skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"You really don't need X for Go" is becoming the Go community catchphrase. And they're right: I won't need anything for Go because I wouldn't use a language whose community actively resists improvement.

There's no language you couldn't construct a similar argument for, is there? Except maybe Perl. There's always going to be some capability favored by some loud person who's going to publicly disqualify some language for not having that feature.

Weird that in this case it's an equivalent of npm or Rubygems, which are nice tools for beginners but a complete pain in the ass for serious projects; essentially, you're disqualifying Golang for not reinventing DLL Hell like everyone else.

Generics, I get. Package management?
Meh, not fan at all of Git Extensions but I have some colleagues using it and they are happy with it I have to say.
Then they missed that mark with IndexedDB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9106752
It has been long established that using Twisted's web capabilities is a bad idea. It has been broken from the usability point of view for a very long time and I don't think it will ever be fixed. Without reciting the entire history, Tornado got a lot of crap for not just fixing what Twisted had going on, but creating a new framework from scratch. Having worked with both, I see why they did it.

Basically, if you have a bad experience with Twisted + web, you are very much not alone but the fault is with Twisted, not Python. Here's how I break it down:

If you need async networking at the TCP or UDP level, use Twisted.

If you want a web application, use Django.

If you want a one page landing page type application, use Flask.

If you are on a restricted budget and need really good performance for your web application that you tried and couldn't extract from Django, go with Tornado.
Better machine learning
Welcome to the interview process - not every employers does it, but coding evaluations are common. Also: grow up or cut the arrogance, nobody's impressed with the attitude but you.
In California we have this absurd voter-approved law we call Proposition 13, which caps property rates. It effectively eliminates the only "wealth tax" we have, leaving our schools perineally underfunded and removing incentives to upzoning from both city governments and home-owners! It's a real piece of work.
World's Largest SIM Card Maker Has No Clue Whether It Was Hacked by the NSA
That's a mac app though, and I'm working on Windows :)
I invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in my business to get a visa.

This option is not available to everyone. I don't think you should have to spend that much in order to come to the U.S. But I also wouldn't blame someone without those resources trying to better themselves in any way possible.
Ideally you don't have to sync the data because one service owns that data. Other services request that data via api. In a RESTful world those api requests are cacheable.
Oh, I see. FWIW, Republic Wireless has unlimited 4G for $40/month (that's the whole price of the service, exclusive of taxes/government fees)
Your reasoning reminds me of the danger of retinal damage when observing a solar eclipse - a human's natural inclination to not stare at the sun is sharply reduced because the viewable area is so much smaller than usual. Looking at a thin slice of the sun is as dangerous as looking at the unobscured sun, even if it doesn't feel like it. But I don't think Betelgeuse would be dangerous in this way. It would be more like watching a lunar eclipse, which may be done without safety equipment.
Crimes are what we decide they are! Criminalizing this sort of behavior is something that most Americans don't want [1]. Expecting someone to be ashamed for violating a law that isn't particularly popular seems silly. Should Uber be ashamed for violating taxi regulations, when those regulations are hated by consumers?

[1] http://americasvoice.org/blog/fox-news-poll-confirms-path-to...
It's come full circle from the time of Old Glory Robot Insurance -- now robots need insurance against human attacks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXnL7sdElno

Sam Waterston would be turning in his grave, if only he were dead and buried.
Probably not unless you consider a group of self proclaimed holy men trying to follow it :-)

That said if you had some instruments closer to the heliopause you would definitely be able to detect the shock wave at that distance. It would be faint but should be well above the noise level of other particles.
I really like Republic Wireless, but for anyone considering it: http://republic-wireless.wikia.com/wiki/The_Complete_List_of...
Or an inherent failure of human communication. Previous generations can't communicate their own past point of view, experience and the meaning of the newly found solutions. The new generation try to interpret these solutions with their own point of view and lack of experience.
Read "The Puzzle Palace" and find out why the NSA is structured like it is. The US gov has been re-orging the NSA and factions inside the gov have been fighting over its control since its inception. To use an annoyingly beat to death phrase: we haven't seen its final form yet.

Actually a pretty good article overall, but these two lines bother me greatly:

> "What was supposed to be a single agency with a dual mission—protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies"

That was never the mission and is not the mission of any similar org in the past 100+ years. It is to eavesdrop on everyone, including ones allies. The Brits were eavesdropping on everyone's telegrams over 100 years ago. This isn't something new.

> "The result is an agency that prioritizes intelligence gathering over security"

Again, that is the #1 goal of the NSA and other similar organizations. Security never has and never will be its #1 goal.
It just seems that you can do anything on paper but covert agreements between the agencies after break up will still occur.
Can You Measure Workplace Sexism?
I'm late to the party, but...

