skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a friend who worked at a similar "elite" program in the government called the Presidential Fellows. These are a bunch of highly qualified MBAs, Programmers, and other such overachievers from the private sector who had overwhelming faith in the governments ability (and responsibility) to get things done.

My friend went to DC with a lot of optimism.

Halfway or more through the program, I met my friend at a wedding. My friend's take on the problems with government IT was that it wasn't resolvable by such a small team, because the problems were cultural, deep-grained, and protected by turf-guardians who had a lot to lose with reform.

Without the President spending significant political capital, nothing will ever get done.

The most egregious instance of wastage that could not be resolved involved an instance where a certain government department was receiving emails for archiving. Was printing out the emails. Was sending those printouts to another department by snail mail. That department was then scanning in the emails and archiving the digital images to computer storage.

The stupidity of this process was manifest to everyone without mental disability, and yet nobody could change the process due to the various contractors and their patrons, and the various government employees employed in the process.

Later, talking to other government IT workers (not Presidential Fellows) I came to the conclusion that Govt. human capital is not of the highest quality, and Govt. is perhaps the worst place to work unless you have a thick skin that helps you to resist demoralization at every turn.
> problem is that the algorithm itself is what makes the system strong. once revealed in a white paper, the whole thing is useless

This is a deal-breaker. Your system is not strong if you rely on other people not knowing how it works. Nobody will use it because you can't convince them it's worth anything, you can't distribute it in code. I don't mean to sound like a jerk, but again this is literally 19th century stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle .
Ask HN: What are some good online sources for longform reading?
Title says it all.

Lately I've realized that a lot of the intelligent people I try to surround myself with read a lot more than I currently do, and typically do so with longform content about a lot of different subjects.

What are some good starting points? (Not necessarily restricted to tech).
These results seem unconvincing without any error bars / confidence intervals, or even a mention of the number of replicates performed (though the downloadable data set seems to indicate that each test condition was performed only once?)
This is completely false. For one thing, SRWare Iron is a scam:

http://www.insanitybit.com/2012/06/23/srware-iron-browser-a-...

For another thing, Chrome doesn't log every website you visit. The closest thing they do is suggest autocompletions for searches/URLs you type in the URL, which is a straightforwardly-explained checkbox in Chrome's privacy settings.
What do you mean by 'good cola'? Coca-Cola has caffeine free variants of both Diet Coke and Coke Zero. Up here in Canada you can usually find them at major supermarket chains. If by good you mean not Coca-Cola or Pepsi... well then ya, there probably aren't many choices.
you're correct.

my claim is a bit different though; it's a new take on encrypting text that has no properties of existing crypto systems.
used OTP as an analogy. i think it's a fallacy to do so.
Announcing NuGet 3.1 with Support for Universal Windows Platform
I was a QRP operator so that's actually quite funny.
Actually, building a critical mass of streetView-like data can happen while having other goals in mind.

For example, I live in São Paulo and I'm a member of OpenStreetMap. Every time I ride in a bike lane, I take photos of it with mapillary, so it gets way easier to map them.

By the way, the OSM coverage of bike lanes in São Paulo, because of the help of mapillary, is the best one in all maps available (even the city hall ones)
Eventually we might consider that rent is just outright theft, we're not actually paying for value, landlords are parasites who suck surplus value from the economy, etc.
What, you've never watched a politician or an actor on TV?
Changing search engine for existing users was a very unfortunate bug, which got fixed (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1041571#answer-6...). Of course, changing the default for new users is nothing to be ashamed of.
Not particularly. iOS browsers all use WebKit, regardless of which app it is. iOS doesn't allow third-party rendering engines, so every browser gets these supposed WebKit battery benefits.
Durham, NC sparks a Tobacco Road business revival
I seriously doubt that even when people are protected by US law against the NSA, it doesn't have a significant effect on the NSA's behaviour. Because they're a government agency, they can pull the 'terrorism' / 'national security' / 'children' card pretty easily, and any serious challenge can be tied up in court for a long time while they continue doing what they're doing.
Remote work and starting the company elsewhere are pretty easy solutions to this problem.
Upon re-reading, nothing particularly egregious. There is the characterization of Sad Puppies as a movement to push women and nonwhites out of the Hugo Awards, when I believe the motivation is that the participants want their fun sci-fi escapism to be evaluated as such and not by how well it coincides with the Hugo panel's politics.

Of course, the net effect of their effort has been, in practice, to favor white male authors, so the article is accurate at face value. I wouldn't expect the author to go in detail into something only tangentially related, either. It's just bothersome to see every controversy in traditionally geeky hobbies lately reduced to "white male bigots form hate mob," so even a relatively neutral mention feels biased sometimes.
No as that information is public.

