skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What is so wrong with giving the unemployed a JOB rather than just money?

If you give them basic income, then the jobs can pay what the jobs are worth, and no one needs to be forced into economically inefficient make-work jobs that take time that could be used for focussed training, risky (but potentially valuable) self-initiated ventures, etc.

Any such make-work jobs proposal is obviously paying a premium over the actual value of the work (which is why the same job isn't available in the market already), so instead treat the premium as basic income, and the job will be available, through the market, at its actual value (and, with an adequate BI, you don't need a minimum wage, because the BI provides basic support, so taking a low-wage job that may be more suitable for other reasons than pay doesn't have the opportunity cost of not being able to provide basic support.)
I think in DC the situation will be that private individuals can't sell it, but there will be licensed dispensaries. That's pending congressional approval though. (Really it's pending congress not striking it down, which they seem loathe to do except for one very zealous committee member without much power).
Oh how remarks like this make me think it's 1999 again. The valuation per registered user is also starting to get to that level (I had friends with business plans calling out values of $500 per user at that time). See what happens this time.
In the context of the original question of "how do I avoid being used", I also thought your advice of joining those specific companies was sarcastic.
You make an excellent point. I tend to think of it as "What would you do if you knew you were going to be dead in 6 months" but that tends to skew toward the 'fun' side of things rather than the 'meaningful' side.
I believe they're referring to the private prison industry, which makes a pretty penny off locking up non-violent drug offenders. Their trade organization listed liberalizing drug laws as a potential threat to their bottom line in their last annual report, so we can expect that they will fiercely lobby against anything happening at a federal level.
Ah, this reminds me of this priceless video of a journalist who quits live on air to dedicate all her energy towards this end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBPsbgKeIFM

Hopefully all her energy was enough.
Why not just use Dropbox? It's always been extremely reliable for me on my Mac.
That's why React is brilliant, since it's really simple and scales well.
You should hold out hope for every company which does this, there will be one acting with your privacy in mind and offer lower rates without the possibility of collecting your data.

I think the Snowden revelations have had a huge impact on how people view their privacy now.
Also check for blacklisted keywords : http://blog.worddata.com/app-store-optimization/discover-app....

Worddata has lots of great articles about ASO. There are tools out there that show you if your chosen keywords are highly competitive and should be replaced with less popular keywords so you have a chance at showing in search results.
You can bypass most of these limitations on Windows by prefixing your path with \\?\. Suddenly instead of 260 chars you get 32k if memory serves. And trailing dots and spaces (at the end of a file or before its extension -- limits that come straight out of FAT's direntry structure) are OK.

So really I'd say these are limits of not knowing or bothering to use the escape hatch in Windows's support for this stuff.
I don't understand why such a comment is being seen as racist, or with racist undertones? I don't live in America, so I don't know what passes off as "racism" over there. But here in Africa, that sounds like a perfectly valid thing to ask a colleague if they show up for work with a bruise on their face, and you're concerned. Black, white, or any other race for that matter.
On Windoze, ADO lets you use SQL directly on any data source for many years now, including CSV, TSV, Exchange Microsoft, and many more.

Here's a sample how this can be done: http://fdik.org/ado.zip

Such database middleware is missing on many other platforms. Could be an option to think about it.
This x 1000. If you're pounding away implementing features no one asked for (or were only vaguely hinted at in a meeting once), or building complex 'future proof' architectures rather than implementing simple one off for the problem in front of you, or rewriting existing code because it doesn't fit your sense of 'right', then you're doing it wrong imo.
God's World is perfectly just.
As with most politics, decisions aren't made by the people who actually incur the costs.
Cool.
It can give you a headache but I guess it will improve over time.
Steganography is solidly a "security through obscurity" thing. Sure, we comp-sci people don't care about that, but spies do.

There was that Russian Spy who was transmitting data for years on her Facebook account through steganography pictures on her Facebook account.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/419833/russian-spies-us...

The FBI didn't know about it until after she was caught. So believe it or not, Steganography _works_. If you're trying to hide the fact that you're a spy, encrypting all of your messages over TOR is a bad idea.

On the other hand, if you pretend to be a normal person and embed secret messages in your Facebook posts, you can be a spy for years and not get caught.
War on Terror in 4 Minutes
The Harsh Reality of the New Enterprise World
I always wondered why Wine prefixed unixy paths with that string.
The big difference there is that when a company is wasteful, they do it with their own money. When the state is wasteful, that's my money they are pissing away.
It might as well be legal in California. The medical marijuana provision is so loose you can get a prescription for almost any reason whatsoever. And the number of dispensaries got so out of control that even LA backed off a little. Still, I have about 10 dispensaries within a 5 minute drive of me.
Tail Recursion Optimization on x86
Browser extension lets you encrypt Tweets, emails and any other online posts
For:

> "Indicate whether you would participate in one round of the following gambles."

