skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think writing to Congress has really ever been the problem, I think the problem is accountability.

The two things we need to see in one place are our representatives voting records for a given topic, and accurate data about what the constituents of that representative desired.

I'm not saying this is an easy thing to solve, mostly because getting accurate data about what constituent want, and doing it correctly, essentially means building an online voting system. That isn't easy, but that is exactly what we need.

Real. Transparent. Democracy.

[Edit]
The accountability application wouldn't need to be binding, it just needs to accurately show if the representative is actually representing the will of the people. It should provide one citizen one vote per pole/bill, provide information about the percentage of the constituency that's registered and voted, and compare those results to the representatives actual vote. I believe that authenticating citizens and public participation would be the biggest hurdles to a system like this.

At the very least this would raise awareness and stimulate conversations between representatives and constituents.
I've worked remotely for the last 10 years now. Existing businesses will probably stick to their existing practices until they die, while new startups which don't have too much baggage to drag around, may indeed see that the future is heavily biased in favour of working remote:

- There is a higher caliber of workers worldwide than just next-doors (if the company is truly capable of distinguishing)

- Some workers may conceivably even be cheaper (cheaper countries, but don't count too much on that for high calibre workers)

- Part of their salary is that they get a huge portion of their life back (this has real cash value)

- The tooling and overall technical management tends to be better, simply because it has to

- Especially in an international context, both employer and employee avoid an impressive number of government regulations, including visas, work permits and so on.

Even though an entirely remote company is more productive, I don't believe that existing on-site companies would be able to introduce it. I see them rather continuing to outsource while shrinking their head count year after year.
Even worse with Guam and other territories.

America, land of democracy.
My main "side project" lately has been trying to get a job in the engineering side of biotech in the Bay Area. Meeting people is exciting! And part of this has been augmenting my blog [0] with some biology writing.

Other than that I've been helping my Google Summer of Code student with IHaskell [1] – soon we're going to have full widget support, supporting all the same widgets as IPython. Although I don't do most of the coding (the student is quite skilled and incredibly productive) I get the satisfaction of seeing something awesome being implemented for IHaskell!

[0] http://andrew.gibiansky.com
[1] http://www.github.com/gibiansky/IHaskell
I know. It was in response to what the other fellow HNer commented: "Why would Google support a version of Android that refuses to pass the CTS? Do you really think Google would allow a device to use their services that was incompatible with Android"
What's a paper cheque?

In some countries, banks give account holders books of banknote-sized paper 'cheques' or 'checks' - you can see pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheque - they can use for making payments.

They have some convenient properties, but poor fraud protection. As such nowerdays they're mostly relegated to applications where fraud isn't a big worry.

For example charity donations, payments to friends and family, paying for little johnny's karate lessons, stuff like that. Some utility companies also allow you to pay by mailing in a cheque.
I believe that Krugman's position is "market monetarism", but I could easily be mistaken...
How to Deep Link on Facebook
You don't have to trust them, you can use their open source downloadable client. The web interface is only for ease of use, and they make it clear that many people consider that "unsafe" compared to their desktop/command line alternative.
a) Yep, I agree, all remote or all local. That's my experience as well. Mixing the two doesn't work very well at all.

c/d) Yes, you definitely want mature people who understand what remote is all about. If you don't have that, it won't work.

e) Zoom is pretty good. No email? Huh! That's a new wrinkle I haven't tried before.
... And that is a problem with password managers why? It doesn't matter who enters the credit card, you or your password manager, those would still get it.

So I ask again, why not?
There is one specific torrent at issue here. It is the latest torrent, gifiles-2014.tar.bz2.torrent. I identified 20 malicious files in my post:

gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\6\6566_The Split Betw.doc
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\19\19701_MASY - Q MASY HUMINT.doc
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\19\19719_List of Addresses - Advance Copies.doc
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\152\152977_Happy vacation.pdf
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\18\18714_Research_and_R.xls
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\117\117687_Lithium.doc
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\117\117870_Hybrid write-up2.doc
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\117\117793_Hybrid write-up.doc
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\47\47247_US Congress re.doc
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\47\47329_US Congress re.doc
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\52\52004_IRAN_STRAIT_PART.pdf
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\151\151784_Command.com
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\151\151098_text.zip->(Zip)
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\151\151098_text.zip->text.exe
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\119\119443_Russia Data Requests.doc
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\142\142345_photos.zip->(Zip)
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\142\142345_photos.zip->photos.jpg.exe
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\146\146924_message.zip->(Zip)
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\146\146924_message.zip->message.exe
gifiles-2014\gifiles\attach\17\17102_Draft scenarios for Libya_0416.pdf

If it is your position that these files do not contain malicious files in the torrent I stated, please back up your conclusion with the level of research that I provided in my post(s) on the topic. For all files provide the hashes, for .DOC files provide the output of an application showing no macros or embedded OLE's exist, explain the presence of executables of .COM files in the torrent, provide a hex-dump of the PDFs.

