skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This isn't isolated to Target. Long time data aggregators like Acxiom collect electronic payment records on everyone. Incidentally, they perform contract work for the NSA which undoubtedly has unlimited access to Acxiom's entire dataset.
"pseudo-company" only if that means be a YC Backed non-profit organization.
Well, I think that it's a relevant analogy to what an operating system does. Like an OS a system of government (like Democracy) manages a collection of physical elements (institutions) and serves as an interface between those and the end-users (citizens.)
That doesn't defend against tyranny of the majority; it just requires a larger majority.

In the USA we defend against tyranny of the majority with the constitution. The constitution places strict limits on what the majority can do to the minority through governmental force.
No actually they can't. Well maybe Harriers but helicoptors are vulnerable because they enemy has manpads and drones have too much lag for close air support.
Is there any advantage for consumers in such a switch? If so could someone explain what it would be?
It's amazing how a little free time and good morale in a team can turn things around :)
I suspect that the plan of the carriers is NOT to profit on your privacy. Instead, they are taking a swing at google. Increasing the competition for monetization of web usage means that ad rates go down. Google depends on the ad rates- the carriers don't.

The carriers might get a brief sugar rush on their EIBTDA initially (from the monetized, non-private traffic), but over the long hall this is going to be a negative growth market. The consequence is it hits google at center of mass.
This Christmas instead of buying a console I built a PC and put SteamOS on it for the family. Of course I bought Goat Simulator. I got it on a Steam sale and probably didn't pay more that five bucks. We hosted a bunch of family from out of state, and the combination of the family visit with the ridiculousness of Goat Simulator really let me channel my inner Clark Griswold. Everyone who came over scoffed at the game yet at the same time the game had them all, from age two to age eighty-nine laughing or at least rolling their eyes. A lot of people who weren't at all into video games had a go. They still had a good time even though they weren't experienced video game players. People enjoyed it whether they were watching or playing. I guess we're all easily entertained.
> Her team’s vision is to make DemocracyOS the “operating system of a more open and participatory government.”

From: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/des...
JavaScript architecture-free neural network library
https://UtilityAPI.com/ is making the Twilio for energy.

Humans needs to switch 87% of our energy sources (~450 Quadrillion BTU/yr) from fossil fuels to other source in our lifetimes[1]. That's an unbelievably huge transition, and one of the current bottlenecks is energy data communication. Solar and energy efficiency companies can't communicate efficiently with utilities and vice versa because each utility has a unique, antiquated, manual system for handling energy data. We are trying to fix that by making a universal API that wraps utilities so energy innovation can happen efficiently on both sides of the meter.

Yes, we are hiring: https://angel.co/utilityapi/jobs

[1]: http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/
There's another big factor at work.

If you read Thomas's recent post on Matasano's hiring process [1], they were looking to funnel people in. Steve's process seems pretty clearly designed to filter people out.

Compare the idea of sending would-be candidates books to study and the idea of an interview process that COMPLETELY EXPOSES candidates. One is trying to bring people in, the other is trying to drive them out.

Somehow tech hiring has often become an adversarial process. It shouldn't be shocking to us that approach makes it hard to find good people.

[1] http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
How does this compare with, say, using a Redis pub/sub queue? (Aside from the hack value, of using a database like RethinkDB for the task)
Not sure if this is the same as meditating. I experience sometimes similar states when really engaging with a research topic. But I would describe it more as a state of "flow" i.e.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
There are different solutions for the two scenarios. If humans are the main cause then reduction in CO2 emissions may suffice. While if there are other reasons then we may need to consider how to drastically increase CO2 capture methods, or look towards deliberate geoengineering, or ramp up coastal protections and work to decrease the population in low-lying areas.
So this would be something like "Literate Programming as a Service", then?
Sandstorm.io (https://sandstorm.io) is working on turning server infrastructure and security upside-down without the need to rewrite applications. The goal is for distributed infrastructure and security to be as easy as possible for end users to manage, and as hard as possible for applications to screw up. The model we're building is capability-based; previous capability-based research systems have usually required rewriting apps to fit the model, but ours does not. This leads to a lot of interesting computer science, systems engineering, security, and UX problems, both in designing a new model that is practical and just-in-time reverse-engineering of application intent in order to seamlessly fit it into the new model.

