skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find this interesting from a professional perspective -

A lot of companies employ manual input of information, my experience being in finance. Often a hand-written copy of a form in input to a system. Mistakes can involve financial loss. An often used 'solution' (often applied in finance) is to use a 'maker / checker' system where an individual (maker) inputs a field, and a checker checks what the maker input. [A checker is often ranked an order of corporate seniority over a maker.] For large value or sensitive transactions, a string of checkers may be applied (or suggested as remedies where accuracy is seen as a problem).

But... adding checkers rarely improves error rates. Checkers tend to trust Makers, and Makers tend to trust Checkers. More Checkers means more trust / less care - adding checkers can often make the chance of a mistake occurring higher.

A HNer may now suggest incentive structures, independent makers, technological solutions including drawing analogies with reCaptcha. I have done the same. Some operations companies do tried varied approaches, but many, including the largest of financial companies, do not for varying reasons. Not least as Operations departments of large multinationals have been squeezed by budget cuts of 10% per year for more than half a decade - some leads to outsourcing or offshoring, some moving the effort to the 'creator of cost' (i.e. changing the paper form to an input form).

I feel it would be an interesting challenge to sell something to enterprises seeking very high levels of accuracy (by which I mean, something in the order of 99.9% for non-standardised poorly scanned hand-written forms often including numbers, names and addresses).
HBO’s “Silicon Valley”
It's one of the things you have to take into account for being one of only twelve human beings to walk on the surface of the moon.

I'd love to think that I would be able to do it, and whenever I get the slightest skittish on a plane, I laugh that I don't think I would hack it.
Won't tests at least show if those basic skills (e.g. ability to read the alphabet) are present or not?
Step-by-step guide for starting to lift weights
India's Orbiter Mangalyaan about a Month Away From Mars
GitHub Showcase: popular repositories organized around interesting topics
Most education reformers want to evaluate teachers based on the improvement/lack of improvement in their classes. This tends to mitigate the problem of good teachers in weak schools being punished. I think this is in place some places, though I can't whether there are places that do this the absurd way you're afraid of.
I wouldn't try Ubuntu on the Surface 3 Pro. I'm pretty sure you will have problems with the keyboard ... like these guys here:

http://www.geek.com/microsoft/linux-users-rejoice-heres-ubun...

Don't get me wrong, I like the specs of Surface 3 Pro, I just don't think it will work so great with Ubuntu.

What you should do is to do some research about how Ubuntu runs on the hardware other people suggests.

Personally I would go with a Dell XPS 13" that already comes with Ubuntu 12.04 installed. The system will probably work well with Ubuntu 14.04 too. Also it has 8GB or RAM and 256 GB SSD.

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd
Or JSON. Images could be even be embedded using base64.
A video link to the actual launch failure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfMbGPf4r9g
The Wallbit Initiative, a encrypted file storage service
> but what is a better option?

More educational resources.
Yes, under the fourth tab on the website.
Or you could vote for the people you think will do the job the best.
In 2008-2009 I was probably the second biggest commiter to Calibre (still #4 according to github), focusing entirely on the conversion pipeline and format support. I'm still proud of the OEB modeling as some of the finest OO code I've written, or probably will write now that I've moved on to functional.

For everyone complaining about the UI and management functionality, realize that you are not the target audience. Head over to www.mobileread.com, look at the Calibre forum and the praise Kovid gets, and you'll see that he's largely catering directly to what his core users want.

It is interesting that Calibre and mobileread are still around, and relatively little changed. I lost interest and moved on once pretty much every commercially-available e-book became available in EPUB format. What's left is a very, very specialized core of enthusiasts.
I find this quote from the article very relevant (and I agree with it):

Equally important, though, is the hacker's attitude. Computer programming must be a hobby, something done for fun, not out of a sense of duty or for the money. (It's okay to make money, but that can't be the reason for hacking.)
Thanks, I stupidly hadn't checked the publication date.
Not worried, just curious. I'm here with a direct link to my old blog with name and everything...
$999 is a bit pricey I think.

You can buy a pro-sumer device for that money:

http://www.testequipmentdepot.com/flir/e-series/e4.htm
It's tricky, but it would probably come down to a determination of whether Secret is a "publisher" or a "distributor" of its content. Case law is generally on Secret's side, in as much as online message boards and hosts are not considered responsible for the statements their users make. But I can see a scenario in which determining what, exactly, Secret is introduces complications to the "message board" category.

In your Google example, Google is in no way responsible for the content of someone's blog post. Google is not the publisher of that content, and is debatably not even the distributor.
In my experience the human eye can spot the lack of that kind of imperfections very well. Not quantify them - just notice that something is wrong.

