skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I was younger, I spent a year in VISTA (often described as the domestic peace corps, essentially a federal program that places people with non-profit organizations working on issues related to poverty for a very small salary). I worked on a project that offered free wireless Internet for low-income housing. (I now work for a leading tech company). Of course, a non-profit housing organization is not going to have the technological sophistication of a tech company, but if you have a set of skills that the organization doesn't have and needs, then you're not going to be treated as a second class citizen. I had the opportunity to work with and get to know people who I otherwise would not have met, and to understand issues that are completely remote to the tech industry, but that are incredibly important to people's lives. I had the opportunity to be of service to others.

The tech industry is great. At a consumer tech company you get to work on products that people love and are important to their lives. Working for a social service agency can also be great. You get to work on projects that help people that may have a lot of disadvantages.
It's relevant to pretty much all PC gaming. Not everyone is enamored by Candy Crush and its ilk.
No, they'll just roll back selected transactions arbitrarily like they did in past flash crashes.

We're much closer to runaway biological threats than we are to AI-inspired ones. Or maybe that's my knowledge gap in the two domains speaking and we're equally far away in each.
I like how, out of the 20 examples, 10 of them essentially copied the HTML snippet in the 'Coder' section of the 2012 image. Most of them even left the "jedi" div intact.

On the other hand, only 6 of the examples copied the yellow-blue-pink splotch motif from the 'Designer' section.

(These don't have any meaning in the bigger scheme of things; they're just statistics that amused me.)
I asked about this very thing, and the people I talked to definitely recognize there's a chicken-and-egg problem. To get good people, they need good environments. And to get good environments, they need good people. I know they're working on it. I don't know enough to say whether they'll make it, but I have a lot of hope.

Also, long ago I did a contract for a state government. There was definitely some nonsense. But honestly, I was surprised how many sincere public servants there were. Sure, there were people who seemed useless, and there were definitely perverse incentives at times. But our project managed to get something useful and exciting done (on time and within budget, even) mainly because there were people at all levels of the government who really believed in doing good things for the state and its citizens. It was a very positive experience, and I can imagine something similar happening here.
This is the essence of Simon Wardley's ILC model (http://blog.gardeviance.org/2013/01/ecosystems.html) - It's a strategy that every smart maker of low level services implements.
It would be really great to fix the IRS's digital presence. Make TurboTax obsolete. I hate TurboTax.
> the barrier was created when infrastructure owners were allowed to kick the other ISPs out

This stinks of deregulation to me.
engineers don't set policy
While I've been initially skeptical of the White House's digital efforts because of my assumption that tech development, especially when it comes to public information, will always be handicapped by bureaucracy and politics...the 18F group has been doing some great work, the kind that is not at all a bad standard for private startups to follow...certainly much better than the kind of things that were rolling out in 2009-2010 (such as the overhyped petitions.whitehouse.gov and the first CTO's pushing of Drupal)

The 18F Github contains a lot of interesting work, with reliance on contemporary frameworks and practices (Jekyll seems to be their choice for microsites) https://github.com/18f

I loved 18F's work with overhauling the Federal Register site (https://www.federalregister.gov/)...and even if you think the federal government's data efforts are paltry...then you haven't seen what existed before 2009...which is pretty much nothing. The wide array of data and information that has been machine-readable and public accessible via the Internet is pretty astonishing, and while I doubt that President Obama has made it a point to keep tabs on his IT, whoever has been whispering in his ear has been very effective.

Edit: a cool project I noticed on 18F's github: https://github.com/18f/mirage ...a Django/PostgreSQL project to assist procurement officers in surveying the market for vendors...another 18F repo contains the Chef recipe for its deployment.
Give it a few years and OpenStreetMap will be superior. Here in Germany it will probably beat google maps most of the time.

There is of course still the routing part.
Self-powered intelligent keyboard could provide a new layer of security
How does this compare to DPDK?
My guess is even basic obfuscation of his code via minification/compression would eliminate the majority of these copies. The version of his portfolio linked in the article has no obfuscation (granted it could be in dev mode)
This only works if the mechanisms capturing productivity gains distribute it as economic surplus.
Right, the FCC is completely inept, so let's let a bunch of Telecoms write the laws for us, like Title X. Three cheers for deregulation!
Is it just me, or does a lot of this sound contrived and/or fed by a law enforcement agent?

> How much is it possible to sell on here if we listed every product far cheaper than everyone else? We have a majority hold over most of the movement of products in western Canada (one of the main drug ports to North America). I have researched your site and the concept seems interesting to me (as long as it is anonymous as everyone makes it out to be). We produce LSD/nBome/Ketamine/MDMA/Meth/GHB and import cocaine and heroin in massive bulk amounts.