What we talk about isn't.
> Bar charts should be sorted with the biggest ones at the top

That would greatly reduce the usability of the charts in this case. The charts are much more useful when they all present the categories in the same order.
Sorry, accidentally downvoted. Meant to upvote.
Hmm... Eventually the massively skilled labor pool will cost so much that the advantage will disappear. Good point about the investors, though.

We'll see. Perhaps it really will be an exogenous event which will halt the San Francisco craziness.
Programming is a trade, similar to plumbing.

Just like the typical plumber or electrician, most programming is not "new products". Even today, most programming is probably Java (formerly Cobol) internal to a business or other large organization.

There will always be a need for programmers, for much the same reason we will always need plumbers: even with standardized parts and methods, you still need someone to actually customize it to the specific task and implement it locally.

This is where Free Software comes in: we need a commons from which those implementations can be built from. Unfortunately, we still have a lot of sociopathic businesses in the market that think it would be really profitable if they make the threads on all their pipe fittings in the reverse direction at non-standard sizes with the hope of cornering the entire pipe market. In practice, of course, all they've accomplished is forcing every plumber to keep a huge set of adapters in their toolkit and waste a lot of time matching them on every job.
I still have no idea what you all are talking about. After fresh install, my Start looks really barren, I'd even welcome these mythical ads...

http://i.imgur.com/tdkFeiQ.png
Want to Revolutionize Global Trade? Flexport Is Hiring
So, there are an infinite number of things that are just series of mathematical operations. It's the ones that are useful that matter. Why would we not compensate people for discovering them?
Once you learn that Safari gives you a longer battery life and you are using a tablet or laptop for every day browsing activity it makes it hard to choose anything other than Safari for this reason alone. Choosing Safari means I can waste more time reading hacker news. Who doesn't want that?
right. but, again, the whole system doesn't even rely on entropy. i was referring to existing literature as an analogy to, perhaps, better clarify the idea. it seems i was mistaken doing so.
Does Encryptr support 2FA? I don't see any mention on the landing page or on Github.

EDIT: After more digging, it looks like it does not, but may in the future. https://github.com/devgeeks/Encryptr/issues/123
You're paying for the location and services (well, with NNN leases, just location). What other value do you need?
> More often than not, companies reject my job applications saying something like: "Unfortunately, your skill sets were not a match for this position", when their job description is an exact match for my skill set

While it's hard not to, it's almost never a good idea to take a generic rejection like this at face value. This is one of a number of things prospective employers just say when they've decided to hire someone else, usually designed to give as little insight as possible as to why they made the decision they did (and along with it, as little exposure to liability).

And common hiring practices being what they are (possibly as bad as random chance as far as getting people who are in fact good fits), it's likely enough that they didn't really have much in the way of insight into your skills. And may not really be clear on why they made the choices they did.

So, it may not be you.

That said, even as a fellow explorer/hiker/kayaker who likes to have other things to do when I'm not at work... some well-selected personal projects are probably a good idea to have. They may not need to be big ones, even small ones that scratch a personal itch might help with employers who use a github profile as a heuristic for engaged interest in the field. I'm thinking of a little Python script I wrote about a year ago, its sole purpose was to list unix permissions for each directory above the current one, something I occasionally need to do when tracking down reasons why a webserver might deny access to resources located within a directory. There was a period right after I'd created it and put it up on github that I was getting recruiting interest as a Python dev. But something related to your MS might even be a better idea.
> Few people truly understand the import of Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment

If you are talking about the AI community, this just isn't true. I have a degree in Cognitive Science, and I took a class with John Searle as an undergrad. Chinese Room was hammered away at in intro to philosophy and cogsci 101 classes, people understand it just fine. For some reason armchair philosophers seem to find it fascinating, but it fundamentally misses the point has largely been ignored in modern times for good reason.
U.S. National Archives Publishes Guidance on Managing Electronic Messages
You could also build/buy your own office. Then there would be no landlord.
Most decent sized to large cities in North America have a large skilled labor pool.
Windows 8.1 Product Key and Activator Permanent 2015 by Daz
Why is it just assumed economic downfalls and recessions should happen every 7-10 years?

Self fulfilling prophecy?

