skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As far as software recommendations to ensure easy communication, Yammer is a good one to setup your own private social network. One that is a bit less intense is Hip Chat which allows for company discussions and group instant message, I’d say more or less like an upgraded Skype kind of communication if you are familiar. And another free alternative to Skype for free video chat (with great screen sharing) is Google Hangouts. G+ has done a great job here, it seems to be more stable quality and connection than others. There are also many great remote time tracking programs like we are building at Worksnaps (http://www.worksnaps.net/www/) that keep people on track, accountable, and allow for complete transparency for all involved.
At least here in DC the drivers kinda got hosed on credit cards. they have to buy a machine + processor from an approved government vendor at above market rates. And it can take 45 days to actually get your money. That's a huge deal if you're living at or close to paycheck to paycheck.
Landing page for a photosharing app
I think it's unfortunate that more people aren't aware of the benefits of using Common Lisp as an implementation target for their new language. All you have to do is to parse your language into list structure and write macros to translate it into Lisp. You get an interpreter and a native-code compiler for free! And there's a long list of language features for you to build on: GC of course, plenty of built-in types (including lists, arrays, and several kinds of numbers) -- and the crown jewel, CLOS, with multiple inheritance, multiple dispatch, and of course, the MOP.

I understand why a lot of people aren't interested in writing CL directly -- though I am still fond of it; it does suffer somewhat from historical baggage. But if you're layering another language on top of it, none of that matters. And it's a great platform.
Apple Pay's charge is paid by the banks, out of the interchange (the '2-3%' - that is actually more like 1.5% or less for any merchant big enough to be part of CurrentC).
You do not need to own a medallion, and given current medallion prices, you probably can't since if you can afford a medallion you are a millionaire and millionaires rarely drive taxis. You have to rent one though. And to pay for it. And that creates an artificial limit to the market and artificial rent extracted by medallion owner - now you pay for taxi service proper and also pay the rent to medallion owner, who produces absolutely nothing and charges just for being there. Real estate is physically limited, but even then you can build your store in different places and people still can come there. Medallion means either you rent it or you are out of business. It's like all NY real estate would be build in 70s and after that, nobody would be allowed to build anything, despite growing population and expanding business. Can you imagine what that would do to a city?
Excellent use of graphics, created in the age before computer graphics.
If you're going to whistleblow on your local government online (be that a legitimate government, or a violent drug cartel), the only reasonably safe way to do it is from outside the country AND using Tor. It amazes me that people don't take these basic precautions.

Mexican cartels are known to have infiltrated ISPs, where they were able to tie IP addresses to identities. Using encryption is the only way.

EDIT: may I ask why the downvotes? Did I say something offensive or break the HN rules?
And where is the banks' money that they're paying Apple with coming from?

This is like how people are made to think a new flagship smartphone from AT&T costs them $199.
Read an authoritative source (K&R is good; there are better ones)

K&R is a classic, but is it a good way to learn proper C programming technique?

This makes one wonder -- from Zed Shaw's online version of "C The Hard Way" [0]:

I myself believed that until I started writing this book. You see, K&RC is actually riddled with bugs and bad style. Its age is no excuse. These were bugs when they wrote the first printing, and the 42nd printing. I hadn't actually realized just how bad most of the code was in this book and recommended it to many people. After reading through it for just an hour I decided that it needs to be taken down from its pedestal and relegated to history rather than vaunted as state of the art.

He goes into more detail in his critique, e.g.

Where K&RC runs into problems is when the functions or code snippets are taken out of the book and used in other programs. Once you take many of these code snippets and try use them in some other program they fall apart. They then have blatant buffer overflows, bugs, and problems that a beginner will trip over.

There's more -- and he goes through some K&R code too.

[0] http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/krcritique.html
And what about all the customers of this cartel who give them the money to pay people enough to do things like this?
So, interesting problem (but not hugely), that as always, ends with, oh... one of our portfolio companies has the solution.