> Cost cutting? Businesses pay engineers HUGE salaries; if there was clear evidence that a given office plan was significantly less productive it would logically be a huge waste of money to put their highly paid employees in it.

That depends on the business. I have only worked with companies that do primarily government contracting. Engineer salaries get billed to specific government contracts. Facilities costs come out of general overhead. The first bucket generates revenue for the company, since they bill us out for more than they pay us (including benefits); the second bucket is limited, severely in some cases, and pooled across the entire company. In such a system, cost cutting on perks and facilities makes rational sense because the people controlling the budget for those things don't give a shit about salaries. Any company wherein money for facilities is separated from money for salaries is going to be vulnerable to such pressures.
Kaspersky Labs Launches Online Bootcamp to Eye Security Startups
I love Patreon - I've donated and just launched the Creator page on my new site (sorry, plug): patreon.com/teleplaytime
8k for someone on a fixed income is a must move. An example of this is the boom in western ND with rents going up $600 - $800 month which forced an issue with a lot of elderly people on fixed incomes.

Tax-duductible doesn't cover it for fixed income folks.
Oculus Mobile VR Jam 2015 Offers $1M in Prizes
Sadly a properly managed program would require employers to pay a minimum wage, which is unacceptable to employers (along with other things that would solve the problem like mandatory use of eVerify for all employment applications).

Basically the current mess will continue because there is too much money to be made out of it.
But is the website being served by a computer that is essentially a robot in servitude?

The hypocrisy is eye-watering.

And won't someone spare a thought for all the routers and switches and shackled nodes that the data had to pass through to reach your screen.
Take a Number
Does this not wholly preclude the possibility of vendors shipping a library without source?
Google is welcome to London: there is a desperate situation sadly - no major competition for tech talent is making salaries very stagnant for everyone.

Also: "“If you brought 5,000 people in and they all work for Google and they said, ‘We want you to vote for this candidate,’ they can own the town.”" - that is how democracy works, e.g. attracting welfare earners to vote for those who will give them more welfare.
It's easy to casually propose such things, on a blog, while lobbing the same tired criticisms about over-zealous intelligence gathering programs. But to actually implement such grand, sweeping measures would require resources that don't justify the benefits. Just scale back and increase oversight on troubling programs, and otherwise let the NSA do its critical job as an intelligence gathering agency.
Show HN: A small helper lib for commandline heavy workflows in Spotify's Luigi
This is another example of where great copy is what really matters on the web. I love it.
Imagine if the Centers for Disease Control, instead of researching cures for diseases, had a budget in the billions for buying weaponized viruses and bacteria, and was subverting disease prevention. Nobody would stand for that. It would be poisoning health care worldwide.

As another commenter pointed out here: "Can we just flip their budget over to making sure US companies are secure?" That is, of course, what should be done. We get the results we spend money on. If the NSA's budget were spent on making security easy and routine, we would have easy and routine security. But that's not how we express our intentions with the budget right now.
meh, call me when you get Sarah McLachlan to sing over it.
Is the iPhone’s popularity impacting its ability to get media coverage?
Though I see $550 round trip tickets on Delta, so there's that.
If it's anything like Austin, it will turn it into yet another homogenous urban experience, partially or completely wrecking the things that made the town interesting in the first place.

It's not without it's advantages - cheaper access to a tech society and it's trappings. OTOH, businesses and institutions that we've come to know as friends have been annihilated.
This article's title got me thinking that Apple, as a company, could actually be interested in suppressing the advancement of the web. Their apps are a shockingly effective alternative to the internet, and the store becomes more comprehensive by the year.

Even at this point, Apple's apps can replace all but some long-tail usages. So, despite the fact that suppressing the progress of the web will hurt the user experience of its own web browser users, that affects users of all operating systems fairly equally. But in the meantime, Apple can keep improving their OS, the app development process, &c; and they could steadily crowd out the web until iOS becomes the primary (or, if Apple gets it way, the solitary) source of networked information distribution/consumption. And after a while, all of what are currently thought of as web or web 2.0 companies would all be at the mercy of Apple. They would, for all intents and purposes, privatize the web.
I was thinking mid-high rise buildings constructed in Mountain View near the train station. I'm going to use Apple as a comparison because we have more information about their costs. Their new $5 billion complex provides about 3 million square feet on 175 acres. Northwestern's medical campus in downtown Chicago, near where I used to live, is 4.25 million square feet across two small city blocks (9 acres). Mid-rise 20-25 story buildings provide a lot of floor space!