As for the next comment's claim that the presence of malware in this sort of file distribution is irrelevant, such a position is nothing short of madness. These files are viewed by journalists and activists. Malicious software like this, regardless of its source, can compromise the identities of those journalists and activists. The only way I could understand such a contention would be if you were to also claim that journalists and activists should be "outed" for working on such documents. To that claim, I strenuously disagree. I think that those working on these documents should be able to remain private and protected. This is not a torrent containing a pirated movie. This is a torrent containing leaked documents from a defense contractor, provided on a website that (rightly I believe) claims to be a news organization.

Would you think that Fox News embedding malware in their website's flash player would be no big deal? For those of us working toward a safe and secure internet, malware should be removed and/or users notified wherever it exists. Mine is not an extremist position.
Terrible journalism...

From the 'making the dogs dance' phrase that is nonsense to believing that this guy has a Twitter account and continuously writes on it...
It'd be nice if the socket.io project spent less time adding features and more time just documenting what they have.

Does anybody have a small, fast, no-bullshit, modern websockets library they'd nominate for use with node?
>But Google has no long term desire to be in a market unless it is advertising.

Which doesn't change that they're the cost leader of the market and didn't lose anything. Where do you think the thin margins per user comes from?

And the company is starting to diversify away from advertising with Cloud, Play, Express, etc.
Oh absolutely, I can see that people still prefer that screen size, I'm just surprised that Apple decided not to go with a larger size on the iPod Touch.
Personally I thought the grey rectangles ("click to play" mostly eliminated my need for ad blockers) emphasized the point.
1. http://woodspotting.com -- hand tool woodworking blog aggregator; initially a site for myself, but slowly growing to others, get's about 100 uniques a day

2. a lightweight knowledge base that's in beta and close to going "live"

3. genetic programming inspired web crawler - using the project to pickup Clojure
I'm sure the Android ecosystem has many equivalents, but they'll never be very high profile. The cellular hardware inside phones doesn't add too much to the cost, so customers are better off just buying a phone and not putting in a SIM card.

I'm pretty sure Apple sells the $200 model of the Touch at a bit of a loss, which they can do because people who buy and iPod Touch rather than an iPhone will probably buy a lot of music, and most of them will buy it through Apple (or subscribe to Apple Music).

The only other smartphone makers that have significant music services are Amazon and Google. A non-phone phone doesn't really make sense in the Nexus line, which is meant to be a demonstration of the core "Android experience". In Amazon's Fire lineup, it doesn't really make sense because it's too similar to their existing products. Actually you could argue that the Kindle Fire is the equivalent to the iPod Touch in Android world.
In all honesty, if you're only a beginning OS hacker, you probably shouldn't be diving into the Linux kernel unless you have a keen specific interest in it. Besides all the complexity, both intrinsic and accidental from its adoption by many heterogenous parties with different interests, it just isn't architecturally interesting.

You want something to broaden your horizons, and that has a much smaller surface. Try Minix 3, Plan 9 (or the 9front fork), DragonFly BSD, Genode, Haiku (BeOS-like), some flavor of illumos, HelenOS or even GNU Hurd.

Besides the easier entry and the higher learning opportunity, you have more of a chance to make truly major contributions. Something like porting your favorite package can get your hands dirty quickly.

Arguably, having less conflict of interest from corporate benefactors makes for a much smoother communication experience, too.
I looked into it further, and know I see where my confusion came from.

[Debian] Iceweasel is a fork [from Firefox] with the following purpose :

backporting of security fixes to declared Debian stable version.
no inclusion of trademarked Mozilla artwork (because of #1 above)

Beyond that, they will be basically identical. (quoting Roberto C.
Sanchez post in debian-devel mailing list)

But there was another Iceweasel, GNU Iceweasel. To avoid confusion with Debian Iceweasel, it has been renamed to GNU Icecat.

GNU IceCat, formerly known as GNU IceWeasel,[3] is a free software
rebranding of the Mozilla Firefox web browser distributed by the GNU
Project. It is compatible with Linux, Windows, Android and OS X.[4]

The GNU Project keeps IceCat in synchronization with upstream development
of Firefox while removing all trademarked artwork. It also maintains a
large list of free software plugins. In addition, it features a few
security features not found in the mainline Firefox browser.