I'm so tired of PR.
I could use some photos off offroad vehicles (jeeps, trucks, SUVs) on the trail. E-mail in profile.
CALEA does not require key escrow, nor, so far as I know, does PATRIOT s.215.

From my work I'm personally aware of more than one major corporate effort to cryptographically protect user data for which key escrow was not only not implemented, but countermeasures above and beyond basic cryptographic best practices were implemented to mitigate likely user errors. None of these projects would seem to me to be possible if it were the case that the USG was requiring private companies to implement key escrow.

In ~10 years of software security work performed for many of the largest companies in the world, I was never once asked to review a system that performed key escrow or anything like it (I would not work on such a system, nor would I or will I work on software security for the USG).

Not only that, but having come into contact with source code, design documents, backend systems, and similar intimate technical details, I have never --- that I can recall --- even seen something like the backdoor you alluded to.

Occam's Razor suggests to me that the popular idea that big tech companies spy on their users for the USG is fallacious.

I've never looked at Bitlocker, though, so maybe I'm wrong.
I'm not sure how you're going to get out real journalism about the events going on within your city from another country... Did you read the article?
I think they have to break the laws in order to have standing to challenge them.
Are you sure taxi screening and insurance is sufficient? When was the last time you checked how taxi drivers are screened?
Chrome is going in this direction:

Packaged apps that have more and more hardware permission.

I think JS will be a compile target.
We know. I put a link to that video (to the Internet Archive, not YouTube) on Wikipedia years ago.

There's a whole series of Chevrolet films from the Jam Handy organization at the Internet Archive. "Take it Easy", "Spring Harmony" and "Shockproof" cover how auto suspensions work. "Facts on Friction", "Hydraulics" and "What stops them" explain brakes. "Head on" and "No Ghosts" - auto frames. "Water Boy" - cooling. "Free Air" - carburetor. There's more.
Prohibition is the only reason those cartels have customers.
At this point, the cartels have diversified far beyond drug trafficking.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023032777045793...
I wonder if the safest way to do this is to have a friend outside of the country help run the social media and you, as the insider, provide the information and direct the friend from within the country/city instead.
Desktop software is desktop because of mouse. Touch software replaces mouse with hand gestures on screen or panel. But web apps still trying to be 1990 desktop replacement. Soon biometric feedback makes this painfully obvious. Security and compatibility is key. But Apple and Microsoft refuse to agree on anything except basic web standards. Third player needed for anything to change.
You're welcome! We hope to hear from you. :) And good luck with your search.
I see everything moving to a ChromeOS-like model, with HTML+JS and WebGL for graphics-heavy things. If not those technologies in particular, something equivalent.

Essentially the consumer OS will be reduced to being a platform for a browser (I use "browser" loosely here -- I consider iOS to be an app browser in this sense). The OS will disappear from visibility.

To make this work you'll need a lot more standardization on APIs and data formats (because in the future consumers won't touch "files" anymore). I also think that's coming.

Finally, I see the server/client sides being even more divorced from each other. Clients will become dumber (single-purpose) and servers will become smarter (multi-purpose), and both will be much more connected.
How Zero Gravity Makes It Possible to Take Sharp, Hand-Held Long Exposures
I did, and it clearly says that other citizens were sending her information to post online. I don't know much about her situation, but presumably that wouldn't require her to be in the country.

And even if that's not the case, using Tor and not linking your online vigilante identity to your real identity (e.g. by having your whistleblower twitter account linked to your personal phone) is a very basic precaution.

I REALLY don't want to sound insensitive, but if people are going to use technology to fight people who wield the power of physical violence, they DO need to learn how to apply it properly.
> and repeatedly being driven to an ATM because their credit card reader is mysteriously "broken" have pretty much dissuaded me from ever taking a regular cab again.