I entered no values, because it seems a pointless exercise - my expected return appears to be zero in each case, so why bother?

I was told that:

> This field is required. Please enter a value.

I think this is a mistake, unless I misread the question somehow and my answer was genuinely invalid.
> I think it's completely wrong, people (most of them) will continue to work; the huge difference is that they will not do it for the money

Of course they'll do it for the money -- at least, for a very long time until productivity is so high that the economy can provide a very comfortable lifestyle that most people are happy with without work (but that's going to take very high output with little labor, which we are nowhere close to and may never reach, given the way that experience drives expectations and expectations increase with output.)

BI reduces the downside risk of unemployment or entrepreneurial failure, provides opportunities to transitionally opt-out of regular employment or income-earning activity for education or other personal development, etc., but it doesn't in any realistic near-term scenario make it so that the vast majority of the population isn't working (whether at wage labor or something more entrepreneurial) for money.
Only US Prime subscribers. We don't get digital benefits with our prime membership in Canada yet.

Source: Contacted Amazon.ca
ericmarcos.p at gmail
> but basically the cops can't force you to decrypt an encrypted device

While true in the US, this isn't the case in all jurisdictions. For example refusing to decrypt or supply keys in the UK can land you up to two years in jail.

Good summary here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law
Did they finally fix the problems with charging (namely battery breaking if you disconnect during charging)?
Not detracting from any of the points of the author, but this line caught my eye:

For example, you can’t start files with a space, something a lot of people do to move files to the top of alphabetical lists.

Do people really do that? That would drive me bonkers. Granted, I mainly work from a CLI so I guess it may not be as annoying if you mainly use a GUI.
Injecting dependencies for scalability with Hazelcast
The Windows API has a nominal 260-character pathname limit, including the leading drive letter designator (e.g., "c:\") and the trailing NULL, but the Unicode versions of the various file system APIs have different limits, as does NTFS internally. The limit to which you're referring is actually a maximum NTFS filename (pathname component, as you said) length limit of 255 UTF-16 code points, which is also the maximum size of an HFS+ filename.
It is so hard to say. Texas very much has a libertarian streak on the right and the cities are blue, but there are so many social conservatives around that it is hard to get a bead on how realistic that is.
ProtoStream: Streaming multiple Protocol Buffer messages
Looks like there's a wide swathe of "homeland security" missions on top of the more traditional missions I was aware of, deemed "non-homeland security":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Coast_Guard#Missi...

I wonder how this all interacts with the CBP.
The value of describing your product in less than 10 words
The ability to survive for 25 years of retirement is a relatively new phenomenon. The economy likely hasn't had a chance to catch up.
Take a look at /etc/os-release, or /etc/debian_version for version numbers.

Otherwise you'll need to look at Wikipedia for the list. Recently the releases have been: etch, lenny, squeeze, wheezy, and now jessie.
Probably a little of both, depending on how much people want to do the work in question for other reasons.
I never get it when people try to reinvent the wheel with JavaScript. Especially on the desktop. Please show me real world benchmarks, where JS apps are not extremely bad in comparison to C++,C# whatever static typed compiled languages.
Apple Mac pro does not have the drivers for 4096×2160 at 60 Hz even with the 700D video. You have to run a bootleg windows software. How do we fix that?
Wait until the pressure grows and then the coast guard will change their stance to, "we follow the local laws". This happened with the TSA in states with medical marijuana, even in Alaska. States rights, the fact that the people voted for it, is going to play a huge role going forward.
The "elephant in the room" of this article was wealth redistribution. Technological advancements should make it possible for people to work 15-20 hours a week. In theory. The problem is that those same technological advancements go hand in hand with increased concentrations of wealth. It is the regrettable observed tendency of people with considerably more wealth than the masses to be stingy with that wealth, feel they inherently deserve it and lack empathy.

So, if people in general are to benefit from technological advancements, there needs to be legislated wealth redistribution to overcome the inherent miserly-ness of the 1% whose wealth is largely a function of that technology.
Show HN: Eyes in Space
Ransomware attacks are on the rise and becoming a business
I completely agree. Because of this we ran into all sorts of problems getting FolderShare/Live Mesh/whatever Microsoft calls it these days to sync files between Macs and PCs. I ended up writing a Perl script that would periodically scan the Mac's shared folder for non-ASCII file names and normalize them by brute force. It was ugly. I told my boss that if it broke, he got to keep both pieces.
Disclaimer: [1]

From what I understand, ideally stego would be used in conjunction with encryption.

First, you would encrypt your message, then you would use stego to hide it.

If the stego is good, it would be a computationally intractable problem[2] for your adversary to determine whether there was indeed a message hidden within the data they were analyzing, with greater than 50% accuracy.

