skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sapir-Whorf is largely discredited in modern linguistics (especially so for the strong form that your comment seems to suggest).

The general consensus is that human languages are more or less equivalent in their expressive power. (Note that doesn't mean certain writing systems aren't easier to learn/use than others. It's important to distinguish reading/writing from language).
I don't like "outing" people, in case they didn't want their presence at an event to be widely known

I understand where you're coming from, but in the present context this is consideration bordering on madness. Trevor is one of the founding Y Combinator partners. How on Earth could it be "outing" him to note that he was at Startup School?
NSA takes seriously ethics laws and regulations at all levels of the organization

I think they mean only if the public finds out
It's probably appropriate to use a throwaway when discussing this topic, not as a way of sniping via anonymity, but because the social climate surrounding this particular topic has gotten so extreme. Those not immediately in agreement with any anti-NSA sentiment seem to be ridiculed or personally attacked for their ideas. Such behavior is usually a sign that we're treading into "What You Can't Say" territory; hence, the throwaway.

As for my comment: I don't understand what's wrong with the arrangement presented in the article. Would someone please give concrete examples of (realistic) scenarios where this would be extremely detrimental to the US, or at least more harmful than the current arrangement of contracting private firms to perform government work?

Is your position that when the government brings in a whole company from the private sector to do work, then that's perfectly fine, but when they bring in an individual, it's not? Why? All of the same safeguards seem to be in play.

Also, having a risk of conflict of interest is different from having a conflict of interest.

He said he understood it had been approved by all the necessary government authorities, and that IronNet Cybersecurity, not the government, would pay for Dowd's time spent with the firm.

Dowd, he said, wanted to join IronNet, and the deal was devised as a way to keep Dowd's technological expertise at least partly within the U.S. government, rather than losing him permanently to the private sector.

Seems straightforward to me. The US government needs technically competent people, and they wanted to keep this technically competent person. The arrangement was approved by all necessary authorities.

You can hold one of two viewpoints: The NSA is necessary, or the NSA is unnecessary. It seems pretty hard to argue that it's unnecessary. And if it's necessary, then surely it's also necessary for them to have highly competent people. (Would you rather an extremely powerful organization have extremely competent people, or incompetent people?) So if competent people are being lost to the private sector, then why not make special arrangements to retain their talent in some capacity?
I want a $1M /yr salary because I want to give $900k to Doctors Without Borders. Surely that is a better idea than the CTO's Tesla Roadster and Palm Springs winter house, right?
The future of our information superhighway seems to be the tollbooth hell of the Chicago area.
It is always good to see open sourced icons. I have always ignored most important parts of UI/UX. It would be great if somebody can provide some insights about why material design is so important and what is so good about it?
Software Foundations: Preface
This is the sickening "Dress for the job you want" of the worst corners of the business world.
The article does mention RTL languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi?) They are kind of annoying to deal with especially when you have multilingual text. (Google "Unicode bidi") And UIs have to be mirrored.
We may be running into terminological variance here. By "networking" I meant meeting new people.
You do have a choice, thats why there is the ugly text with the learn more link. They really went out of their way to ensure you were informed. Anything less than acknowledgement stinks too much of either the tech cults, or unfounded paranoia. The first icon presented is Safari, so if you don't read and don't look at icons, then okay... But that's not Apples problem. If it's a feature you don't want to use, don't use it, you can turn it off without a python scripts. I tire of these stupid games.

Theft and financia fraud? Do you search for you account numbers and passwords in spotlight???
'Au contraire, mon ami, it is you and your programs that suck' retorted some languages. Though in fairness I think there was as much comic hyperbole as grating condescension.
Text existed before the proliferation of other media probably because it was primitive and inferior. Chimpanzees lived for eternity before human beings appeared. I don't see anything great in that. We didn't use a lot of multimedia in the beginning, primarily because of tech limits. Now that the conditions are ripe, why not? If everybody is using more and more of it, it's for a reason. Apple and MS brought about a revolution, exactly because they unlocked the killer feature that was the GUI. Ask if many of us would like to go back to the 80s regarding computer UI, that would be a nightmare. I certainly feel a 2-min video overview of product features is tons better than an one-hour read. Images and in general sensory feelings are always much more natural to human beings, which in essence are still a kind of animal. Texts were invented to maintain civilizations and enforce social hierarchies, but it was never ever natural nor great in this matter.

The Twitter icon takes a lot of space in a digital form, yet it only takes one minute to draw by hand, while the author probably wrote for an hour.

In all it's just a pointless, childish and tunnel-sighted rant. "Bet" on text? Bet what? I'm quite amused by the number of upvotes here. Though gladly I see many sane counterarguments high up there also, which is quite reassuring :)
How does another company compete with IronNet?