In most cities, (incl. SF and NYC), if their machine is broken and they do not tell you before your ride starts, your ride is free.

I've never had this issue in NYC, but in SF I found that reminding the drivers of this is the best way to magically "fix" the machine. And if that doesn't work, well, hey, free cab ride!
All the more reason to encourage domestic production of drugs in regulated (ie, legal and not cartel-run) markets.

Blaming the customers is ineffective, because there's no way to end the demand for drugs entirely - we have decades of prohibitions that prove that[0]. Whether or not you or I would like them to boycott these products on principle en masse is a moot point, because it's just not feasible.

[0] If we can't even keep federal prisons drug-free, how could we keep the rest of the country drug-free?
> The point isn't to convert a TeX program into an equivalent HTML program.

You are correct, of course. And one of my main
points is that such a conversion is essentially
impossible. E.g., TeX can read and write files, but,
thankfully for Internet security,
HTML can't.

So, my solution and envisioned converter is to
convert TeX output in a DVI file to
an HTML file. Such a converter seems doable
and to solve a concern the OP had.

Further,
my envisioned converter from DVI to HTML would
do just what you are describing.

Or, the DVI file has to put the 'f' of
'foo' at some coordinates (x,y) on the page in some
font, say, some bold font. Fine. TeX can handle
lots of fonts, the many standard ones and
more if want to make routine use of the ability of
TeX to handle essentially any font given in the
form TeX wants.

Want to create your own fonts? Knuth has been there,
done that, and left a terrific tool MetaFont, open
source, beautiful documentation. Create all the
fonts you want and have TeX use them. Then create
equivalent fonts for HTML and that a Web browser can
use. Such work with fonts is just making routine
use of what TeX has had for decades.

So, from the DVI, write to the
HTML the markup string

<b>f</b>

at a position given by absolute coordinates while also specifying the desired font. That's about
all there is to it. Seems quite doable to me.

Want to convert to PS? Okay, from the times I
read the big, red Adobe books on PS, converting from
DVI to PS is also quite doable. Indeed, there
is likely a TeX device driver for that conversion
now, as there is from DVI to PDF -- which I use
heavily. Indeed, checking, my script for converting
DVI to PDF uses EXE

I:\protex1p2_run\miktex\bin\dvipdfm.exe

and that EXE is standard in the TeX world.
It works fine.
I read this as A* and Dijkstra's in O(m) and was expecting something very different.
It's somewhat amazing that it was a seemingly unrelated kidnapping that lead to her discovery given that she seemed to be tweeting from her own phone, probably publishing from her own (unsecured?) computer etc. and the reach that the cartel are purported to have in law enforcement / military in those areas.

I sincerely hope for America's sake that there's no substance to the claims that the CIA are working with these cartels.
I think you were downvoted because people suspected you of glossing over the subject at hand (for the record, I upvoted you).

I would say that for some of these local journalists, you're correct in suspecting that their technical expertise isn't high...however, it's not easy to report on dangerous local conditions from outside that locality. For one thing, you've introduced another attack vector for a MITM attack -- between the local stringer and the international point-of-contact who then publishes the content.

But the bigger problem is this: the people most passionate about this kind of local reporting, well, they're passionate about it because it is in their town or neighborhood. It's generally not feasible to be a long-time resident (the type who really gives a shit about the terror that's going on in the neighborhood) and then uproot so that you can do reporting safely. For one thing, you're just not as connected to the events once you've left the area.
And the mob survived the end of alcohol prohibition in the US. It nevertheless weakened them.
Desktop apps are basically stuck where they were 10 years ago, and I don't see them advancing much in the next 10. Office, Photoshop, etc will still be getting upgrades every couple years. All the investment will be in what the new hot platform is.
How Pakistan's State Bank killed the country's fintech industry
I agree with the advice of validating your idea by asking the target users if they would be willing to pay for the service.

Maybe start making a prototype (Balsamiq/Prototype of Paper rather than code based).