Bugs in the system?
Thats a good question - I can't really articulate it well, but here's an attempt.
(a) Design / Scaling: I guess I like solving small coding problems that translate math or logic into code. It is building software at a non-trivial scale that bothers me - anything that I've designed that was over 2000 lines was fugly code, and I can find numerous design flaws with the code I write and all the alternatives to it. At the end of my work assignments I am often dejected thinking - "I can't ever design something non-trivial cleanly."
(b) Not being as good with new frameworks/tools: I am a loyal C/vim/shell person, no IDEs. I am very efficient at my shell+Vim development environment (which was shoved into me in school when I didn't have a choice), but I shy away from trying anything new because it feels unnatural or scary.
I think there are two ways in which children may constructively be taught computing. The first is algorithmic problem solving, which is often better taught using logic puzzles and games rather than programming trivial if-then statements. Anany and Maria Levitin's book, Algorithmic Puzzles, is a good example of the genre. [1]

Secondly, they need to be taught an active and inquisitive posture towards technology. Most devices today (especially tablets and phones) force the user into a dependent and passive mode of interaction in which it is impossible to know how things work. Accordingly, I think it may be destructive for children to spend too much time with these devices.

The KIBO system described in the article seems like a great thing to play with to build a basic understanding of symbolic control flow, although it too is opaque. I think 4 is too young to spend much time staring at a screen, but by the time a child is 8-10, I think it is better to have an admittedly difficult to use Linux workstation or an old computer running FreeDOS. Also good are the many simple devices arising out of the "maker" movement.

I would really like to give my kids a simple device that could be programmed from the hardware up in something like Forth. Something like an HP calculator, but with a command line and options to connect to other devices would be great.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199740445
> removing the maximum wage for Social Security contributions

This sounds like a great idea to me. It's absurd that only the first $118,500 of earnings are subject to to social security tax, and it means that our tax structure is much less progressive than it appears at first glance (which is one reason certain people strenuously avoid talking about any taxes except Federal Income Taxes).
> we're not actually paying for value

The value you are receiving is location.

If you do not care for location, then rent office space in Tennessee where you can pay less than 1/4 of SF prices.
The following is some related reading on "Tholins" along with the history of the term. The CBC.ca article is sparse on details, and it seems the "Science" paper is paywalled.

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/2015/0722-what-in...
It's a lot more complicated than that - there's a massive skilled labor pool, but at any given time, a huge percentage of them are gainfully employed and not currently looking.

Many of the really amazing labor pool members are recognized as being amazing and are compensated and rewarded in such a way that it will be difficult to draw them away.

Then those that are looking are being courted by every other company.

The converse can be true - it can be much easier to get very high quality talent somewhere that there is not a massive labor pool. You'll attract the people who don't want to live in SF or NYC, or want a certain lifestyle, or to be close to where they went to college, etc. etc.

I'm not saying that starting a company not in SF is inherently better, but that "insurmountable advantage" is also one of the biggest disadvantages about SF. Your mileage may vary.
This should have been in the article. From the title, I was expecting something completely else; reading the article I thought "nothing new" and eventually I was left with "there's some dude doing something".

As a daily Anki user, this seems interesting though.
valid points in the intro. I feel this way about html.
Did you make it to the end of the article?

While I agree that's not a stunning insight, I don't think the author should be punished for stating the clearest conclusion of a graph before talking more about it.
The Google updater is the main reason that I don't install Picasa or Chrome... that's a good thing if Iron doesn't use it.
Depends on your situation. Sometimes you want the flexibility of a rental care rental scenario. Perhaps you're not ready to commit to a purchase or a 3+ year lease. You'll pay more for the rental, but once you're above a 30 day rental period, you can get a discount.

If I have a rental car, I can return it anywhere in the country whenever I want if its from a major brand, with the only transaction necessary being a charge on my credit card.
Wow, that's huge. Are you in tablet mode? If not, you can drag the edges of the start menu to resize it.
It both helps and hurts - just yesterday Yelp admitted that the "Unicorn bubble" was hurting their profits:

http://recode.net/2015/07/29/yelp-admits-the-unicorn-bubble-...

For some reason it has only occurred to them now that hiring for offices in cities other than San Francisco might help them get talented developers.
WeWork might not be in the best position if most of their clients are venture-backed startups and they all go away within a few years.
NYC doesn't use groundwater: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/drinking_water/groundwater....
Not sure if this makes sense in the US, but I actually wanted something like this when I was selling a car that we no longer used. As a substitute we had to buy a full day of insurance from our primary carrier when we were showing the car and letting potential buyers test drive it (we always met a good distance from our home). I know the rate varies per car and driver but for us it cost about $28 per day and it didn't feel convenient to get (website or calling customer service).
My sibling comment points out that Tor Cloud is discontinued anyway, but I have some concerns about running a relay on a cloud provider. If a lot of people do this, it seems like it could pose a risk to Tor users' anonymity.