That said, I'm not sure how practical using an application like this would be for stego. It does not "whiten" the data it tries to hide, so unless the data's already whitened, it could potentially stand out like a sore thumb when subjected to steganalysis. And how would you propose actually using this?

This does present some intriguing possibilities, however, like maybe having Alice and Bob share a tweaked version of an OCR library and having Alice generate random images until her encrypted message has been "encoded" in such a way as to be recognizable by the tweaked OCR library that she shares with Bob. The tweaking of the library's character recognition parameters could be a sort of pre-shared key, and would not be available to Eve (the adversary).

[1] - this post comes from a hobbyist, not from any kind of security researcher, steganalyst, cryptoanalyst, etc. So please take what I say with a grain of salt and please correct me if I'm wrong.

[2] - "computationally intractable" being different for different adversaries, of course, which is one reason you need a good threat model.
WSJ: The Fourth Major Era of Computing Kicks In
This is quite true. Some of my friends and family work for themselves and I could not possibly cope with the stress of having to win jobs or worry if I was going to get paid at the end of the month. Despite the romantic ideas of working for yourself, it appears to offer LESS flexibility instead of more - they're always working! Instead of "I can work when and where I want!" it turns into "I am always working, anywhere"

I could happily find things to do in my spare time though. Like playing an instrument, or reading.
We have to do that in our database for numbers since zeros get truncated off the left side if it is detected as a number--and the number of zeros is important.

I don't know about people doing stuff in file systems these days like that, but it is a simple hack.
One thing that is interesting is that Congress usually blocks funding for DC laws by restricting how we can spend our local tax dollars (through the appropriations process).

When DC decriminalized possession, Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland tried to block the decriminalization by blocking funding for decriminalization. If that sounds like the legislative equivalent of a double-negative, it is!

Harris's legislation potentially would have had the un-intended affect of preventing the District from spending any money on enforcing the decriminalization: no money could be spent on writing citations, printing tickets for possession, or prosecuting cases in court. This would have effectively legalized it since the criminal law is already off the books.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/mike-debonis/wp/2014/06/...

I doubt Congress will pick this up. They have 90 days to veto DC laws or they go into effect, and they can barely name post offices at this point. Obama has also promised to veto the veto.
Then perhaps it would make more sense to change that than to change rules about vacations.

Isn't it the job of the banking system to enable people to start businesses?
I'm crafting a time tracking app for Google Drive, https://whathaveidone.today.

Stack: Python/Flask + MongoDB
Statistics: 60 signups, 1000 pageviews so far.
History: my friend came up with an idea and I coded it as it seemed like a couple of evenings (it turned couple of weeks actually).
Ask HN:What are the best online resources to learn Python?
I am starting to learn python and there are a ton of resources. I kind a got overwhelmed with all the available sources. What are the best ones according to you?
>I don't understand how the people who play these games can motivate themselves to get up in the morning.

That's one reason I decamped to the SF bay area. I have friends still living in DC (or one of its inner 'burbs) who have been saying for over a decade that they want to escape the games and backbiting bullshit, but have never managed to do so. One reason is the compensation can be high: the DC area is home to the highest-income county in the nation[1]. Stewart is a senior partner at Steptoe, where the average partner income is approx. $1M[2]; as a very senior one he might be taking home $2M a year.

Plus housing prices are cheaper than SF or the peninsula, and if you're trained as a political fixer/policy wonk, where else do you go?

On a more HN-relevant point, working in DC means trying to get a bigger slice of a fixed pie. Silicon Valley companies and other startups around the world can make the pie bigger. For more realpolitik, check out this provocative essay on DC-Silicon Valley by San Jose-based Cypress Semiconductor cofounder/CEO TJ Rodgers (it's worth a read even if you disagree, I think): http://www.cypress.com/?rID=34975

[1] "The Washington region dominates the list of the most affluent places in the United States..." http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/12/12/th...

[2] http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2013/02/steptoe-johnson-ll...
They really aren't on the same side and were mostly orthogonal to each other. Of course, both movements share some common grievances against the government, but the concrete ideas of both groups are just about 100% incompatible.

As a glaring example, consider the Citizen's United case; Occupy supporters would almost unanimously point to the Citizen's United ruling as extremely damaging to American democracy, Tea Party supporters on the other hand overwhelmingly side with the government regarding the treatment of money as speech.

Pick pretty much any issue and you'll find that the two movements bitterly disagree, just about the only thing they can agree on is that the government is corrupt and the country is moving in the wrong direction, but that's a universal platitude that everyone will nod their head at.
Not to mention the Erlang mantra of 'let it fail'. They're tracking bugs, not severity. Someone may file an issue "hey, in this instance, this thing goes wrong", but because of the supervision process, it doesn't actually cause anything to break (just a logged error message and a bit of system churn). The language actively encourages you to code happy path, and address failure conditions only as necessary, relying on the supervision tree to handle errors that stem from deviating off the happy path.
Funny and interesting. Did you know that firepad.io is a rich-text OT text editor with timestamps? I think it's just what you need. You get a real-time collaborative text editor with a fully featured toolbar, and the exact history you need to replay.

