technology by ten years entirely in secret. They wouldn't have the benefit of any of the literature released in those 10 years. All their computers and other equipment would be 10 years older, and the sheer number of cryptographers working on these sorts of things at the NSA is almost certainly much smaller than the number working on them outside of these contexts. It would be pretty difficult to pull off, particularly since they can get away with just cheating.
Where did you see that, I didn't notice they are offering anything like that?
> Not sure if its efficient for someone else to work a job they don't like, for the man, so as to fund you, so you can work a job you like, not for the man.

> The moral repercussions as you call them, do not disappear if you transfer the burden onto someone else.

They don't disappear, but they certainly do change. Money flows regardless; the question is to where it flows. If you look at things as a trade-off between energy and social benefit, in simplified form for the sake of illustration...

Scenario A: Dave has a well-paid job, and let's say he's hypothetically able and willing to fund me entirely. He spends $17k of his yearly $100k on keeping me afloat. There is now one person-year of energy going to a corporate purpose, and one person-year of energy (mine) going into a socially beneficial purpose.

Scenario B: Dave has the same well-paid job, but spends $17k on booze and other 'disposable income' things instead. He's not going to be paid any less. I have my own paid job, that pays $17k per year. There are now two person-years of energy going into a corporate purpose, and none into a socially beneficial purpose. Dave does not work any less hours, and his contribution to corporate purposes is not lessened, but mine has increased.

Consider it as me trying to 'pick up the scraps' of money that others don't really need (and that they are willing to put towards a socially beneficial purpose), so that I can spend my person-years on something that benefits everybody, not just a corporate purpose.

I would agree with your point if I were asking people to get a paid job for the purpose of supporting me (although you could then have a more interesting discussion about how the productivity differences change the equation), but as it stands I'm just piggybacking on corporate work that is already being done.

The terminology I used above may not be perfectly accurate, but I've tried to keep it simple for readability.

> I think you should figure out how to monetize your work and support yourself.

Non-voluntary "monetizing" just introduces attached strings and distorted priorities, no matter how ethically okay the particular form of income is. It would not allow me to do what I do now. That's why I'm doing this fundraiser - which, conceptually, is just a form of voluntary monetization.

> Or, if that isn't possible, work some job (not necessarily in tech) to raise enough to feed yourself as you work.

I've tried that (see also my passage on the campaign page about the open-source job), and it didn't work out well at all. I had raised these concerns to my employer prior to taking on the job, and was told that they believed they could make it work, but it ended up not working after all, more or less as predicted (and I'm not blaming my employer for that).

> But I hope your kickstarter is successful in any case. Seems to me you would use the money in a more useful way than most.

Thanks!
How did you bring in team members to work in the country on a B1 visa? That is expressly forbidden.
And they appear to have some way to fill in the part of the photo occluded by the cut-out objects.
Solution to distracted driving: self-driving vehicles, public transit, etc.

Take your pick.
Can't you just signal to authorities or unions that you were dismissed for that reason (that is not a "good enough" reason on my state) and basically fuck up the entire company considering that that guidelines document would come up in even the simplest investigation? This would put your employer in a weak position, so weak you can easily even blackmail him
I can't recommend divshot.io enough. It's so much easier than rsync and better performing than Heroku. In fact, the UI reminds me of Heroku in a way.
https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partI
https://www.coursera.org/course/aofa

The two books that helped me the most were:

Algorithms, 4th Edition by Robert Sedgewick. Material: http://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/

and Data Structures and Algorithms in Java, 2nd Edition
by Robert Lafore

Both are in java.
At some point, after basic needs are met, every working person is forced to answer the following question with respect to the toll work takes on his or her family: is it worth it?

It takes courage to say "no" and make a clean cut. Kudos to this gentleman for doing what his family needs him to do.
Yeah, this is immensely better via SMS. So much so that I was reading the comments to see if you were going to do it, otherwise I was going to ;)
> photography will no longer be an accurate reference for knowledge about the real world.

I think we passed that point a few years ago. The trick now is to lower the barrier so that it is more accessible to more people.

The state of the art in rendering looks perfect:

http://www.ronenbekerman.com/inspiration/

Our product, Clara.io, makes it possible to render things like this out in real-time:

https://clara.io/view/bee73adb-ed90-47c0-8048-93accd56ff80/r...
Imagine if MtGox were a Stellar gateway. I want to pay you $10, but all I have is 100 BTC in MtGox, and you trust neither MtGox nor Bitcoin. Our transaction will succeed through the Stellar network as long as someone on the network values a 100 BTC MtGox credit as much as $10, modulo any bid/ask spread between those currencies and Stellar's native currency. You trusted no one but your USD bank, which you presumably trust more than cryptocurrency exchanges.

If you're exchanging your own funds between currencies, you need to trust two entities: a USD gateway and a BTC gateway. These gateways can be the same entity; Bitstamp, for instance, is a Ripple gateway for several currencies. There isn't any extra trust involved in Ripple/Stellar unless you want it.
YouNow and Tinychat are the ones left that I know about. BlogTV was big but closed down and was acquired by YouNow.