Possibly-interesting technical posts:

https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-19-why-not-run-docker...

https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-08-13-sandbox-security.h...

https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-24-tinytinyrss-plus-s...

https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-05-12-easy-port.html

https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-12-15-capnproto-0.5.html

https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2014-07-21-open-source-web-ap...

https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-01-14-compute-units.html

Sandstorm is not currently actively hiring. But it is an open source project if you're interested in contributing. See:

https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Get-Involved
Yes. Living in the midwest, I've done software development for nearly 30 years. I've had more than half a dozen employers and I have never been given any kind of "technical test" in an interview, such as writing code on the spot, diagramming an algorithm, or solving a puzzle. I don't know where this happens, but it's not everywhere.
It will be easy when AMD make a truly ambidextrous chip that can run code for either architecture. Jim Keller already said the ARM has a "bigger engine" and zen seems to be a derivative of their new ARM core or at least shares a lot of design. He also said the ARM requires almost no decode stage. One site even wrote a piece speculating along these lines. It doesn't make a lot of sense from a software point of view though - you want one or the other and parts would be disabled for either ISA. But it would serve Apple well. It would be this biggest coup the industry has ever seen.
This is really interesting. I have never heard of Terminal.com before and I'm now deeply interested. Do you hire remote or sponsor visa?
I attribute a lot of my ability to think clearly to meditation. I attribute a lot of my willpower to qigong. I should really do it more often.
Partially related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
https://fogus.github.io/marginalia/
This would be an awesome pedagogical tool.

I'm a student and often find myself struggling with pseudocode to the point that I end up writing it out by hand and annotating it in a similar fashion on paper.
Oh, FFS. Tesla has done a fine job at showing electric cars are feasible, for sure. But without real innovation and progress in emission-free baseload electricity generation (i.e. fission or fusion) it has negligible effect on reducing GHG emissions.
Another brogrammer who thinks programming in two languages of the same paradigm is difficult.
At Netra (http://www.netra.io) we are building true visual search. Imagine being able to search video/images using other image(s) or video clips. Yep we are doing that, and eventually Google scale.

We see immense benefits to humanity - from medicine, to environmental science, crime prevention/monitoring....down to the trivial - search millions of your photos for your pet dog, look for all photos where you & Aunt Millie were together etc.

p.s : and yes we are hiring.
> Why would you side with that?

Because the letter of the contract and law is more important than reasonableness or ethics.
Why Health Care Tech Is Still So Bad
Genius already does code: http://genius.com/James-somers-using-diff-match-patch-to-cap...
I use the term 'post-vivum' for writeups of successful projects.
Can we stop calling it currying?
I recently learned what the heck "currying" means. I'm sure I'm not the only one who struggled to grasp what this term means, since its name does not come from an intuitive notion of the concept, but rather it is named after Haskell Curry who first explored this approach.

A curried function allows an incomplete argument list, in which case it returns a new function that is still awaiting the missing arguments. This allows you to compose (combine) functions into new, reusable functions. A powerful tool for programmers, and yet unfortunately we give it a name that often reminds us of curry the food and nothing else.

Can we stop calling it "currying" then and instead call it something meaningful? How about Argument-Deferred Functional Composition, or my preferred shorthand: argument deferral.

Obviously, the name "currying" and "curried function" is widespread, so it would be appropriate to say argument deferral (i.e., currying) or argument-deferred function (i.e., curried function).

Am I right to have a pet peeve about this, or should stop programming and go into marketing?
I agree with wyager.

A political system should be a strong constitution that defines the rights of individuals. Something like DemocracyOS should be used to engage the population into ensuring that political actions are in fact constitutional and just.
> Try it out with some numbers. 10100 candidates, 100 are "good".

What you're attempting to do works well for hypothetical drug testing[1] or terrorists but not for hiring developers (or anyone else). With the numbers you used you're proposing that less than 1% of all candidates are "good" - nobody would reasonably set the "good" threshold to include only the top 1% of developers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem#Drug_testing
dart is awesome but does anyone know the status of embedding dartvm into chrome. surprisingly i don't hear google talk about this a lot...
I think the same thing could be said about Flappy Bird. That game were also considered a joke but gained a following. The fact that the developer pulled it out of the market oddly enough skyrocketed it's popularity.

I also remember the Beavis & Butthead game becoming pupular, even though it was a joke game too.
Your comment reminded me of Chris Dixon's idea that big things start out looking like a toy. http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-o...
I thought the take-away could be something a bit more specific, like, make your games fun to play.

Al Lowe gave that interview a little while back and it showed up here on HN. He said he was a little sad that people didn't make funny games any more. Well, sometimes they do, and it turns out, people are willing to buy them.
Yes -- I try to do tai chi style standing meditation, focusing on posture and breathing every morning after the gym. I can feel my thoughts slowing and becoming more focused, rather than the rapid jumping from idea to idea that sometimes happens otherwise.

Whenever I'm stressed, I'll close my eyes and focus thoughts inward, just to clear my head and reset my thought patterns.
I felt bad about my nervousness in interview situations too, so I started taking improv classes. Now interviews don't give me any performance anxiety at all; once you've performed in front of a large audience with no idea what you're going to say or do, it makes interviews a cakewalk.