Will there be a scramble for other highly ranked NSA employees by other companies in the same line of work?

So I'm viewing this from the implications of the effect on the market rather than the effect on NSA.
Do you think your employer feels bad about soliciting 3 bids for a vendor contract? In many cases not doing so is illegal!

Same with your job.
I'm usually against the "why is this posted on HN" comments, so can someone just clue me into why they personally find this so interesting? Is it the effort put into the calculation or the revenue angle?
Yasuke: The African Samurai
Sure, but I think it's fair to be just as unforgiving in a critique then. My concern here is that we hackers love it when (seemingly) low-hanging fruit are pointed out and react with "well this sucks - let's drop it" very easily, and if this happens to someone as a result of reading this blog, it's bad. That said, I don't think eye-for-an-eye discourse is nice, either, and would certainly prefer it if this was a more rigorously fact-checked article.
I never assumed that every YC partner would be at every YC event. As far as I'm aware Trevor wasn't organizing Startup School, merely attending it; and PG (for example) didn't seem to be there at all beyond his appearance on stage.

I wouldn't say that Trevor was trying to go incognito, but he certainly didn't seem to be trying to make his presence obvious either.
> However, the article is very informative

I can only speak with confidence about the section on the German ss/ß, and it is dead wrong. (This has been explained a few times in sibling-of-a-sibling comments.) So it's not informative unless you fact-check every single paragraph of it.

I also don't remember anger being part of any successful learning experience.
The Common Lisp Condition System
This was originally a presentation in English at a conference in the Netherlands, but it was also published in a Korean academic journal, and there used to be a PDF of the English version floating about ... but I can't turn it up anymore, either :/. I've fired off a mail to the author asking for help; if I get a response I'll edit/reply.
i went to "hardware summer camp" summer of 2013. a weekend event hosted at the oreilly alphatech office in sf.

it was a fantastic event with nuts and bolts business and hacker types talking about how they actually got companies/products off the ground and then operated them.

point is ..need more of those!
@nickpinkston on twitter was one of the organizers > that team brought in all the right presenters.
CSS is probably a better analogy for performing music. You generally keep the same content, but presentation is important.
I agree 100%, even giving the client access to a simple WYSIWYG editor (think mailchimp, campaign monitor, exacttarget, etc) always end up in a nightmare is mis-aligned and wrongly sized graphics and text. Not to mention what happens on mobile and of course outlook's wonderful rendering.

We build a lot of emails and we don't allow our clients to touch anything. It's something I hate dealing with on all levels but the ROI can be incredible for some business's.
I still like StartSSL better than the other options. Yes, obviously opt out of having them generate your private key and CSR and upload your own. There is a big obvious "skip this" button there for that. To me the killer feature is that with class 2 validation ($60/year) you can generate as many 2-year certs, including wildcard as you want.
Thanks. Hoping you won't mind if I drop a mail.
Eyegroove (social music video) is hiring
Hi Folks,

Eyegroove (a groundbreaking social music video app: http://appstore.com/eyegroove) is expanding with multiple open positions in San Francisco. If you or anyone you know is appropriate, please come forth!

One position not listed there is a short-term contractor who's fantastic with cinematic shaders - simulating qualities of analog film and video. If that's you, please shoot me an email too.

Hope you all have a great weekend,

Scott

http://www.eyegroove.com/#jobs

iOS Software Engineer

We are looking for an independent, multifaceted engineer who is an expert with iOS APIs and best practices, and who has the ability and interest to create beautiful, well-engineered interactive experiences. more...

iOS Graphics Software Engineer

We are looking for an independent, multifaceted engineer who is an expert with graphics and video on iOS, and who has the ability and interest to create clean, well-engineered interactive experiences. more...

Full-Stack JavaScript Engineer

We are looking for an experienced individual with serious front-end and back-end skills to create a cross-browser, web-app. more...

Lead Full-Stack Engineer

We are looking for an experienced individual who is an expert in architecting and maintaining web services for scalability, and providing a team leadership role. more...

Technical Product Manager

We are looking for an experienced, technically-savvy individual to manage the product development of the Eyegroove social music video application and its related web services and technologies. more...

Senior Interaction Designer

We are looking for an interaction designer to continuously improve and evolve our app to turn it into the best and most popular in its space. more...