I'm working on a general-purpose streaming site, but with a twist in how broadcasting works. Not quite enough for a 'Show HN' yet however.
They never seem to mention that in the paper, at least not prominently as I of course skimmed it today. But Photoshop already has a built in tool for this, so I guess they can just use the standard methods that seem to work fairly well.
In CA you have to make 84k a year for the computer professional overtime exemption. If you are making under that you are still getting overtime pay. There are many jobs that do not meet the requirements to be exempt also.
Interesting idea, but certainly the demonstrated applications seem to be awful. Now, a HUD with map and information about upcoming traffic & road conditions would be useful.
Recently I was trying to get hold of local plan housing allocation which detail where new building is likely to be. The local authority would only give me PDFs of maps with hundreds of insets which obfuscate everything. With a proper digital format national mapping would be possible. The public could easily find out where new developments are going, something that is very hard to do now.
Saying that e.g. Ruby is "vacuously type safe" strikes me as fairly misleading. Consider an extension to Ruby which defines the ++ operator as casting its argument as an integer (e.g. Fixnum) and incrementing it. "Properly" defined, this operator would break type safety in a way that __can not__ currently be done in Ruby (i.e. modifying a string from "abcdefgh" to "bbcedefgh", "abcdefgi", or some other nonsense). This is clearly a type error, and it is one that Ruby does not allow, so describing Ruby's type _safety_ as vacuous strikes me as wrong.

Additionally, Ruby prevents e.g. calling on an undefined method on an object. Given the way the interpreter works this comes trivially, but that does not mean that it does not affect type safety.

To summarize: there are certain classes of type errors related to e.g. casting which would be dumb to allow in a (non-toy) dynamically typed language and others which come with no particular cost. This does not mean the type safety of the language is "vacuous" (though it may negate the need for an explicit "type checker").
You are free to go find another position that also will not pay you for overtime.
Woah. So my Maxima can become as cool as my buddy's Z06 for the low, low price of $300? Interesting. Having a tach thrown onto the windshield is much preferable to squinting down through the steering wheel into Nissan's lovely (not), isolated pods. Keeping both eyes on the road while shifting into 2nd a hair past the redline? Nice.
+1 for the cheating argument! I do think though, that the sheer size of the mathematicians at the NSA can make up for a lot not-released papers within the last 10 years.
> It really is quite simple --- find work that you enjoy.

I already did. That's what I'm doing now. That I'm not employed by somebody or running a commercial operation, doesn't mean it's somehow not 'work'. The parameters are just different.

> Just because you "want to help people" or have some moral objection to working for the man does not mean you're entitled to have others fund your dream lifestyle.

Who said anything about entitlement? This is a fundraiser that you can voluntarily contribute to. It doesn't even have any material perks for that reason.

I'm just constantly amazed at the lengths to which people go to try and paint accepting voluntary contributions as something immoral, while involuntary (that is, forced) payment is apparently perfectly fine.

> There are millions of talented people (some of which I'm sure have noble intentions) out there who don't like their jobs, or at the end of the day are not producing a good result due to dissatisfaction with their jobs. If they want to take a year off, they work more, pick up side projects, cut expenses, and gradually save for it. Is that route really "morally" worse than asking others to pay for it?

I consider forcing others to pay for something (by proxy) worse than asking others to pay for it, yes. I also find it odd that somebody else wouldn't.
Harry:
So how do monads work?

Hermione:
Magic.
"I feel I should know modern frameworks like Rails and Angular to have a better appeal but it would take months before I get proficient in them"

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
I don't think patio11 hates BTC for any rational reasons. Nobody should hate or love BTC any more than, say, hacksaws. It's a tool, you decide whether you want to use it or not.
I'm really curious if this was isolated to a particular department or team, or type of worker.
> The way things are looking, it's a pretty good bet that HBO's writers will be the ones that finish GoT and he'll eventually have to write the last two books to follow the plot that HBO settles on. Hopefully he'll be consulted on plot points, but HBO isn't going to put the show on hiatus while they wait for him to finish it himself.

ISTR reading that GRRM has provided, and continues to provde, HBO's writers plot outlines and drafts ahead of what has been published, as well as being actively consulted on plot points in the show (which don't always follow the books precisely.)
> "This same tobacco species is one also used by Medicago USA for development of a pandemic influenza virus."

I hope the above paragraph from the Forbes article was a typo.
If you are familiar with Ripple, it seems like a curious omission from your story.

If you are _not_ familiar with Ripple, you should learn about it before you get on board with Stellar. (Stellar is a clone of Ripple, so familiarize yourself with the controversy about Ripple in order to learn what the controversy about Stellar is going to be in short order.)

