skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But this sort of spying clearly isn't like ordering a bombing run on Berlin or sending a tank division to capture Athens.

Spying isn't even a military operation, it is mostly diplomatic.

Spying has always been common even amongst allies. It is a form of hacked transparency. Countries hide as much as they can.
These knowledge workers will continue working automating jobs away until their own jobs are automated.
I remember five years ago when you could make enormous amounts of money if you knew how to send a tweet...

I don't. Wow, what a missed opportunity.

ten years ago when you could make enormous amounts of money if you knew how to install anti-virus software

I don't remember that, either. That said, you can still make passable money doing charlatan "computer repair" that amounts to running an antivirus scan, CCleaner, disk cleanup and maybe some graphics tweaks to speed things up a bit.

And now these things have gotten so easy that the value of knowing how to do them is basically zero.

They've always been easy?

Releases like this show that web development is quickly going the same way.

It's an arms race, really. You have a lot more batteries than ever before, but the expectations for today's web applications are so high that the real value comes in being able to compose vast and multifaceted technological stacks, which as it turns out, is not so easy. There's almost this zealotry against building a native application that makes people take ridiculous hoops just so they can view things under a web browser.

Additionally, the abstractions are still pretty leaky thus far, so building a complex app requires a lot of domain-specific knowledge that has yet to become invisible.
Shaggy beard, long hair, and tattoos are part of what's going to be at the job. You're not going to be drinking beer on the job.
Eloquent Javascript was the first programming book that I ever worked through online and subsequently went and bought because I was so happy with it. I was young and playing Diablo 2: LoD and stumbled upon some bot that would let me do Mephisto runs for loot all night, I was amazed with it and went back to the forums where I'd found it and did some reading, this was the book that they recommended for anyone who was interested in learning some programming.

I'd have to say that this book was one of the more gentle and concise introductory books I've ever read and so far I couldn't be happier that it was my personal introduction to JS and programming. It certainly set me leaps ahead in the JS section when I attended a web dev bootcamp. It is my personal go to for any of my friends who approach me about their interest in getting started with programming. Big Nerd Ranch books are a close second but I've only recently found them and begun reading them.
I used Django a few years ago but am now learning Flask and coupled with SQLAlchemy, WTForms and a few other extensions seems to be very intuitive and powerful.

Just curious, what batteries in Django make it preferable to you over Flask+SQLAlchemy+Jinja2?
Processing and tying requests to a phone number isn't the scalability bottleneck; that's easy to do.

The hard part and main scalability concern is coordinating user requests with other third party services, and that can't be automated in any way. (For at least the next few years, anyways). That's not something you could implement and scale at a hackathon.
I've been using Google Flights for over 2 years. Why is it just now getting announced?
Three Austrian men first to get bionic hands after amputation
> Launching a service now without thinking about scaling is an amateur move.

I don't think they were shooting for the stars with Magic. It seemed a hack from day one. My impression is they didn't intend it to grow as it did.
Putting Apache Kafka to Use: A Guide to Building a Stream Data Platform
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I'm assuming a shared database. So cascading deletes would be defined in the table's schema. Let's pretend we're using Postgresql:

\d Person

[A bunch of table schema stuff]

Referenced by:

TABLE "Billing" CONSTRAINT "billing_id_fk" FOREIGN KEY (id) REFERENCES Person(id) ON DELETE CASCADE

(I typed that off the type of my head so it might not be quite correct.)
>We are digging through. By the end of the week you will get an absolute statement on that. I do not believe there is any. But I want to be 1,000 percent sure.

Lenovo could come out ahead on this thing IMO if they are honest and really clean up their default builds from here on out.

Take note from your new acquisition Motorola and how they just add a little bit here and there to the AOSP builds. Not flood them with a bloatware and Motorola Email, Motorola Browser, and such like some companies do.
Yeah, events. Which are message queues for most things, api calls if it really needs to be done synchronously
I gotta say, I find those four-legged robots terrifying, because I know the first use of them is going to be for police/military/security-forces to use them to attack us.
Is there a way to track & regulate these? e.g. if drone operators are breaking the law by flying too low, then do police have the means to cite violators? If so, I don't see what the issue is - they're not enforcing their own law very well. If not... well that's a whole other problem.
If you're not afraid of NCurses, sup (http://supmua.org/) manages GPG.
All that said, Betelgeuse isn’t expected to explode for another 100,000 years or so.

Total click bait title.
This could use some elaboration.

Charge who? Your clients? Businesses trying to contact you? Everyone?