This article is about Debian's Iceweasel, which is why my comment was wrong.

https://wiki.debian.org/Iceweasel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat
My model based development tool is currently on hold. The intent is to make something better than Simulink for developing embedded control code. It's actually time to scrap it and start again using the lessons from the first go at it - some fundamentals need to be changed. An old screenshot is in this SO question:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4821102/font-differences-...
It passed for me. Where did you get the diehard test? If you compiled it directly from http://www.stat.fsu.edu/pub/diehard/ then it is because that source is broken.
This product is exactly the kind of thing I want when I'm walking around in the city at night. I actually own a plethora of personal safety devices-- 3 kinds of mini mace, and a keychain shaped like a cat with pointy ears. I still don't feel totally comfortable. A device that can make bright flashes of light and loud noises would be invaluable, PLUS alerting my friends/fiance where I am.
Working on a client-side robots.txt validator for a client (nothing public yet).

Still editing the final draft of the novel from my Kickstarter (http://planetoz.net/kickstarter).

Finally created a new personal landing page (http://www.jcholder.com). Still incomplete, but feedback appreciated.
Passive income often connotes building something once, then sitting back while money pours in. More often than not, this doesn't happen (at least initially anyway).

Most of your time with your side project will be allocated to customer support and marketing. Others on this thread have correctly pointed out that approaching the project in terms of a business is the appropriate mindset to possess. You'll constantly be tweaking and iterating until you hit product-market fit, then you'll have to go out and sell the product.

It took me about a month to build https://www.onhand.co then double that time to reach enough users to sustain the server costs (still not profitable).

Honestly the best advice I have is similar to the advice startups receive, which is first figure out a pain point others are willing to pay to alleviate, then spend time building your side project/business/passive income.
I'm working on several site redesigns so putting my design hat back on after being neck deep in JS is always refreshing.

Also working on building a community site with Telescope on Heroku.

Starting to learn React. As a non-application developer, I'm looking to use this along with Ampersand to create an easy way to create static websites with it. I know, I know, this is not what its meant for, but I like to think outside the box sometimes with these frameworks.
This looks great! Looking forward to hooking up my RaspberryPi with this!
this isn't 4chan.

Quite right--4chan has a better sense of humor than HN, more original content, and is much more abrasive. :)
I'm working on a webapp that lets people advertise any arbitrary event going on with google maps integration, and with an eye towards making communication between users easy (commenting, forums, private messaging). I'm not confident that many people would find such an app to be at all useful, but it is simple enough to get my hands dirty in webdev. Will hopefully make my first release by the end of the week.
Latin America's Stripe competitor (Mercado Pago) API Security Hole
"Looking at various examples of security advice we find that the advice is complex and growing, but the benefit is largely speculative or moot. For example, much of the advice concerning passwords is outdated and does little to address actual threats, and fully 100% of certificate error warnings appear to be false positives."

I've thought the same about highly restrictive network firewalls for years. Most threats today are 'pulled' in via http, e-mail, software update feeds, etc., or entry is made via phishing or social engineering. Highly restrictive firewalls don't do anything about any of that, and they impose significant inconvenience. Your firewall is security theater.

Part of the problem with security is that it's a gut feeling, unsupported "expert" opinion, and tech-folklore driven discipline. At worst it's cargo-cultish and almost superstitious.

For one example consider the extremely common -- and utterly dumb -- belief among many that NAT improves security. It's a superstition. How? What threats does it mitigate that can't be mitigated otherwise? Get concrete, give examples, show data. Nope.
Projects related to Tor were funded as part of the Memex project. DARPA only funds transformational research, not iterative improvements to existing technology, so simply funding "Tor" is not a thing they would do.
I'm building a job board and currently I'm finishing up the initial feature set.

https://whoshiring.io/
The one quantitative thing I think you can say about companies with lots of remote workers is that they don't have to pay as much for engineers. Speaking as someone who lives in the Bay Area, that makes me less likely to work for such a company. Yes, I could move somewhere where the cost of living is lower, but I actually like it here, and I have yet to run across a company with a strong remote culture that doesn't use it as a cost-savings device (among other things).
I'm working in a project called Codenizer (http://codenizer.co) that aims to help Python developers to maintain and keep their projects up-to-date. Basically, it verifies whether a new version of a certain library is compatible with your project, checking all imports you do to that library. Many other things are to come!
Haha, Amazon is trying its hand at what flipkart does often in India.
> The Node reference client to our PGP directory will be retired. (PGP support will continue, of course.)

Can anyone from Keybase shed light on the reasoning behind this? It sounds like you are moving away from programmer-friendly API libraries and into GUI apps. Even if they're open source, as a developer I really liked your up-front API. Will you still be providing those APIs?
George Boole 200
Which kind of companies?

Big companies. Multinationals. Megacorporations. My coworkers in other states have no idea if I'm at home or work, and they have no idea where I am. Often enough I'm not sure what cities are involved much less office or home on on the road.

This leads to a BIG social and cultural problem that it's director/vp privilege to have a boss/employee relationship across timezones, how dare those lowly scum cross timezones, next thing you know they'll be using the exec washroom, nobody under $250K/yr gets to work across state lines, etc.