> I’ve looked around your site, and the prices are absolutely absurd. I’m assuming most people on here selling are 3 or 4 tiers below the actual producers or distributors?

> 1M a week sounds like it would be worth selling on here, once we know exactly how everything works. Even if commission was 15% it would not matter, as we lose more than 15% doing it on the streets with street level guys getting robbed or arrest and losing product etc.

> Also, we have kidnapped friendlychemists partner Xin already and are on the hunt for friendlychemist.

> We are all familiar with PGP as we have been using it for years via email linked to our smartphones. It’s the only way we communicate with each other aside from in person, since phone calls are not secure.

> After some “questioning” he admitted he was intending on moving to a different country and setting up a new seller account on this site. We don’t take too kindly to thieves. He’s gone.

> If you have your mind set on just finding his location, I can talk to them and get them to get it for you for a fee (not sure what amount as usually when we hunt someone, there is more involved after we find them).

> I can almost guarantee it, but I stop short of guaranteeing anything unless I am 100% certain I can get the job done. I do that so I don’t look like an idiot if I can’t accomplish something I have said I can.

I mean... for a supposed Hell's Angel hard-core drug dealer that's never met this anonymous online person and only exchanged 5 messages... they seem a little too open and forthcoming. Also, PGP on your phone? What app are they using for that?

If this conversation is real, I have an inkling it was LE on the other end posing as "Readandwhite" (part of the reason none of the persons supposedly "hit" every turned up on any missing persons reports or their identities ever really found).

Clearly Dread Pirate Roberts was into some bad stuff here, but it seems... off, a bit.
Coincidentally, I had a demo call with Sumo today. I was very impressed, except for one point that makes Splunk the clear winner at the moment: I can send structured logs to Splunk and it automatically finds the keys and allows me to query on them immediately.

Meaning, I can send:
2015-02-02 01:00:00 event="Product sold" price=5

And with zero configuration in Splunk, I can now query: event="Product *" price>2 | stats sum(price)

And in the next iteration of my app, I could add 30 more key/value pairs to that message and could query on the rest of them just the same, no configuration. It makes development incredibly rapid to be able to instantly report on any metric anyone on my team logs out, debug-related or otherwise, without having to maintain some master list of every key in every log message in every service we write.

I was floored in my Sumo call today when I was told that wasn't the case in that product yet. It seems like such a basic feature-- and is why many products have switched entirely to JSON-based logs. Have you discovered a workaround, or find that to be as cumbersome as I'm anticipating?
Same goes for the DMV, as well as countless other citizen-facing government orgs. Math & administration is really the roots of computing.

Edit: I'm rather unclear what is objectionable here.
Will work for fedgov once fedgov stops using tech to violate the people. Until then, GFYS.
I'm wondering how you've found about them?
WeChat Won't Show Chinese Users BMW Ads If It Thinks They're Poor
So much criticism of Google! My question: Why on earth would Google want to cede any significant chunk of the personal transport value stream to Uber - or acquire them at a $40Bil+ valuation - when the main (only?) semi-uniquely valuable thing Uber have (a large network of drivers) is worth approximately zero dollars in a self-driving vehicle scenario. Uber are valuable and effective in a human-driven vehicle model because they have achieved critical mass in the pool of human drivers on their network, and are in a position to grow that pool. In a self driving vehicle model critical mass of vehicles/drivers is available to anyone with a decent line of credit.
Inside Radio Shack's slow motion collapse
I just want someone that also hacks on things in their free time and likes it so much that they even want to publish things.

(same idea with a technical blog)
Yeah, maybe find a way to make sure that pesky, embarrassing emails don't suddenly get deleted/disappear.
i want a lot of money. if i had 10M, i'd want more.
Word on the street is IBM's Watson is getting pretty smart
I am glad it is. Millions of people are able to get the benefits of smartphones because of that. If Google can bring auto-driving cars to the whole world with lower cost then I will again gladly welcome it. However, that's still a decade away really.
The State of .NET Core
That is why it is so difficult to predict the weather. But you don't need to predict the weather to predict changes to the global climate.

Just like you don't need much of a model to predict that if a rogue planet passed through the solar system, existing orbits would be perturbed. Calculating the precise perturbations would be complex, but not predicting their existence.

Likewise, it's difficult to predict exactly how more heat in the atmosphere will change local weather. But it's not hard to predict that heat will build up if the gases build up.
7 Modern Marketing Frameworks Every Startup Needs to Know
Staples, Office Depot in Advanced Talks to Merge
I agree. I wonder if they're willing to take people straight out of college. I'd be interested in doing a short "tour of duty".
For curiosities sake, I decided to take a look at healthcare.gov, put in a random ZIP code picked from New York in google maps. When I tried to look at individual cover I got an ACCESS DENIED. Is it restricted to US IPs? Seems like an odd thing to lock down.

http://nystateofhealth.ny.gov/individual

[edit]
I got to that link from this working site: http://healthbenefitexchange.ny.gov/ which I got to from Healthcare.gov
Not mention the sites that hijack "/" for their search. I don't think there's a single site that hijacked keys which ended up being a good idea (at least from my experience).