How? Do they have to pay before they can even send it? You send them a bill afterwards?
I took this course about a year ago. It was my real exposure to a functional language. I had a lot of fun!
If Google thinks this will be an issue dealing with Mountain View, they'll just go with a whole new location. This isn't brinksmanship.
The fundamental issue isn't their culture or organizational structure, it's their unethical missions, which breed cultures of secrecy and opaque, unaccountable and defensive institutions. I don't see how you can set up a spy agency to prevent it from evolving in that direction. Would love to hear of counter-examples, though.
I think student loans are the financialization of labor.
Wow, I didn't expect to receive a reply from you! Thanks, I'll check out the Coursera course. I did start reading "Functional Programming in Scala" by Paul Chiusano and Rúnar Bjarnason, but wanted something a bit more beginner-friendly. Then again I was recovering from a concussion at the time, so perhaps I should revisit it now. :)
A decent workaround is to use the 1.5.2 until they manage to fix the current version.
--Should police be shut down completely?

Sometimes, yes. When the corruption and brutality is so bad that there's no other option.

--Would you be safe in a city with no police?

In Acapulco, the answer was yes. The police went on strike and it was so much better without them that the people didn't want them back.
This is exactly what I was looking for! I started looking at Scala over the weekend and found the existing beginner-oriented documentation to be pretty lacking. I also signed up for the course.
> Google, per the Chrome rep quoted in the article, prefers PE from a technical perspective, and only doesn't support it because it won't be universal because of Apple's resistance.

See below: the Chrome team have other (performance) objections.
The study only covers methane leakage and says nothing of the chemical slurries used nor the groundwater/aquifer leakage of said slurries. IMO, the Ars article is reverse FUD.
>ed more developers? Hire more.

They're aiming to increase their total number of Cupertino employees from 16k to over 24k in 2016. For any organisation, absorbing another 7k+ employess is no mean feat.

Apple is experiencing unprecedented success and fantastic growth. But sure, that's trivial to manage. You could do it in your sleep. Maybe you should drop Tim Cook an email.
The json serialization is also very different. Flask is using json.dumps while the django code is using a custom JsonResponse class that includes an isinstance check.
I'm surprised about your data issues since Google owns most of it (from their acquisition of ITA software).

https://www.itasoftware.com/
Incidentally I reserved two tickets yesterday after finding the best prices with Google Flights. It linked me directly to the airline's reservation system a couple of clicks away from confirmation.

BTW, I used their map to find the most suitable flight. I could change dates on the fly and see the prices change instantly. It's a great service.

Now if they could do the same for railways, I'd gladly pay for the convenience.
I worked at Google MTV in 2013 and my wife and I thought that Mountain View had a lot to offer: good restaurants, bookstores, shopping, and the nice (huge!) movie theatre complex very close to the building where I worked. San Francisco, Santa Cruz, San Jose, and Monterey were all close for more entertainment. My only complaint was that it cost us $6000+ per month to live there. I quit and went back home to Arizona where my income is smaller but the cost of living is very inexpensive.
Thanks, worked for me too.
Correct, I was going to mention that

If you need a "CMS style" web application go for Django, now if it breaks too much from that you might want to try Flask/Pylons/Pyramid
Yes, if Uber had said they were ready to go in dozens of cities and took people's orders for cars and charged their credit cards but the cars never showed up and they had no manned number to call or email address to deal with that problem and they hadn't coded an app that tracked cars and they had no backend software to handle orders and registration they would have maybe had a different business outcome.
Quite complete and interesting.
Programing in Scala[1] helped make a lot of things click for me. I'd start there.

1.http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Scala-Comprehensive-Step-S...
Does that include bio robots? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mXI4WWhPn-U
Based on my degree in astrophysics from the University of Popular Science Blogs IIRC they're from quasars or something.
There's a distinction to be drawn between James Bond-style spying ("Humint" - which is the kind you're actually referring to) and the large-scale, indiscriminate, archived, mass-surveillence of otherwise ordinary people ("Sigint" - which is what we've learned about over the last couple of years).
"collecting data on innocent Americans either incidentally or deliberately, and data on foreign citizens indiscriminately. It doesn't make us any safer, and it is liable to be abused. "

If you are collecting data in order to analyze and identify threats to national security, how would you possibly exclude "the innocent" beforehand? These people are not innocent as much as they aren't guilty - however blinding oneself to observation seems like a knee-jerk alternative.

If these practices are "liable to be abused" isn't the solution proper oversight or accountability and not to shut down the entire program?
I don't understand why society thinks that certain things can be contained, while certain other things cannot be.

The liberals will always be telling you that the drug war is a failure, and that drug users will be able to get their hands on drugs anyway, and we should embrace that fact so we can retain some level of control, and so otherwise innocent people don't have to interact with criminals. But guns on the other hand...

The conservatives will always be telling you that guns can't be controlled-- that criminals will get their hands on guns anyway and will conceal carry all the time, and that we're better off keeping them legal so we can retain some level of control, and so that innocent people don't have to be at a disadvantage to criminals. But drugs on the other hand...