And remember, even though the primary skill you're interviewing for is coding, they are also testing you for communications ability. Being able to clearly and concisely explain what you're doing is at least as important as being able to get things done.
Well if you resolved all debts then technically we'd all have no money. That's one way of explaining what money is, after all. (It's right there on some banknotes: "I promise to pay the bearer...")
App testing and marketplace validation service – AimRocket
Hey guys, I'm launching a new service which focus is to help developers and startups get their apps approved by app stores providing cheap and accesible quality testing. Here is the site http://AimRocket.co . I'm looking for feedback to improve the product. You can ask me anything here or you can send me an email to cgarner@aimrocket.co
MapD (http://www.mapd.com) is building a hyper-interactive big data analytics and visualization platform running on multiple GPUs/CPUs. We basically do every performance trick in the book (like compiling our queries via LLVM and caching hot data on the GPU) to do this. The end result is the ability to scan billions of rows of data in milliseconds at rates greater than 2 terabytes/second per server when running on 8 Nvidia K80s (although we also get great results on laptops and even ARM cores.) And not only can you query the data with SQL but you can visualize it or feed it into machine learning algorithms without copies because it is already distributed across all available compute devices.
The A8 on iPhone 6 doesn't get hot even after extensive use. They even mentioned this during the keynote, so they consider it an achievement
how did you get started?
OSX always did that, more or less. It seems like it's only in the last few months with Chrome switching to 64bit that it's been possible to stay 64bit clean. Same with iOS, even the 64bit arm devices have to keep 32bit armv6/7 versions of all the frameworks around to be able to launch older appstore apps.

Sometimes they slip up, and I think it was Skype that ran into problems where some releases of OSX shipped a faulty or missing 32bit driver for some particular iSight/FacetimeCam models.

(on the other hand, as you say, it might be more difficult to run a multi processor setup sharing RAM and buses across completely incompatible ISAs.)
It depends on the link. If it's far outside of any of the domains I specialize in but it could still affect me, I usually check the comments first just to note any specific objections people have.

For example, when that new space engine (the one that uses just electricity and no solid fuel) a lot of the objections were fundamentally "this violates our current understanding of the universe", which in my mind is not really an objection on its own, especially when there's empirical evidence that shows otherwise. So I was free to read the article and consider what the implications would be if it turns out to be a feasible propulsion system. If there had been some claim like "this guy was convicted of fraud in 2003" then I would be looking for some explanation of that in the article before even considering the possibility of spaceships.
Ironically, the solution to tyranny of the majority is a strong executive.
You can find the text of "War Is A Racket" here: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html#c1
Who decides what the rights are? A majority?
There are a lot of code review tools that might be suitably repurposed for this sort of thing. Lots of quality/community issue I expect though.
Write a program to parse a dictionary file, enter a word into google, click on the first link. Rinse wash repeat. When you reach the end of the dictionary, start over and click on the second link, etc. run this all the time in the background. Raise the noise floor so high that all data is useless.
I can feel my thoughts slowing. I can't tell if I'm more productive, but I can certainly feel an effect [And strongly suspect it helps.]
Does it avoid getting hot by clocking down the processors? Or do you mean it can actually operate all CPU/GPU cores at 100% until the battery drains, like these darn things should be able to?
Apple and the other big names will deal with it by moving processing to the cloud, and selling processor cycles as a public utility accessed through relatively simple devices - like a Chromebook, only more so.

This can't happen until there's much better access to bandwidth. But it is happening already - Siri is just the start - and it's going to continue.

I'm expecting Windows 11 (12?) and Mac OS 11 to be cloud-based.

I have no idea where this leaves Linux. (Possibly nowhere, except on servers and embedded devices?)

There will probably be a legacy market for expensive high-end performance personal computing for the relatively few applications where it's essential to have a beefy processor on a desk next to you.

But aside from games and maybe music/video editing, most domestic and office computing is already so light-weight that it can be cloudified without issues.

Of course this also means your data will be cloudy too, and you'll be stuck inside a walled garden with very strong access controls for apps and content - so you probably won't be able to run any app you want.

I suspect the big names will see this as a feature rather than a bug.
I never really "got" meditation, so excuse for sounding tone deaf, but when you say "stepping aside when I can see it's no longer productive", do you mean thinking about your thoughts¹? Or something different, not thoughts at all?

I ask because I'm completely familiar with analyzing my own thoughts, especially when I'm having a small hypochondriac episode, and I don't understand why would meditation be necessary for that.

On the other hand, if it's not thinking about thoughts, how would you describe it?