As to keep it hush-hush:

"An idea for a startup, however, is only a beginning. A lot of would-be startup founders think the key to the whole process is the initial idea, and from that point all you have to do is execute. Venture capitalists know better. If you go to VC firms with a brilliant idea that you'll tell them about if they sign a nondisclosure agreement, most will tell you to get lost. That shows how much a mere idea is worth. The market price is less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA."

http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

Just start. Good luck!
Assassination is not the worst thing that someone can do to you.
No. Three decades of C have clearly demonstrated that trying to make programmers be "very careful" will not work.

(This evening, I'm struggling with a broken "gedit" on Ubuntu. It turns out that editing a sufficiently large file will break "gedit". Not just crash it once, mess its configuration up so badly that future uses of "gedit" hang the entire GUI.

Known bug since 2012.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gedit/+bug/1021720
Status: unassigned.

If the program terminated with "subscript out of range at line 1354 of 'editmain.c'", this would have been fixed by now.)
This is interesting, i know one lab close to me, will ask them, if they agree.
>Yes, a small turbine-powered RC aircraft can easily have a higher thrust-to-weight ratio than a full-sized aircraft, but it's not thrust-to-weight ratio that determines top speed; it's thrust-to-drag ratio.

And parasitic drag dominates, right? Ok, so yeah, I was thinking in terms of induced drag. Thanks for the discussion. I enjoyed it and it was a good refresher.
Great quote by Schopenhauer. An analogy of the will that I like is that the will is like an animal in that the drive to live and reproduce is primal. But this animal -- let's call it a donkey -- can be tamed and then ridden upon, and with proper discipline, be made to go where the rider -- or intellect --wants it to go.
This is why we need not only password locks and full encryption but panic passwords and hidden logins on every piece of electronics we own. That no mobile OS offers these yet is pathetic.

When twitter and facebook don't let you connect anonymously from tor, this is what the result is. If you have a major website that is used by dissidents and journalists in countries such as Mexico or Iran and you don't have a plain html form to fall back on and insist on javascript being on all the time you really do have blood on your hands.
I've built one significant project in Ember, and three in Angular (multi-month projects with a small team; requiring maintenance for the next 3-4 years; < $100k USD).

Ember 'feels' so much more right to me. I really enjoyed working with it and it reminded me of the desktop frameworks I used to work with. It's not without it's faults, but what is.

But sadly Ember just doesn't seem to be holding it's head up in the ongoing swell of JS frameworks. I think that is a great pity. But time goes on and they'll all be forgotten in a few years.
What the hell are you selling?
I've thought for a while that certain web technologies that Google is developing or promoting (e.g. WebGL, NaCl/PNaCl, V8, Chrome app store, Chromebook, etc.) has implied a vision of web apps being just as capable as desktop apps, perhaps even in categories such as video games that need raw access to the CPU/GPU. However, progress towards this vision seems to be going much more slowly than I would have expected, and desktop apps will no doubt continue to fill certain needs and niches even if a fully realized web platform is achieved.

Of course, mobile apps (and the consumer electronics revolution that has allowed many people to consider their phone as a primary computing device) are also competing in this space.
That's a very good point. Perhaps being overseas is not an option. In that case, I guess the best she could do is use a disposable OS (Tails) and VPN at the time of posting sensitive information online, and never use her whistleblower identity/handle outside that very narrow context.

Some newspapers (correct me if I'm wrong, I think it was NY Times) have even started running an .onion website where people can leave so called "dead drops".
> are not enabled by default because they can either lose history (rebase) or are complicated for new users (or are of dubious benefit).

Yet for me and many users, this means we cannot go to any coworker's terminal and use those features, many of us can no longer live without.

> Git actually has some serious scalability problems in places and no good way to overcome them

How so? You can upgrade the format in new versions (perhaps some abstractions to make it easy are missing, but there's enough development effort behind git that it doesn't have to be easy).