I think browsers need option to disable key hijacking.
Lessig said this once: Code is Law.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html

See also: http://codev2.cc

Granted, he was talking about how the private sector can fill in where government doesn't go. Yet even on the inside there are choices to be made and influence to be exerted.
That dynamic sounds somewhat similar to the NCO-Commissioned officer relationship. The race to put everyone through college promulgated IMHO a concomitant, deplorable attitude shift that the line/floor had little to nothing to offer. You even see glimmers of this in the API sub-thread on this discussion. Once your automation efforts are down to a "game of inches" (see Al Pacino's performance that expounds on that term), iterative feedback from the line/floor saves you a ton of design time.
The net becomes a utility (and ISPs utility providers), and every breach, exploit, or unprotected private data leak becomes a terrorist action at prosecutorial discretion.

Something to think about.
OK, it was legal prior to 1996 (was it the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992?), and majority of cable systems were established in the 20-30 years prior to 1996. So if a cable company was granted a monopoly by the government, and if it is able to keep competitors out because they enjoy monopolistic market share, isn't the critique fair?

If I want build a network in Comcast territory, there are very "new" customers. I have to go through an extremely expensive build out, and convince customers to switch. Meanwhile, Comcast can undercut me on price because they have already have infrastructure paid for. They can offer $1 internet to people trying to leave until I run out of money.

So yes, you are right that providers aren't currently monopolies, but they exist in markets distorted by being monopolies in the past.

edit: note that the Comcast/Time Warner mega providers grew themselves by buying up all the small ex-monopolies across the country - they didn't build out against them.
No, they don't set policy. But they inform it.
Why it takes so long to get data back from New Horizons
NTRU Encryption Cracking Challenge
> The exact same reason we don't get our resources from near-Earth asteroids and Earth's neighboring planets: It's freaking expensive.

Remember that I referenced its relative price. We don't get Earth's resources from near earth asteroids because we can get them more cheaply from Earth. Obviously, this wouldn't apply to Venus. Likewise, lots of things on the west coast of Alaska come from Seattle, not because it's cheap in absolute terms, but because it's the cheapest.

> So why bother going to Venus at all, as opposed to creating such an economy around Earth?

For the express purpose of not living on Earth. For the express purpose of spreading our civilization beyond the confines of one planet. Such an Earth independent economy and culture might be more likely to exist around Venus than Earth, simply because the proximity of Earth is more likely to pull investment away.

> All successful colonies require an economic driver, and Venus is no exception.

Not all colonies on Earth were motivated primarily by economics. People have lived in a variety of places on Earth motivated by religious and military concerns. Successful colonies will need economies to keep themselves going, but economic concerns are merely the strongest motivator for settlement, not the only ones. Granted they are in the minority, but there are people who live in the middle of deserts, in pressure vessels at the bottom of the ocean, in all kinds of remote wilderness, in many cases for the sake of living in such places as private citizens.

Granted, it will be a long time before such civilizations would begin to remotely rival the scale of Earth's, but I'm sure they will come to exist and that they will achieve near self-sufficiency.

Summary: People will live in space because they want to be there. Once a spacefaring population reaches a certain threshold, it will become self sufficient.
It costs $250, we can walk away the moment it becomes limiting. It's a lot harder to walk away from hours spent learning to do something some particular way.
Platypus is the one true hacker animal
i didn't realize negation is an invented concept ("popperian")
I probably agree on your viewpoint, but it's not like Google really has an advantage of "a decade of research" over everyone else.

They do have a serious advantage, but a the vast majority of benefits of this decade of research is not developed and kept by Google in-house. Key parts of it are either included in non-core components (sensor hardware, commodity electronics) that are used also in other applications (such as computer vision applications in manufacturing industry robotics) and Uber can simply buy that from other companies; or in publicly available academic research and data resources.

In terms of actual competitive advantage in self-driving cars, I'd say that Google has the following things - (a) a vast store of high-precision mapping and laser scan data that nobody else has; (b) a 1 (2?) year gap in pure research between what they have and what has been openly published by someone; and (c) a bunch of engineering expertise and experimentation experience that Uber doesn't have but some others do -e.g. many major car manufacturers. An impressive gap, but one that can be overcome in acouple years if you're serious about it.
Bad guys? What a myopic view of the world. Having seen first hand both industry and government IT, both worlds have their faults.