Actually, Firepad does replay the history to display the current version on load (though it also has some snapshotting system to restart faster, but snapshots do not erase the history, they are kept in another location).
Is it not connected, but every new car in the US is already required to have an event data recorder, that in a collision saves at minimum such information as speed, throttle position, whether the brakes were applied, and whether the driver was wearing a seatbelt.
Kubernetes also fits very well with Mesos for scheduling.

Check out https://github.com/mesosphere/kubernetes-mesos
+1 on breaking out of a single “views” directory via a View Resolver. Coming from mobile dev app architecture I always found it awkward. Maybe this is more standard in web dev, but for iOS Android Mobile dev there is a much more module convention expectation on View/Controller organization
I feel like this situation is overstated a lot. Something like 8% of prisoners in the US are in privately run prisons, which could be a problem, but it's not the massive number that is often implied.
I bought a license for IntelliJ IDEA 12 during their end-of-the-world sale, and I can upgrade to 14 for $99. What a great deal.
The hipster effect: When anticonformists all look the same [pdf]
No, don't, please. Do Not let go of a word and its definition. It has a definition, and you must stick with it and not give them an inch of ground. It's a losing battle, where constant re-definition means that eventually anything applies under the term.

Giving them ground is precisely why you, and others think that we've lost the term "capitalism". For so long, we let individuals use it in bastardized terms to refer to grey-area capitalism, and allowed its use to be in the form of a pejorative.
MD5 Hash Collision on AWS in 10 hours, for $0.65
I took issues with this; restraints make people more creative not less. The harder the problem, the more amazing the solution.

Look how creative hackers had to be to break 2FA or Snowden himself walking outside an NSA office with gigabytes of data. How about those amazing jailbreaks via helicopters and ornate
heists talked up in Wired Magazine.
The New IBM True North Architecture
I coped by adding a column to my spreadsheet: satisfaction. I charged more per hour for instance for family time, than for engineering time. So trading one for the other was obviously wrong. Still, the spreadsheet total has to meet a bar. I ended up working about 30 hours per week.
I don't object to PWA style projects when we find things that we want to do. I don't think it's a sensible way to guarantee a job. As orangecat said downthread a bit, "shovel-ready" often isn't. I want to spend money to build the infrastructure we actually need. I don't want to throw money at boondoggles, which will be increasingly hard to avoid if we structurally have to keep pushing out projects whether or not we have anything that's actually 1) a good idea, and 2) ready to go.

Edited to add: To be precise, when I say "throw money at", I really mean "throw physical resources and people's time at, while shifting power toward whoever organized it". Obviously I'm advocating paying out some of the money either way so that's not the difference.
I concur. I used to be all about passions, that was before my existential needs shifted to family, home and sharing life.
Try writing more at least everyday to regain your old penmanship, this is what I do and it helps to a certain degree. Im not sure taking penmanship guides would teach you anything you don't already know?

I thought I was alone in this because I've noticed over the last 10 years my handwriting has become horrible!
Because it would undermine HN's goal that we vote for and comment on content on its own merits, not whether it was posted or commented on by someone you like.

I don't think HN is doing that great a job in surfacing the best content or encouraging better discourse in comments, but making it easy to follow favorite users instead of going to the front page would make it worse, IMHO.
So, what do you suggest? What is necessary to improve the recruitment process?

PS: Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, use tryouts to test candidates, you can se more at http://hbr.org/2014/04/the-ceo-of-automattic-on-holding-audi...
Are the TAO APIs asynchronous?
Are there any document on the parameters of those APIs? :-)
Why Silicon Valley Should Not Normalize Relations with Washington, DC
You might be interested in Erlang and Elixir, where systems are designed to "simply fail" and then recover rather than trying to catch every possible error condition. These languages are also built upon the idea of using lots* of lightweight processes, which also provides a really nice model (the actor model) for concurrency and parallelism. It's worth noting that the designer of the actor model claimed that it was informed by how physical systems operate, which is akin to your biology comparison. Erlang and Elixir take that actor model and make it operate in a highly reliable fashion.

Here's a quick intro to Elixir (it takes about an hour), where you'll build a distributed app and have it automatically recover from a failure in a process: http://howistart.org/posts/elixir/1

* I had 400,000 processes running on a modest VM without maxing out.
In association with Flux I assume you mean?
The freed manifesto – How to facilitate focused freedom of expression
Our VW stealership does the same thing. My wife gets emails and mailers when her car is near it's next appointment based on estimated driving.