I take this a level further: There's no containing cryptography. The people that are on tor looking at child pornography are protected. The people that are on tor plotting terrorist activities are also protected. The only people not protected are people that don't care or don't know, and they're not the people that are worth spying on in the first place.

The NSA internet data collection is perhaps the most frivolous government program in the history of the United States. We've spent god knows how much money building their Utah data center, and it will be useless as soon as the tech community starts encrypting. [1]

[1]: letsencrypt.org
This seems like it's just taking the idea of decoupling your service and talking to them via APIs a little further by saying.. decouple them to an even smaller granularity?

This has always been the generally accepted way to scale out software services. Is there a novel idea being discussed here, or just that they've been doing this at Netflix?
ElasticSearch and Denormalization in Rails
Many people like boring. It makes for a stable place to raise a family. If your boring little town becomes overwhelmed with traffic, etc, then it is no longer a simple task to run your kids to their swimming lessons and soccer practices. Mock that suburban life all you want, it won't change the fact that boring towns work well for many families.
Some of those predictions have been around a long time-perhaps in 1994 Quebec might have been pictured as leaving Canada, but it never came to pass, and seems anachronistic in 2015. Quebec becoming independent seemed almost like a trope or cliche for 90s sci fi.
I suppose that in that case, your approach makes sense.
End to end encryption though Kafka: our proof of concept
Here is the evidence: https://twitter.com/wundercounter/status/570454045099307008
Arguably not as optimized as Magic, strangely.

Call your pizza company and see how much effort it takes you to order a pizza to your house. They don't know your card number, your address, etc.

Compare with magic: "I want a large pepperoni pizza". Confirm the price, you're done. About 20 seconds of time involved.

Assuming your time is worth, I don't know, $20/hour or more, this seems to be worth the money directly--not even accounting for less cognitive load, loss of focus, daily happiness, whatever.

The pizza company sucks at taking your pizza order. Magic doesn't suck at it.
upvoted.

Yes, that's exactly it. When I see these videos, I am terrified.

I (and I don't think you) are saying that there's really someone sitting in an office thinking "We need to make people happy with these robots so people forget how they will be used"... actually wait, nevermind, while that clear thinking wouldn't be neccesary, I think there probably IS someone thinking exactly that. They know they're going to be used for police/military purposes (the research is funded by DoD, and they're already busy marketting them to their likely best customers), and they know not to show that in their PR videos.

Whoever made this funny web page, they made it with videos released by or in collaboration with the PR people for the companies making these weapons (and that is indeed what they are), and they do know what they are doing.
It is not fundamentally impossible. It has been shown [1] that forward-secure public-key encryption can be done without the key size blowing up with the expected number of encrypted messages, though it's not very practical. The trivial case of §3.2, in which the key is simply a tuple of N keys which are erased as messages are encrypted/decrypted, seems similar to what TextSecure does.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2003/083
Everyone who write to your public email have to pay. So basically new contacts. For friends and people you know you use your private email.

This is how a solution could look like: http://wrte.io
It's not just browsers. I work in storage, and their NFS client (a 25 year old protocol) is without question one of the worst we've seen. The number of hoops we have to jump through and spec violations we've implemented just to get the server to play nice with Macs is a little disgusting.
Finally, a pragmatic voice amongst those calling for an anarchist solution. I will add my vote to those calling for increased oversight, and regulation over the all out "scrapping" of these programs.
How to build habit-forming products, part 1: the habit loop
CircuitHub Is Hiring Haskellers Worldwide to Fix Manufacturing
CircuitHub enables hardware companies to scale manufacturing from 1 to 10,000 units at the push of a button. We are growing revenue fast, count many household names as customers and are backed by Google Ventures and YC.

We are looking to hire web developers; our stack includes:

- Haskell for most new API services

- Node where it makes sense

- Elm / AngularJS SPA frontend

- MySQL / Redis / RabbitMQ / S3 / EC2 / Heroku

Our team is distributed between California, South Africa and London with regular retreats to exotic locations. We are open to applications worldwide for remote developers.

If this sounds interesting and you would like to discuss working together, email careers@circuithub.com
One unstated question in all this discussion of Magic is how what they are doing relates to the terms of service for the third parties they are using to actually deliver. Couple that with the usual money laundering / fraud type problems you get with accepting credit cards and then placing an order with a third party service and you have a real life legitimate
"hard problem" on your hands.