Regarding walls (and edges in general) not being perfectly straight, apart from what I learned from my engineering studies, I've done my fair share of home repairs :)
The losses of the film industry, what BS. Someone that pirates a movie will not pay for a ticket if the movie is not available now. He will simply wait for a pirate copy to appear.
If you do the research yourself, you will quickly realize how the citation works when people are trying to sell you something. Scientific research is cited when it supports their statements, and is ignored when it counters their beliefs.

It's almost too easy to cite weak scientific studies to prove almost any belief you hold these days, in weight loss business.

Taubes is as good as Atkins - people and media love to hear and write about something different. I am sure the HN crowd already is aware of that. Despite the hate Stephan Guyenet has been receiving by Taubes fans, he does a great job at explaining why what Taubes is promoting isn't scientifically sound or absolute: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/08/carbohydrate-h...

For everyone who enjoy making references to Insulin without context, considering it an absolute storage hormone, here's a gem: http://weightology.net/weightologyweekly/?page_id=711
Ukrainian Military Launching Attack – COMBAT FOOTAGE
This has been the opposite of my experience. The US school system is extremely inhibitive to fast learners. Everything is on a curriculum, and it's really difficult to get around the bureaucracy to get ahead.

I was homeschooled/self-taught since the 2nd grade until about high school when I started attending community college full-time. At that point I was about "even" with my best friend, who is also considered very intelligent. I was then able to pick which semester-long classes to take. For example, I was taking third year calculus my sophomore year, a full year before he was able to take Calc 1. And this was no discrepancy due to ability. (for those curious I applied to colleges at the 'regular' time and am now attending a 4-year institution without transferring any of my credits).

The fact of the matter is that the American public school system wasn't developed with education in mind, and now functions more as crowd control than as an educational institution.
Here's what my family's spending looked like over the last 12 months:

$8,824 housing
$1,870 food
$2,965 medical
$8,982 personal and transit
$55,306 savings
$52,761 taxes
$130,708 donations

$261,416 total (income)

For most of this year it was me and my wife, with our first child being born 2/3 of the way through. This is with both of us working; let's imagine instead we had two kids, one $100k income, and one of us stayed home with the kids.

To adjust for there being about twice as many people, let's double the first four categories. And because we're talking about a $100k income let's decrease taxes proportionally down to $20k. Now tax rates are graduated so we would really pay less than that, and kids cost less than adults per person in terms of food and housing, but let's be conservative and stick with this. What do we get?

$17,648 housing
$3,740 food
$5,930 medical
$17,964 personal and transit
$21,753 savings
$20,000 taxes
$10,000 donations

$100,000 total (income)

When an $100k income can support four people with enough left over to donate 10% and save 22% then I feel pretty confident calling it "rich".

(This is Boston, which is not quite as expensive as the bay area, but nearly so.)
Lol seems they left out AMZN.
Gyrophone: Recognizing Speech from Gyroscope Signals
> Why do we call people who develop user apps hackers

Because a/ "hacker" was (is) a title that commanded respect, hackers were seen as something special, and b/ business got wind of it. Once a term like that enters business-speak, and then finds media attention, it's game over, the term becomes meaningless.

So here we are, if you know how to tweak Rails or Android examples found on-line and have above-room-temperature IQ, you're a "passionate rockstar web hacker".
But you are still equating "people are all fat because they can't control themselves" with "fat people as gluttonous sloths with no self control".

I'm not saying that a desire to look down on and judge other people doesn't bias people's views on obesity. But the main reason people believe that "people are all fat because they can't control themselves" is that there are so many individual stories of people losing weight by following a diet.
If folks are interested in contributing, the mailing list is here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gitenberg-project
Or they don't care about moderating a tiny programmer website.
what embedded security screwups has Apple had? (Not asking because I don't believe you, rather because I can't think of any)
> An FAA representative was present at all times.

Well thank goodness. I was so worried that a government agent was not present. All is well. Hail the FAA.
Cell-Phone Data Might Help Predict Ebola’s Spread
Hidden Gems of Laravel
Perhaps by changing it's flight path to land in the ocean? Sorry but real life isn't like movies - you can't blow everything up.
It was the proper stance too.

These companies wouldn't have known about "PRISM", they would have known about their own individual subsystems used to tie into some NSA warrant system.

All these companies knew that NSA could get NSLs signed out, or even warrants issued by FISA before PRISM was made public, and they had all received such NSLs/warrants before they setup the infrastructure to handle those NSLs/warrants in a more automated fashion. NSA calls this infrastructure "PRISM", but each individual company wouldn't have been privy to it, because none of those companies would have a "need to know" (or a clearance) about the NSA's own special access programs.
I've long been accustomed to setting up servers one-command-at-a-time with SSH. I tried Chef and some of the others, but they seemed too complicated to get setup.

Ansible's out of the box experience allows you to start with some simple but useful constructs then allow you to graduate to more and more complex usage.