I am a fan of both the Bitcoin and Stellar concepts; I hold a bunch of Bitcoins as well as some Stellars. I used to hold some Ripples; I may yet buy some more.
Spreecast (www.spreecast.com)
I've got an 8k word essay that I've been working on for a while about the engineering case against Bitcoin. I'd promise it in the near future but it isn't quite ready yet and I try to space publishing things out, partly to avoid wearing out my welcome with my audience and partially to make sure that I don't spend too much time on this sort of stuff relative to all the other stuff I have to do or could be doing.

I'm still left not really understanding either what Stellar seeks to achieve

If you trust me to speak on behalf of stellar advocates, then my good faith belief is that they'd describe it as something like "We want stellar to be TCP/IP for money." (People who like Bitcoin qua the protocol or blockchain technology rather than qua an asset also sometimes use that metaphor, for what it's worth.) The implication is that "TCP/IP is a fundamentally important technology which allowed other technologies which changed the face of the world" and "money is a crosscutting concern of many extremely important problem domains which you care about."
lwn.net is an awesome news site, nowhere else on the Internet can you get a concise insight into the design and development process which goes into Linux and its distributions.

It has always reminded me of an open source academic journal that provide insights into cutting edge technologies such as file system design, memory management and networking.
Parse is a collection of backend services designed to make mobile app development easier. It provides things like cloud storage, authentication, social network integration, push services and analytics.

Parse was also acquired by Facebook for $85M in 2013.
...My cousins had just bought a membership...
You can always sue of course (there is no union in the company). But what would you gain by doing so? They might be forced to hire you again, in which case you can be assured you will never receive a raise and will generally not enjoy working there a whole lot.

You could even try proving you worked too many hours, but that's quite hard to do (a list of start and end times would surely not suffice).

Edit: Also, they will surely claim that they did not tell you to perform that overtime, and that in fact you did so without them knowing.
They should hire you to write all their copy. Thanks for explaining. :)
This is very useful for non native english speakers that uses other than latin characters.
I have to repeat word by word and check what people wrote when I need to tell my email address.

If my address was a word in hebrew, or something people can pronounce and write it would actually help, saving time and avoiding misspellings.

But this should be an alias, or it should be very easy to create one, I already have my email for some years, I don't want to create a new one and handle two accounts unnecessarily.

Also lets say someone creates his email address in his native language, so it is easier to give his address to his friends at school, later in life he wants to give his address to a VC from US he met.
even if he gives a business card with his email printed in clear letters, this western person can't even spell or even type, unless he could copy/paste the address he won't be able to send him an email.
That's all the more reason to demand overtime pay.
> That's garbage; it's not done now, because there's no ability to do that. One of the selling points of Dart is having typing; nobody would turn this down if it was easy and possible.

You assert that Dart has, in principle, the ability to do that. But it doesn't. Not in the general case. No class-based programming language can solve this problem in general. You can have a close-to-complete solution (like C# and Java do), but that complexity is very unwanted for a language running in the browser.

Adding a language feature to Dart does not solve this problem either. Fitting dynamic data such as JSON or some other interchange format into a compiled definition in a typesafe way is just very hard. Writing validating mapping code really is the most robust thing to do.

So you end up with a fragile solution of large complexity. Or you can just write the mapping code yourself if you really really need it.

> Rubbish. You can crash if the string doesn't deserialise exactly as expected;

I'm going to use your own quote here: this "is not a viable solution for any reasonable sized application". Dart is made for large projects where type safety guarantees imply your project has a certain degree of correctness. If you want to undermine that by introducing crashes on bad mappings, then you have to do it yourself.

> Manual mapping is not a viable solution for any reasonable sized application.

There are plenty of "viable" projects out there with manual mapping of reasonable size. It's understandable that you don't feel particularly excited about writing that code. But don't blame that on the Dart developers. No other class based+statically typed+compile-to-JS language has the feature you desire, and I'm trying to tell you why.
Ah, but that was adding social pressure as opposed to just saying "I'm going to do X."
I used Paypal once (UK -> Canada). The rates were better than any bank could offer, and I have a verified account. The transfer - not a large amount - went without a hitch.

But then a week later, out of nowhere, my account was suddenly 'limited', with the requirement that I send a copy of my passport and latest bank statement to the US. I enquired and got a canned response.

I have not complied. Two years later, my account is still locked, and there is no way to shut down my account. Never used Paypal since; and I never again will. I hate them intensely.
In the last five days while I happened to catch the news on tv (I rarely watch it) they were reporting the workers had been laid off and work had been stopped. toomuchtodo above states that they are behind and trying to get caught back up so perhaps it was just temporary.
To be fair naive analysis for photography hasn't been accurate for a long time and these methods will leave traces.
I recently confronted a similar situation (though the stakes were vastly smaller when viewed externally). I am moving from being a full time employee to a contractor where I can control my hours and spend time with my children as they grow up. At least that's the plan!

I've always been of the opinion that once you have X dollars (for some definition of X, which fluctuates), time is worth far more than money. This opinion has only been reinforced by the arrival of my children.

(I do recognize how lucky I am that I have a choice.)
Huh. I mean, I knew that pilots need to be fit, I just didn't think they'd be crawling through the mud and such.