Data Scientist

We are looking for a Data Scientist to build out our analysis, reporting, recommendation, and messaging systems and strategies. more...
Regarding point 7, that the collation order is context-dependent: does a title that starts with T come before or after a word that starts with U? What if it starts with "The"?
Lookup firesheep.
It's the daemonizing part that complicates things. Running java -jar MyApp.jar is easy, running it under the control of a system init script, dealing with how to ensure it's restartable as other daemons, logging, log rotation, where Java is really located on the system are all variables that affect any daemonized application; not just Java apps but ones written in any language, Ruby, Python, C or C++.

Docker seems like a good way to "contain" the problem domain challenges I outlined, hoping anyway.
by that logic, do you read the source of your key generation binary and then compile it yourself?

or at least consult the md5 on your distill page before running it? oh and make sure md5sum is not altered either.
A very nice 'Lullaby', I enjoyed it, thanks. Also thank you for the tips.

> Since music is subjective there's no way to say, "you're song is correct, move on to the next song".

Are there some kind of music "compiler" or "linter" for educational purpose out there, which check for a song's obvious and blatant violations of fundamental composing principles? This might helps beginners to hone in on the basics. I know the rules are meant to be broken later, but at the beginning, the 'compiler/linter' is efficient and cost effective in guiding the student and checking their practice work.
"It just works" used be Apple's slogan. Funny, because the only computer that ever "just worked" was the chromebook I bought my wife.
In my experience, glassdoor tries to extrapolate salaries from far too few data points, even for largish companies.

I'm in the middle of leaving my old job and starting a new one, and I know that I'm pretty far above the average reported salaries for my position at both companies and I know I'm not anywhere near the high point of pay for my kind of position.
Snapchat Ads Have Arrived
to be honest i enabled tsl n all my 10 page blogs a long time ago. but i took a couple days to read about the subject before dicking around aimlessly. so you're spot on.
Three.

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/523509876560257025
Interesting to see Dutch mentioned. From what little I know about Dutch, its orthography does seem more similar to English than any other non-english-derived language I've seen.

I seem to remember that some (clearly not all!) of the horrible mess of English orthography originates from Dutch in fact, since some of the first people to run printing presses in England (or to print books which were distributed in England) were Dutch.

Wikipedia seems to back me up slightly here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refor...

Any linguists fancy putting me straight on this?
"Is your position that when the government brings in a whole company from the private sector to do work, then that's perfectly fine"

I don't know about "perfectly fine", more of a "has significant problems with revolving door corruption and lobbying" but be that as it may, the conflict of interest seems pretty clear to me.

Given your premise that the NSA is necessary and it is in our general interest that it is effective, then the NSA's CTO is exactly the guy who should be playing companies off against each other to get a better deal for the public money he's spending. It's pretty hard to do that well if have any ties with one of the companies in question, let alone strong ones.

It would be a different story if part of the deal was that IronNet would never bid for, or in any way be involved in any NSA contract, but that doesn't seem to be the case (unless I missed something?).
Hum, sounds like a nice machine, cheap and small, just what I'm looking for. Is it known if ChromeOS can be replaced by a GNU/Linux distro? I know there's crouton, but I'd really rather wipe it clean.
Classic capture. Would the government's decisions be biased by knowing that the financial decisions it makes will directly affect its old (and future) colleagues? The bureaucracy can buy product A from a random company, or product B from their old boss's company. And also have some assurance that in the future, the second company would offer them a job. All the while, product A is the better product.

This is not nearly to the level of 'constitutional protections' - but is instead another indication of the inability to properly regulate an entirely secret bureaucracy. The NSA has all the failings and issues that any other large bureaucracy has - however it has difficulty utilizing the common mechanisms to regulate its less efficient behaviors.
> Can you link or describe the resource you are leaning on here?

http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=17

Short version: 76.6% of convicts released from prison are re-arrested within 5 years, half of those within one year. From this we have to add the percentage who committed crimes without being arrested and account for those who would not have re-offended regardless of whether or not they had served prison time. The latter numbers are obviously difficult to come by but I think it's safe to assume that they aren't both zero.

The recidivism rates in countries that use non-prison punishments or shorter prison terms are obviously lower than this (since it would be nearly impossible for them to be any higher).

> I have trouble believing that the massive increase in incarceration rates in the U.S. over the last 30 years is entirely disconnected from the drop in crime rates.

You may find this relevant:
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...

Also, the number of inmates in prison has finally started to decline over the last few years and the crime rate is still falling, consistent with the linked article but not with a link between higher incarceration and lower crime rates.
So Keith Alexander doesn't know shit so he needed a real tech guy and ongoing access to classified info. Got it.
"The defining characteristic and critical role of the state is maintaining a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. As time progresses, technological advances change the way individuals and states engage in conflict, and it is
incumbent on states to adjust their activities and policies to maintain their control over the use of coercive force. In the Information Age, the Department of Defense (DoD) must develop an understanding of cyberspace and determine its
appropriate role in this new domain." - Nye, Toft
I am from country with strongly phonetical language and you are just plainly wrong. There are minor dialects but it is considered rather as slang in compare to language taught in schools or comunicate with officials or even broader audience.