Just to put things into perspective: the two blocks bounded by Evelyn, Franklin, Dana, and Bryant near the Caltrain station in Mountain View, which is currently just nondescript strip mall, is 8.5 acres. We're not talking about SF or NYC where it might be hard to find that much contiguous space.
Note that this is from 2014, but it is more relevant than ever.
He's certainly physically stable, but is he mentally stable?
There is a world of difference between the importance of a GPA and the importance of a Benz.

Low GPA means no good job straight out of college (because apparently you need a 3.5+ from an ivy league school to model in excel) means in a lot of cases lesser income for the rest of your life.

No Benz means you can drive a Toyota. Big whoop.
sucker into whatever they're pushing

This is the same "If you build it they will come" logic that doom so many startups. The reality is that even if you have a perfect solution to someone's problem you still have to go sell it to them. Uber started with cold calls, so did many other successful startups. It's the lowest barrier to entry there is.

Lets also differentiate between b2b cold calls which is what I have in mind mostly, and b2c cold calling. I think the latter is probably magnitudes less effective and more "sleazy" than the former and there are better ways of targeting advertising at individual consumers at this point.
Programming a Computer for Playing Chess (1950) [pdf]
Yes. Imagine if the NSA were tasked with being a gatekeeper for data privacy and integrity that large companies like Facebook had to work with any time they pushed an update that sent data somewhere new, in the same way that the FDA verifies safety and efficacy of pharmaceuticals when they're applied to a new problem-domain. (I know that sounds almost satirically over-the-top, but it could work—if it were limited to companies [and branches of government] that were handling enough user data that, say, identity fraud attacks would be made possible just by having it. And any system where the government itself has specified the data-integrity requirements: voting terminals, library checkout systems, etc.)

Come to think of it, this NSA would probably also be responsible for chasing down companies who ask you for your SSN, wouldn't it?

They could also offer free pen-testing services (presumably through their defense subcontractors; they wouldn't have to employ any whitehats themselves) for small businesses who can't afford pen-testers, like a specialized form of industrial-development grant.

And, of course, they could also do the only legitimate/legal "active no-advance-notice" pen-testing for infrastructure they're concerned about (ISPs, hosts like AWS, etc.), converting taxpayer dollars directly into those "eyes that make bugs shallow."

Effectively, the NSA are to our sovereign data boundaries as the coast guard is to (most of) our physical ones. Since that's the case—where's our Lighthouse Service?
I just tried SFO to Mexico City. $447 on Google ($427 with a 12 hour layover), vs $352 on Kayak, and $338 on priceline.
Technically, you are wrong. NSA has a signals intelligence side and an information assurance side. It does have two dual missions. You may argue that they haven't done a good job with the information assurance side of their mission, but you cannot argue that it is not a stated mission of the NSA.
I use TortoiseGit on Windows because working with hundreds of repos via the file browser seems more natural to me. Standalone git clients cause too much friction when working with lots of repos in my opinion. They get cluttered with a huge list of repos that I have to organize separately from how they are already organized on my file-system.

With TortoiseGit, when I find a git repo in the file-system and want to start working with it, I don't have to start another program, I can just activate the file browser's context menu with a single keystroke and then I can instantly see all of the Git commands that I normally use. I hardly even have to look at the list of commands though because the next keystroke is usually to hit the letter of the command that I want: (M)erge, (C)ommit, S(w)itch/Checkout, (L)og, etc... because you can customize the context menu to show the most useful commands.

(Disabling overlay icons in TortoiseGit is also a good idea. I typically just delete their registry entries via SysInternals/Autoruns.)
But what about the situation where you have an entity service that owns the data for one piece of the domain, for example a People service, and then other services, like the Address service and the Billing service, reference a particular person. In that scenario, I can imagine the Address service and the Billing service would have a foreign key referencing a person in the People service. Then, what happens if the Person gets deleted? In that case, we've got a consistency problem, even though each service owned its data.

Is the best practice to not use entity services?
But.. what about parallel construction? We know that the NSA is feeding tips to, among others, the DEA and ATFE -- they're just pretending to find out about criminal activity in other-than-blanket-surveilance ways. The practice is so commonplace that the NSA has a special division for seeding the evidence to other agencies, and there are indications that even state and local law enforcement agencies are in on the fun.
It would likely break all sorts of TOS agreements at various levels, and wouldn't last a month.

There are industries where profits are huge and disruption is badly needed. Airlines are not one of them, afaik; ever since low-cost became a thing, they've been under constant economic pressure and usually operate on razor-thin margins, at least in Europe. Mid-size companies have all but disappeared, even giants like British Airways and KLM have been permanently de-structured.