I started with some of the one-liners here, then setting up inventory files, then roles, some simple tasks and then (what really sold me) was templates.

Even just having those configuration files in an SCM is a huge win, but I honestly squealed with joy when I was able to write a nginx configuration file that dynamically included backend servers given a particular role. And that provisioning a new backend server took a couple minutes and was automatically added to the load-balancing proxy! (not to mention was instantly sending metrics to a graphite/statsd backend because collectd was installed automatically too as part of a common role and configured to point to that log collecting server!)

Magic!
> In an ideal world, every student can be accommodated in the learning ecosystem, and we don't require a standardized metric to figure out if a student should advance to the next level.

I live in an ideal world, then. In my country (PT), education is free and mandatory for 12 years. After the 9th grade, students do their first selection of objective in their student careers. It's here that they are given the choice between technical course or a track oriented towards university. They then study three more years and either proceed to the workforce, to Bsc degrees (3 years) or to Msc degrees (5 years).

University, while not free, is not expensive. Tuition is about a thousand euros per year. Even so, we have some of the highest tuition in Europe.

Of course, there are dropouts, and some of them economically motivated. It's a problem being worked on. Dropout rate (students not completing the 12 years of mandatory school) was 50% in the 90s, is now below 20% and dropping.

It follows that your assessment that we are nowhere near being able to provide education to all of society is plain wrong, at least in Western countries.
Analyze Twitter Data with Apache Hadoop (2012)
I'm not a digital nomad per se but I think I found a good compromise. Instead of traveling often like he does and dealing with having to travel light and not having all of the conforts, I move to a different country every year or so while still keeping all my customers in the US.

I find that it's the best of both world, I have time to discover any country I move to and really get to know the culture. It's also much easier on my clients because it's easy for them to know how to reach me and I'm sure I always have a good internet connection.

One thing I do recommend though is getting an expat health insurance like GMC, BUPA, A+, AETNA, ... It's a bit of an expense (I'm in my 30s and pay $220/month with a deductible of $1200/year for coverage anywhere in the world except Canada and US) but I think it's important for the peace of mind that it procures.
Why Offensive Security Needs Engineering Textbooks [pdf]
Chiang Mai is a good choice.

There is significantly less traffic than Bangkok and it's much cheaper whilst you can easily buy any imports you might want to make yourself feel at home.

The reason Thailand always comes up in these kinds of discussions is that it is a much better choice than Myanmar, Laos or Cambodia with the possible exception of Vietnam that I can't vouch for since I haven't been. Hospitals are better here than in major Chinese cities and even big expenses such as cars are noticeably cheaper here than in the west because Japanese car companies have factories here.

A big plus is that the weather here is excellent precisely when it turns uncomfortable in the US and Europe.

Also if you have a hardware startup it's very easy to take the 1.5 hour flight to Hong Kong for 65USD and take the MTR to Shenzhen or drive anywhere in Guangdong within a couple of hours.

Internet here is fine if you get your own DSL or Cable connection. SSH connections to Singapore and Hong Kong are very comfortable latency wise.

There are occasional power outages but those don't last long and are easily solved with a UPS.

The only true caveat I can think of is the air pollution, but it's nowhere near Chinese levels, having stayed there for several years.
I bought a few, the ones I got had a thick clear plastic wrapper that's not in the pictures.
It seems to me that you're forgetting a very important cause to obesity. The marketing campaigns led by big corporations such as Mac Donald's, Coca Cola and so on...
In a .pdf?

In seriousness, I think this kind of extreme highlighting could be an important step in making programming more accessible. There are only so many characters like ,;:.()[]{}<> available to use in code, and often most of them indicate completely different things in different places.

Done the right way, and combined with live evaluation á la Bret Victor or the Swift playground, I think this has the potential to be the next paradigm of accessible programming, after Excel.
Weren't they justified in that reaction? As best I have been told and can recall, the CEOs recognised neither the "PRISM" name (presumably because it was an internal label which the government hadn't shared with the webcos?) nor the initial description in the press of the PRISM program (apparently because it was highly inaccurate). In that case it's easy to see how their reaction could be genuine.
> it has to be a community process and discussion

Would you recommend any existing orgs, mailing lists or forums where there's already an active community for discussion?
How to Write to Reduce Stress [presentation, commentary, checklist]
GeoGuessr – Let's explore the world
One thing that bothers me a lot about modern writing (in news, mostly), is that people tend to break logical ideas into teeny tiny paragraphs. The author of this article does this, taking what is essentially a list and making it much harder to read, reference, and track the flow of ideas. To my dismay, it seems that the trendier the publication, the more the writers tend to do this (although this appears to be standard style for Reuters, and I can imagine a few good reasons for that).