Also there's stealth WFH if everyone is expected to put in some hours while VPN in from home during emergencies, then weekly emergencies become BAU, then people are expected to VPN in when they're sick at home, next thing you know people are staying home and VPN in because they have a dentist appointment in the middle of the day, then people start going home after lunch and VPN in on a regular basis... You will save commute time money WRT rush hour slowdowns but you won't save many car-miles.

Also look for professional, experienced managers. Noob managers will be lucky to achieve and measure trivial baby step metrics like "butt-hours in seats per week", although the pros will get stuff done without making graphs of tardiness infractions and dress code violations. There are numerous other advantages to working for professionals instead of amateur hour.
> Want to do login to your bank account? 100% required that you have an two-factor SMS token in addition to your user ID and password.

Still leaves the user open to MITM, viruses, and SMS interception. You should take a look at chipTAN [1] [2]. The user has to confirm account number and transfer amount on a little device before the crypto chip on the debit card generates a TAN that is valid only for this specific transaction.

I'm not a great fan of German IT (often unimaginative and slow-moving; e.g. none of the major German e-mail providers offer any form of 2FA), but this chipTAN thing is pretty fascinating from a crypto standpoint.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transaction_authentication_num...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAjLXxrqqK8&t=1m9s
Well it sounds like you are a pretty important player here and should perhaps be taking more of a role in the negotiations.

What is your definition of "significant equity stake"? Are you talking 1%? 10%? 30%?
Obama unveils ConnectHome to get low-income households online
The HackerBoxes King7532 was talking about look neat. I already pre ordered and I can't wait until they ship! Check them out here: hackerboxes.com
Google Offers Free Internet for Obama's ConnectHome
There are very few things we want to email about that don't better fit in a Slack channel, or as a Trello card.

Our Slack channels are: Dev, Comm, GIS, Recruiting, and Random

We basically only email if an outside party sends us some big email to discuss.
> The trouble with most of the writing about monads is that it's all at the level of the opening paragraph of a Wikipedia math article.

IME, that's not at all true; most of the theory-heavy sources I've seen are explicitly framed as alternatives to the large body of intuitionist tutorials that avoid theory almost entirely, focusing on a few popular applications (usually, collections and IO.)
Show HN: Build and work with AOSPs using Docker
This helps keep the org fresh, new talent coming in and out all the time and there are side benefits in reducing potential corruption. You come in with your big ideas, you get a chance to try them, and then you're out to make way for the next person.
>> Your comment just reads as "I've been using MooTools since my pappy was alive! It works so why change it."

I didn't mean it to read like that - I'm not against new frameworks, just developers who jump on them and think they are the greatest thing since sliced bread before they're really vetted and most of the bugs have been worked out.
I have had a similar experience, and also met many people with similar experiences. I have had exactly 2 advancements in my 5 year career. One was a cost of living increase (actuallyl slightly less then that), but only after I complained numerous times. The second was when I switched companies to a new position.
I don't know about "slam-dunk" in the sense of 'silver bullet'. But I don't find your argument convincing at all.

Why would you think that large companies, entrenched in their ways, would be capable of switching overnight to any paradigm?

Remote-work happens as most new things tend to: mostly in small companies. But it's becoming more and more common, for good reasons. There's no reason for that not to continue. And the lack of massive, immediate adoption isn't an argument for or against anything.

To cite pg's awesome OSCON talk: "I'm saying that companies will learn these lessons the way that a gene pool learns about new conditions."
Ask HN: How to be productive in a small startup
Hi we are a small startup with around 10 people in total and 3 developers.
We are still in a stage of doing things that don't scale, but I have the feeling that the development is not productive at all. It takes us a long time to finish bigger features because we have to do a lot of others things.

Out of your experience what works best for the dev team at a small startup, so that it ca be productive.
It would be rounded almost instantly. In an impact of that size -- almost exactly comparable to the impact which created the Earth-Moon system -- the surface of Pluto would have been heated so extensively as to become molton rock.
I launched Your World of Text six years ago right here on HN. It's an art site where people can write anonymously on an infinite field of text. In the intervening years, without any active development from me, site traffic grew to about 500k visits/month, then shrank back down to about 100k. A lot of that decline is due to scripters flooding the site. This month, I'm giving the site some overdue attention: fixing bugs, fighting the scripters, and some other improvements. The first iteration of the rate-limiter is launching soon, and I'll then clear the frontpage content for a fresh start.
I've got three!

A highly opinionated project management saas: http://kati.burakkanber.com/

A long term HTML5 RPG project: http://thebotanistgame.com/

And I'm working on a really interesting giga-scale chatroom UX, intended for live chat in a room with hundreds or thousands of active participants. Mostly as a UX experiment.