(On the other side, it is much more difficult for us to learn English and get used to that disconection between alphabet and said words. And we don't have spelling competitions :).)
There are non-compete clauses for the guy making your sandwich at Jimmy John's. Why do they exist? Because how to make a particular sandwich by some predefined script isn't privileged information, so you need some other way (possibly futile) to prevent others from disclosing it.

But the CTO at the NSA with access and intimate knowledge of the entire body of classified information in his field of work, selling his services to the highest bidder in the exact same field? I guess if the client was Huawei he'd be rotting in prison by now, a traitor and spy.
Why Politicians Need Historians
What a coincidence, I am about to dive into self thought computer programming period to start my startup and I just found this article. It raises the question about the ideal path of computer programming learning..
I understand your point of view, and have to admit would also be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, however, Keith Alexander has been caught lying about issues so serious this just doesn't look right.

It's also quite concerning that they think there's only one person that could be the NSA's CTO, and that they can perform that role part time. It's possible to entertain many ideas about the rights or wrongs of the NSA, but that would be admitting to a serious long term management failure.
That assumes that each of these properties exist in a vacuum, which is surely not the case. There's an obvious interaction between written and spoken language, and even without that, hundreds or thousands of years of differences in the written interactions and data transferred through reading within a culture could have immense impact on collective experiences and ways of thinking.
> Russian has a very simple alphabet, strictly phonetic.

I don't speak Russian but I know enough to say it's not "strictly" phonetic in that there is not always a 1 to 1 mapping of letters to phonemes. For example as an outsider looking at the language I get confused at things like the "г" in "его" being pronounced as a "v" and not "g".

In terms of phonetic writing, I personally really like Spanish. Its writing seems the most phonetic amongst languages I have exposure to. (Admittedly limited). With the accent marks you can know the stress of every word even if it's one you haven't seen. You can adjust for regional accents based on spelling ("s" and "z", "ll" and "y" kept distinct even if a lot of speakers say them identically.) There are quirky rules about how a consonant sounds if some vowels come after it but at least it's consistent.
It all sounds good until you get to the part where they don't include same sex couples

It wouldn't at all surprise me that this eventually changes. If you look at the history, you will notice that their beliefs have changed in several significant ways over their history.

As a side note, since my ancestors came to America in the 1850s, there has been at least one person in each generation that is very interested in family history. The effort got a boost when my uncle became Mormon shortly after he started his family. (An event not without controversy in the family.) The resources available for genealogy research as a result of this work are quite staggering.
yes, for example, https://github.com/documentcloud/underscore-contrib
> Who cares about tone?

Leaving aside the idea that you are the one to decide what others should be sensitive on: Because it makes the signal-to-noise ratio of this blog post _crap_. I'm not sure if particular things are a serious grief or just a bewildered look at new things. I'm not sure of the intention. Should it educate or just rant? It's unclear and wastes a lot of time on things that don't add anything.
Twitter API 1.1 and Twitter Search Have Different Results
It's not. Virtual time can mean anything in this case as in not real time and it can be swapped out at any point.
The "speed" of consciousness would just be in terms of the subjective rate of experience. But yes, that's a significant problem with appealing to this sort of attitude outside of this 4D world (you have to invent some notion of time which applies to souls but not matter).

It is true that you can "step back" from the world-line and insist that every part of it is conscious, but that takes a really radical position on our own conscious experience of the progression of time, one that's actually distinctively Buddhist, if you can believe it. (There's a lot of Buddhist speculation about how the mind is a series of "aggregates" rather than one temporal whole; the idea is that you are no more identifiable with the you-of-twenty-seconds-ago than a candle's flame as it has exhausted a new quantity of vaporized oil: in a metaphorical sense we say that both "are the same" but we don't really mean much by it.

In general though, saying that "the whole worldline is conscious" abdicates our notion completely that time progresses, and instead says it's all illusory (we have a local sense of progression even though nothing progresses). I think that the reason that this is unpopular is simply because if such an illusion exists, it has an interesting asymmetry with other illusions: you can't actually shake it. (It has some other problems, like: it's hard to see why natural selection would assemble those world-lines into something which have these feelings, given that they don't seem to do anything -- and of course natural selection becomes just a metaphor to describe a pattern in how the lines are structured, rather than a force which changes the world, so it's hard even to phrase the question much less answer it.)