I sincerely hope that good writers put more emphasis on organization and flow than hooking readers with oversimplifications and straw men. On one hand, the surge of sites like BuzzFeed make me think we're all doomed in this regard. But then people like John Oliver (and his writers) who consistently deliver thought-provoking stories give me hope.
None of these individual companies would have known about the NSA end of the webservice NSA calls PRISM.

Does the Zuck have a TOP SECRET clearance with read-ins to all the special access programs that would be needed to know about PRISM? Somehow I doubt it.

There was acting going on with those responses alright, but the acting more about pretending they didn't understand how powerful automating warrant compliance was, instead simply playing along to the crowd of hacktivists.

But none of these companies would have known about the NSA side, all they'd have seen would be the company's end of the operation, which would be nothing more than an archival tool of a user's data within a certain filter set followed by an upload tool to some NSA-controlled server. They wouldn't have even known what NSA calls the whole operation.
Really interesting post and good debugging work. A couple of take-aways:

1. This is one reason it's a good idea to use signed ints for lengths even though they can never be negative. Signed 64-bit ints have plenty of range for any array you're actually going to encounter. It may also be evidence that it's a good idea for mixed signed/unsigned arithmetic to produce signed results rather than unsigned: signed tends to be value-correct for "small" values (less than 2^63), including negative results; unsigned sacrifices value-correctness on all negative values to be correct for very large values, which is a less common case – here it will never happen since there just aren't strings that large.

2. If you're going to use a fancy algorithm like two-way search, you really ought to have a lot of test cases, especially ones that exercise corner cases of the algorithm. 100% coverage of all non-error code paths would be ideal.
The No Excuse List
Why would we want to separate people ?

Al contrario. We want to use testing to identify holes and other areas of opportunity. To help the teachers teach better and the students to learn better.
Please re-read the actual linked article.
In terms of a protective cover/case, maybe there is a cheap, everyday item or container it would fit into nicely. I put pen springs around all of my cable heads.
IQ seems irrelevant to the performance of the teacher.
Things to check after repairing your laptop
Dirty Markup – Tidy Up Your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Something doesn't need to be 'big' or mainstream to have an impact. Quite the opposite I'd say. (And I think HN's impact as an influencer should not be underestimated).
What I'm saying is that you cannot have your cake here and eat it too.

Strong laws? Great, you'll have an Aaron Swartz every 5 years at least, especially as long as those laws continue to make common-sense computer crimes like breaking into a subnet (now matter how easy or difficult that was to do technically!) legal crimes as well.

Weak laws? That's fine too, but don't be surprised what a dedicated "advanced persistent threat" can do under a weak legal regime.
My main clients all pay a monthly retainer for a block of my time. I don't do piecework through eLance or oDesk. My hourly rate puts my annual gross in the same range as my friends in Silicon Valley.

If you want to do projects from scratch or work for startups that's a different situation, and you probably would need to participate with a team. For the kind of work I do it's not important where I am or what I'm wearing.
You can point to the hosts file in ~/.ansible.cfg

hostfile = ~/.ansible/hosts

Or, if you run more than one project with multiple servers each, ansible will also read an ansible.config file in the current directory. You can have a separate hosts list, options, and playbooks for each set of servers. Then just cd ~/projects/whatever and ansible will work accordingly.

You can put any given set of playbooks and configs into git and share with your team so that everyone is using ansible the same way. And that repo won't even carry any auth info.
Meanwhile, in perhaps scarier reality... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_West_Africa_Ebola_virus_o...
Hiring Engineers, a Process | hueniverse
YCombinator is an American company which is required to obey the law and comply with the government. The 'spell' you're referring to is for the moment a matter of law.

So yes, they are under the spell of the NSA. That YC still exists and hasn't been pursued ala Lavabit suggests that any requests, if they have been received, have been complied with to the government's satisfaction.

If one doesn't trust Facebook, Google, etc on principle, there is no reason to trust YCombinator or any startup they fund, other than personal bias, because the same principles apply. No one would trust such a statement from another company. YC should be no different in that regard.

Although, as is mentioned elsewhere, HN itself doesn't keep much private data. It probably wouldn't be worth their time to do anything more than monitor this site and inject the occasional bit of propaganda.
I also almost got a job there, and toured that facility during the final interview. Their testing at that site involves firing rockets that are secured to the ground, and monitoring the results from an underground bunker. I lived in that area up until this year, and I've never seen them launch anything from that site. I didn't even know they had that infrastructure there! There are also houses all around that facility, so I am surprised to see them launch this thing.
"It was a dark and storm night."

You're welcome!
I like how the NSA is the example of something that catches everything.
No, I don't think learning basic literacy skills is really going to crimp some kid's style. And I don't understand what you mean about testing. I was given a test on how well I could follow directions before they let me into kindergarten, and the test wasn't exactly strict.

Maybe you're just not very good at writing tests? Just because you can't think up a good test doesn't mean they don't exist.