I'm not going to get sucked into a debate about which is worse, but I'll give you my perspective on working with federal gov't IT. Yes, policy sucks, thats not going to change any time soon but it is moving towards something halfway decent. There are plenty of skilled, intelligent and motivated IT professionals who you would actually be working for. You don't do the bidding of every politician out there, but you do follow directives from offices higher up such as the white house. Btw, the respect these people proffer to devs is immense because they know you could have worked anywhere else and make more money but you decided to work for a cause they believe in as well.

So please be considerate when you make these sweeping assumptions about the govt.
https://www.federalregister.gov is a favorite of mine in the federal government, and an inspiration (they launched with a full JSON REST API in 2010!) -- but just so it's clear, that's not an 18F project.

The code for federalregister.gov can be found here: https://github.com/usnationalarchives/fr2

(Disclosure: I work for 18F.)
What's a Link?
Let's say it's January 2017 and President Bush or Rubio or Paul or Walker is being inaugurated. Does the 'U.S. Digital Service' actually keep getting funded? If it does, do the staff actually want to stay? Will any of them be willing to work on government objectives that might not be in line with their personal politics?

I'll believe this is actually what it claims it is when I see it and its staff persist through a change of political control in the White House. Until then, I'm more than a little skeptical.
The Week of the Atom Bomb (2012)
I couldn't help but think this as well.

I also don't understand how someone who is supposedly a creative type and makes their own art/copyright material be able to unabashedly steal something like this.

What's even creepier by the way, is that some people even copied his smile and hair style for their photos.
Thats actually incorrect, while we don't set policy up on high, the results of our work and projects we initiate push policymakers to set those policies. JackFr is right, engineers inform and that holds a lot of weight beyond what you might think.
Yes! There are so many DMV things I'd like to do online.
>If you have physical access to the harddrive and can turn it on or off legitimately, then can you not just image the harddrive to a backup (While its running)

How would one complete an image level backup of an encrypted hard drive without admin rights?
It was the apple 2, also designed by Wozniak that really made them famous, not the first one. It was the first personal computer to hit the market that you could purchase and use without some serious technical knowledge, both is software and hardware. So he may not have technically invented the personal computer, but he built one that was actually marketable. And Apple was worth billions within the first years of their existence, so I would say it was pretty influential. Some people may not like Apple, but it's impossible to deny the massive role they played in the early days. And it really wouldn't have happened without Wozniak, he was the technical genius of the group.
Regarding mapping - one overlooked aspect is the fine grain detail required for driverless cars. For example - current precision is for a road, required precision for driverless cars is for a lane. Not sure how Google can leverage Uber to solve this.
You'll hate them even more: They're one reason why taxes are more complicated than they should/could be.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/04/auto...
> You are subscribing to ad hominem attacks, without knowledge of how these services get built, paid for & capitalized upon.

Please. Your company provides a commodity. You are a utility and soon will be regulated as such. There is nothing special about what you do vs. ISPx ISPy or ISPz.

If our current model worked, we (the US) wouldn't have third-world quality internet at first world prices.

I am a pretty conservative guy, but in this case: enough is enough. You guys got greedy, and people are pissed.

> I work for an ISP

Change is coming. Prepare accordingly.
The trick here is it not go to the reset page but to the signup page. Almost always, there is a message that indicates that the email id is already taken.

(which is why I think that indicating specifically, that the userid was incorrect or the password was, is better UX.)
The US digital Service should also make and maintain a framework that state and local governments can implement. Paying a parking ticket in Los Angeles is a trip to the 90's.
Quantum Mechanics and Scientific Realism
I think he might have been referencing the initial build team.
Sometimes I do wonder about the double standards involved in characterizations of certain people.

Like if it's someone we like, then that person "embellished" their record, but if it's someone we don't then, they "lied".

So thinking aloud, does that mean I can go crash some courses at Stanford too, then put it in the pitch deck as "Attended Stanford". Knowing full well, physical access, is not what is meant by the use of the term and that investors may be misled?

It seems to me, this might qualify as evidence of the reality distortion field at work.
Wave function gets real in quantum experiment
> Btw, the respect these people proffer to devs is immense because they know you could have worked anywhere else and make more money but you decided to work for a cause they believe in as well.

At best they could be as clueless as you and believe in "the cause", at worst they see how it is in reality and they see you as a sucker working for less than you deserve.
The raspberry pi is supposed to be an educational tool. You cannot learn anything about the inner workings of an operating system when it is closed source. There isn't much of an argument to be made really for Microsoft on Raspberry Pi. Programming in c# can be done on Linux these days. Why one would want to use Microsoft is really beyond me.