----

¹ What Terry Pratchett describes as "Seconds Thoughts" :) http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/618907-first-thoughts-are-th...
Ask HN: Engineer contractor rates and full-time salaries in Israel?
Hello,

Any ideas about engineer/dev contractor hourly rates and full-time salaries for Israel?
Why is Atlanta not attractive to tech workers? Georgia Tech has a phenomenal CS program, and we've got a pretty large and diverse startup population.

I'm not sure if what you're saying isn't true, or if I'm just biased and not able to see Atlanta from an outsider's perspective.
Agreed, why not just choose "Democracy"?
While I do seriously think that Goat Simulator is one of the most underrated games-as-art works of our time, my main take-home message from the postmortem is:

If you take a perfectly sensible game development sentence and replace one of the nouns with a goat, it becomes intrinsically funny.
> I took his edX functional programming class mostly Haskell)

Missing a ( there.
That's a metaphor, and its confusing if not mildly infuriating.
I'm just happy someone for one wrote one of these things and properly distinguished FRP as being different from "reactive programming" generally.
Are you actually involved in screening candidates and making hiring decisions?
A switch to arm would be easily justifiable if it was the only road to fan-less macs and apple controlling the processor development, but intel has made huge strides in power efficiencies lately as well as opening up the possibility for using intel IP in SoC's.
And isn't the ipad already a mac with an arm processor?
Prior to WW2, such mobilizations were possible.

In the post WW2 era though, the increases in firepower and mobility made this point moot. A well orchestrated and timed advance could conquer a nation in days, nuclear weapons not withstanding. the Army's Active Defence doctrine post WW2 reflected this, recgonizing that in the era, a war would be won or lost in the first few battles.

Eisenhower reflected upon this in his Farewell Address. The warning regarding the "Military-Industrial Complex" was placed in the context that such a construct was necessary, but needed to be kept in check:

"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions."
If people scrape together a few votes and do not get their wishes rammed through, they will complain exactly like they complained about the White House petition site - because it was not a direct way of getting in legislation to (say) legalize marijuana. I don't see how DemocracyOS can solve that problem.
The Sass Pseudo Left Mixin
Hi guys, I'm one of the founders. Glad to answer all your questions.
Low and slow the A-10 can out turn just about all air superiority fighters (vectored thrust fighters being the largest exception); as the old saying goes "get down low and go go go". The true enemy of planes like the A-10 is 4th+ gen missiles combined with look down radar.
Wriber (http://www.wriber.com/) is SaaS that empowers enterprises to build marketing and communications content more effectively using dynamically-generated artificially intelligent writing prompts.
I would be very surprised if they killed it off, it's just that the title made me think that's what they were doing. Thanks to you and others for explaining why the title is as it is anyway.
I have a theory that if a word is less than 5 letters long, it probably means male genitalia in a foreign language.
Thank you! Totally agree with the branching aspect and yesterday we were playing with some ideas to order debate in pros&cons. Also, we are looking for funding to form a blockchain team, to validate democracyos votes in bc. All ideas are super welcome! pia@democracyos.org
It's meant to be open for many intepretations:
- Open Source because, well, we are open source (github.com/democracyos/app)
- Operating System because, well, we aim to build a layer on top of the current political system.
- Open Society becasue, well, we aim for societies to become more participatory and democratic.

Pick your favorite flavor.. the goal is to nail how democracy should work in the 21st century.
> Ironically, the solution to tyranny of the majority is a strong executive.

That isn't sufficient in and of itself, to be ironic. If the strong executive lacks stringent limits on its power and domain of influence, then it is ironic. But, a strong executive is likely necessary in even a libertarian-styled government, to protect rights by enforcing "legitimate" laws (where "legitimate" is open to interpretation and opinion). But the distinction is that the strong executive in a libertarian-style government has a strictly limited domain over which it exercises power.

Strength and scope are different things, despite their frequent conflation in [American] politics.
Make your own extruder holder (it's usually the first thing that gets designed) and pick one that is easy to unclog.

You'll eventually tune it to perfection.

That's my experience anyway.
I like this summary and plan on stealing it from you.
There are extensions that do that for you. They're generally hopeless: providers could probably easily tell real traffic from false traffic; and you pollute your bubble making ads and search results weird.

http://cs.nyu.edu/trackmenot/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/trackmenot/
I think it is a good idea - one piece of advice, do not make your UI black :)
I started after reading the book "10% happier", it gives me happines, calmness and makes it easier to tackle everyday stuff. I have gotten a small window of opportunity from when something happens until I react that makes it possible for me to react more true to myself.
Wow great quote. I think it would be narrow minded to not consider prayer a form of meditation. I know people who would describe a wide array of nontraditional activities as "meditation" as well: skiing, playing an instrument, driving, weight lifting, yard work. Surely prayer has a place too.