Tor works by bouncing traffic across a few nodes. In an ideal case, these nodes are run by different people in different countries, so even if a vulnerability in a server or legal action exposes the traffic across a single relay, the other nodes are not accessible to the attacker and the users' anonymity is maintained.

If a large number of people start running nodes on cloud services, then this centralizes the nodes under the control of Amazon or whatever cloud provider. Even if you trust Amazon (there are many use cases where you shouldn't) a vulnerability in their cloud services could expose data from ALL of the nodes running on their cloud. I haven't done any specific analysis on this, but my guess is that if 5% of the nodes in the Tor relay system had their data completely exposed, the nodes would include all the nodes along routes for a significant number of users. Combine this with traffic analysis and other attacks, and even more users could be de-anonymized.

I'm by no means an expert on Tor, so I can't say with confidence whether or not this is a concern. Perhaps someone with more knowledge will weigh in.
To add to that, reading new code is unnatural too. So far in my career, I've only built new things, and refined them based on my colleagues' input. But unlike my colleagues, who can dive into a piece of software and augment/change it adhering to the style of it, I am usually lost with any code that I didn't write.
I think ignorance is taking things out of context unnecessarily. I am assuming Pinterest already has an unbiased hiring bar. Yet, due to sheer probability, the number of other races get hired much more. Considering the number of applicants remain the same, how do you balance the race/gender without being biased to one race/cast?
You could also switch to base 12.
i agree. now this is something to get busy with.

thanks a lot for taking the time to discuss it.
If all of your employees are remote, what do you show your investors, partners, board members, and creditors when they want a tour of your facility? How do you show them that you've got smart people working on hard problems? For some (bad?) startups, this is an even more valuable function of engineers than engineering.
How to start your own Blab tech talk show
yeah, perhaps I worded that I bit strangely. I was just commenting on how Microsoft's monopolistic behavior caused Netscape to open-source and eventually get bought out by AOL, thus forming Mozilla through the open-source release.
Ask HN: Best learn to program course for mature learners?
A family member (age ~60 years) is looking to pick up new skills and wants to learn to program. She has some basic computer knowledge but is totally lost when it comes to the command line, basic text entry, etc. She doesn't have a specific goal for learning beyond understand more about what she can do with a computer.

Since I am available to only help remotely, something very guided and hand holding would work the best.

Her platform is OS X.

Some options I've found:

Learn Python the Hard Way, http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

A Byte of Python, http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/python/

Learn to Program from Coursera, https://www.coursera.org/course/programming1

CS50 from Harvard, https://cs50.harvard.edu/

Codecademy, https://www.codecademy.com/

CS101 from Udacity, https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-computer-science--cs101

Treehouse, https://teamtreehouse.com/

Codecombat, https://codecombat.com/

I'm leaning towards Learn Python the Hard Way at the moment because it starts at a really basic level, explaining how to open the command line, use a text editor, etc.

Any specific recommendations or opinions?
The little four-squares icon that popped up few weeks go on my Windows 7 desktop notification zone, spamming me with messages to update for free to Win10, cannot be uninstalled, is deeply rooted into parts of OS Win7 through KB updates and crashes at least twice a day. With hibernated computer, it somehow forces LAN to awake, as a result blu-screening otherwise perfectly well hibernated session.

For this reasons alone, I think Win7 will be my most loved and probably last version of Windows I will ever use.
http://longreads.com/. On the community page you select a topic http://longreads.com/community/
A large reason for that is a leveraged economy.

I still remember how hard it was to build up enough credit to move beyond prepaid cellphones.
I confess that I use this same pattern frequently for work emails outside the company. Inside the company, I only sign with my given name.

[GivenName],

[Body]

[Closing],

[FullName]
I agree. And I extend that sentiment to their approach to Web Standards a few years ago too, like WebSQL [0] and NaCl [1], Dart [2]. That felt like NIH [3] or some other non-collaborative or ultra-competitive motivation on their part. Not a place of "speak for the Web". IMO, the choice of IndexedDB over WebSQL set the Web back 20 years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dart_(programming_language)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here
Usually people use their full name in signatures. Still don't see what the issue is.
Fine, run your startup in the middle of the street. There's no value in the office, correct?
A lot of this may come from the belief that the economy is only being propped up by the easy money policies of the Fed, and that the Fed is going to start tightening rapidly in the fall. There's a sense that once the tightening starts, everyone will run for the exits at once, and we'll have another 2008 situation but worse.
I get this whole skepticism thing, but Microsoft has been backing up BitLocker keys in OneDrive since at least Windows 8.

I have personally used the feature several times to recover my drive keys.

There's no evidence here that Microsoft has installed a "back door" for the FBI.