I don't think hg is more scalable than git.

> I can't think of any version control system where checking out any version in history isn't fundamentally a cheap operation, either. This is not a Git-specific thing.

I read that hg uses some sort of a linear-append history format, meaning that going back to past versions is O(distance) in time. Is that false?
I had never seen this, so i appreciate the link. Is there any similar video for a limited slip differential?
Yeah or hang two pieces of string off the side of the desk. DIY it!
It's a platonic ideal, but the internet runs on ads, and that ruins everything.

An interface you don't control is an interface you can't advertise on. The vast majority of players will never open their data in a manner that hurts their ability to sell sponsorship, and this problem is entrenched in the fabric of the internet.

HN is a very, very rare exception in that it never was and never will be dependent on ad funding.
I wasn't talking about "higher level languages", really. Still, you have made a strange statement. Most obviously, if you don't worry about EINTR in Python, your code crashes. This was, in fact, the subject of a recent draft PEP (475) that generated a fair bit of discussion but not much consensus.

To the extent you're better off in Python or any other high-level language than in C, it's because things are removed from your control. Obviously, if you can't do something in a language, you can't do it wrong. That is uninteresting.

And of course EINTR and much signal behavior is POSIX-specific -- as in, you may not even have it (or necessarily anything like it) on other platforms. This, again, is not a "C" thing.

All the world is not POSIX.
That's a massive compendium! I wish I had been more crisp in my question; the thought over here was to figure whether there's a simpler step by step process to minimize frustration and maximize your confidence on your path to becoming an enlightened generalist (which would naturally takes years to accomplish). I'm mostly interested in the "sequencing" of these steps which is why I provided a rather contrived example of the web app that grows in features with each iteration. For junior devs it's usually pretty hard to figure this out on their own so they end up either doing a deep dive in a very limited number of technologies (ex: Building a webservice in Spring + Hibernate ecosystem comes to mind) without or just float up top at very superficial layers.

You've done an incredible job at detailing the expectations of a generalist but might you have some recommendations on forging that path for people interested?
No, see, people call that "victim-blaming" and not "educating yourself about the risks by utilizing the global sum of all human knowledge". The only way people are going to be safe is if they're educated about the risks/rewards to using technology. Lately it's gotten very weird in that anyone that falls prey to predators and become victims could never ever possibly ever have made any possible mistakes/misteps, for they are the immaculate victim that must not ever have any responsibility for their actions.

This flies completely contrary to precautionary measures and utilizing knowledge/education as a barrier to attack. The sooner society gets away from the "that's 'victim-blaming'" mentality and embraces education for all, the sooner everyone is better of for it. It's not saying, "yeah, they had this coming, this is their fault" but rather, "let's analyze the situation and provide mitigation for the future"
Yes.

A company is not a person, a person is not a company. Attacking one should not be considered the same as attacking another, our entire economic system is based around the abstraction of organization so as to shield people from legal liabilities incurred by simply pursuing trade. You can't have it both ways, to both enjoy the legal benefits of a corporate structure, and then to be able to claim public sympathy when you get beaten in the market.

Corporate personhood is a dangerous legal concept that Americans believe in for unfathomable reasons, and it causes all sorts of ethical problems, particularly legalization of political manipulations that are considered corruption in other parts of the world.
The CIA working with cartels abroad is not mere rumor. There is substantial evidence that this takes place.

Unfortunately, nobody in this world has the combination of power, opportunity, and desire to take the CIA down for its crimes. They are the closest thing to a god that has ever existed; and organization that is profoundly beyond the grasp of society at large. They smite as they see fit, and there is nothing that can be done about it. Even if the American democratic system were functioning as designed/desired, the CIA would have ample opportunity to burn all of their records (as the Stasi unsuccessfully attempted). Black budgets (see:their involvement in the drugs trade) is one of their many insurance policies against accountability.
what email address?