How, exactly, do they plan to handle chargebacks and allegations of non-delivery from third party service providers that they don't have any apparent reseller agreement with?
So how are you saving the world or does it bother you that other people are trying to make a difference? This tone towards startups and founders, I get it, but in the anonymous internet I have to wonder, who are these people and what are they doing that they think gives them a superior moral position. Or is it just that the other person has supposedly taken a superior moral position so you can argue however you want?
Stuff I Did When I Was a Kid
This is quite the ivory tower view (one I must admit that I'm privileged to share with most other tech workers). The median income of a California resident is about $29k. In a dual income household property taxes rising to 10k a year would be a pretty big deal. Particularly for those living paycheck to paycheck.
Just to clarify: Do you think you could miss useful email if your public email has a paywall?
the NSA's surveillance is an unprecedented power grab. add Moore's Law to the mix, let that policy sit for 20 years, and what kind of power do they have? they can predict everything, they can track everything, they have no oversight - what they're doing is setting themselves up to completely replace the government in 2035.

hopefully, that's not deliberate. hopefully, they're just that naively convinced of their own goodness. but that's what they're doing.

the NSA's unconstitutional surveillance is a total disgrace, a national shame, a total failure to uphold the Constitution. that's the GOOD news. that's what it is today. add Moore's Law and 20 years, it's going to be something much worse.

(shoutout to everyone who was on Hacker News back when mentioning how Moore's Law ties into this would be worth an upvote.)
Multiple choice tests simply are a horrible way of assessing knowledge in any non-trivial domain. Instead of wasting time with writing R scripts the author really should grab himself a book about education.

Edit: On second thought that's probably worded too harsh, but multiple choice testing for a final exam in biology? There's not the slightest chance the results will correlate with the capabilities of his students at all.
Scaling problems? That's what people have against these guys? This is the most transparent sour grapes I have ever seen. Believe me, I'm insanely jealous of them too. It's an amazingly simple idea that has exploded, and has potential for great growth. This could be the Google of the Seamless, Postmates, etc economy. All you guys can do is get pissed because they can't hire fast enough?
The exact opposite of each of these things will happen.
wrong website. their prepaid plans are elsewhere.

http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-plans

other montly plans section at the top.
Ask HN: Microsoft Outlook Whiz?
Hey HN, I'm looking for some help finding out more about dragging and dropping attachments from Microsoft Outlook into a web application. All of my searches are in vain and it seems much more complicated than it has to be.

Any MS Outlook gurus out there who may be able to lend a hand?

Thanks in advance.
Derided by morons, yeah.

It's clearly not easy to clone Magic. It's pretty easy to clone "software to SMS message with customers via a browser", though.
BS. How does Magic magically know my address or payment details?

In any event, I usually order pizza online, and it takes a couple of clicks. Even on the phone it's less than a minute.

Do you really consider your time so important that you refuse to even spend one minute on the phone talking to another human being to order a pizza?
On the topic of functional JavaScript, a few interesting articles and books I have been reading that have helped shed more light on this subject matter. I particularly enjoyed the Functional JavaScript book [2].

[1] - http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~rjmh/Papers/whyfp.pdf

[2] - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920028857.do

[3] - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/36504/why-functional-lang...

[4] - http://scott.sauyet.com/Javascript/Talk/2014/01/FuncProgTalk...
So, there's still an "IE6" effect, right. More so than an iOS 6 effect? Web developers must test and fix for IE8.
I'm surprised he didn't break it down to probabilities according to answer distributions instead of right vs wrong. For instance, given 2 questions with their answers and the percent of the class that answered for each choice:

1. A is the answer
A - 60%
B - 20%
C - 5%
D - 15%

2. C is the answer
A - 10%
B - 5%
C - 70%
D - 15%

The probability of randomly selecting 2 students that both chose:

- A and C (both correct) is 0.1764
- D and B (both wrong) is 0.000056

* Appreciate corrections
> I have a CS degree from 1990. It's about as much use as an aerospace engineering degree from 1927

I'm not sure there was such a thing as an aerospace engineering degree in 1927, but if you think a CS degree from 1990 is worthless than you didn't learn much. That theory is still applicable today. Just because the shiny bits on the outside look all new and fancy does not change the underlying theory one bit.
would they have reported if otherwise, though?
As long as there's a chance that the NSA could be able to break strong encryption and thus gain a huge leg up on other nations/potential lawbreakers, the governmental sentiment will remain in favor of retaining the NSA in the face of whatever pie-in-the-face leaks come out. Last I heard, they're working on a quantum computer to do exactly that.

http://www.cnet.com/news/nsa-working-on-quantum-computer-to-...
Microsoft Garage delivers a second wave of diverse apps
A lot of the features seem highly inspired by Hipmunk.
Yep, the unfortunate reality is that living in a gentrifying area does not guarantee someone a right to continue living there.

Property taxes are a controlling factor on house price inflation to an extent. As property values and taxes increase in an area, residents who can no longer afford that (often times lower-income or fixed-income residents) are forced out. While that sucks for them, this ultimately puts more homes on the market and increases the inventory. Increased inventory means a downward factor on house prices. Probably not enough to prevent them from increasing, but it may slow them nonetheless.

The Bay Area seems to be missing this critical market factor. I'm now seeing townhomes in MV list at 1 or 1.1 and go for 1.3. How depressing is that.