Flying is an expensive and risky business, piling up the pressure is likely to generate even more safety issues than we already have today. If you're all about price, just fly with RyanAir and be sure that nobody can ask you for less money than they do.
Yes, but you can do a lot more with SourceTree than with Github app (last time I tried GH, anyway). SourceTree allows you to do some pretty involved things, and because of that, it has to be a bit "closer to the metal". It's still very easy to do the basics IMO, but you do need to know a bit more of git terminology, etc.

Different target markets, IMO.

I don't know many serious devs that use the GH app, to be honest (because of its simplicity).
But still the US Citizenship application form has lots of very specific questions about past deeds that she would have been required to answer under oath. Either a) She disclosed and answered them "correctly" and had a good immigration lawyer or b) She lied, in which case her citizenship (in theory) could be revoked should USCIS wish to purse the matter in court.
There could be a much-much worse scenario: we will not figure out AI within this generation, and dying by the manipulators of a robot will stay just a dream.
Thanks for the opportunity to try out Keybase. Great work.

The only question, but really important is: What is Keybase's business model? How will you make your living? It's a great service, I'd love to build upon it (my company does email as a service), but that step requires knowing you'll still be here a few years from now.
Comments like

> (and they’re mostly blinded by iFever anyway)

do nothing but make the author look bad and make many readers (such as myself) inclined to discount the entire piece. It's really disappointing to see something like this in an article that otherwise has a legitimate point.
Those aren't assumptions. Axiom 18, the final conclusion, states, "we're on the receiving end of a war fought for control of our societies by opposing forces that are increasingly more powerful than we are." The reader is left to decide whether that is a good or bad thing.

Edit: And if you are labor, if you are the people of the democracy, of course these things are bad. It is self-evident. It is not a hidden assumption, but rather falls out of the conclusion. No one wants to be under the finger of another's control. These things are only good for capital.
The market's horizon depends on the world's population time preference and risk aversion as a whole, not on the whims of venture capitalist.

Why? Because arbitrage. If the world as a whole has a low rate of time preference and risk aversion, investments will flow towards high potential long term projects rather than short term ones.

But what if you're a greedy, myopic VC with high time preference who wants to make money now? That doesn't affect too much how you will value deals. What you care about is how much money you will make at the exit, which will depend on the equity valuation at that point. And that valuation, depends on the global investment's community risk aversion and risk preference.

Facebook trades at a P/E ratio of 71, meaning the equity is worth 71 years of current earnings. Netflix has a P/E of 116. Think that's shorts-sighted?

Ultimately, investments come from two sources, money saved and invested by individuals, and banks.

If it were only the first, you could say that the type of investments you see reflect the society you have. As a whole, society picks taxi cabs now rather than maybe some pharmaceutical product later. It's not capitalism, it's human nature.

Banks complicate the picture, since they turn their deposits into loans of various maturity. The rates on these loans are ultimately tied to central bank policies.

However, these policies generally attempt to keep rates low, so as to stimulate "productive" investments. In addition, various bail-out guarantees tend to artificially increase the amount of risk taking.

So there you have it. Capitalism by itself merely represents the time preference and risk preference of the population as a whole, and central banks tend to make it more risk taking and longer terms than investors would actually prefer.
Bruce makes a good point here. There is a balance between the COMSEC and SIGINT. Any advance you make in SIGINT is a failure of COMSEC and vice versa. The issue is then the 'viruses' of our internet ecosystem, the hackers and state level threats. How do you balance the two? Will the nature of the system self-balance as threats are discovered and then bandaged?

Still, good job not just demonizing the NSA, they serve a purpose in the game of international relations, one that the free world may not like, but that we all need.
Ask HN: Potential investor wants us to change our name. Is that reasonable?
My cofounder and I are in our last year of university, and started a company together about 6 months ago. A local VC firm has started an initiative to invest $20k (as an uncapped, undiscounted convertible note) in student-run startups from schools in the area, presumably so they get the chance to find out about the promising ones early and join in later rounds.

My cofounder and I pitched our company, gave them docs for due diligence and they agreed to give us the money -- but only if we changed our name. Apparently they've already invested in a company (in a completely different market) that has the same name as ours with one letter changed.

We're not super sold on our name to start with, so it's not really a huge issue to change it (although we do have contracts, paperwork and domains with this name) but it's more a question of the kind of relationship we want to have with investors. To me it feels unreasonable for them to expect us to change our name when there is no possible confusion in the marketplace, just a small amount for them internally. I'm worried that they may be really activist investors and/or not act with our best interests at heart.

If we sign the papers, they won't have any official control over our company (at least until the note gets rolled into our seed round), so if they have any other strange requests we can always just tell them "no." Does it seem reasonable to accept the terms and take the 20k?
On Versioning
LoungeBuddy raises cash, benefits from airport delays
Who can we trust to tell us the answer?

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/2/25/climate_deniers_expose...