skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If $2.3MM/yr over 5 years is enough to reshape the trajectory of fundamental laws in this country, why aren't people just Kickstarter-ing cannabis decriminalization, marriage equality, and copyright law changes?

My point is: that's not a lot of money. Not that I think you can get important changes done for $2.3MM.

There is real conservative opposition to return-free filing. For instance, conservatives in general think the tax code is both too complex and too onerous. In a return-free system, citizens are given a summarized bill and encouraged not to consider the line items. The concern is that the bill is unfair, and the less citizens have it shoved in their face, the less likely we are to get a fairer tax code.

(I think this is silly and that we are probably under-taxed, but I understand the logic.)
>>You are right though, size of the market likely isn't that big

Why do you think that?
Our two cats seemed to think it was worth investigating when I played it for them - presumably thinking that my iPhone was a very odd looking cat!
Flexport is hiring logistics veterans to do sales and service
Indeed. The point of the GFW is to prevent political unrest. MNC's workers are unlikely to be fermenting dissent at work. Deploying the GFW on their connections doesn't really aid the government as a whole in terms of staying in power, but it does mean that MNCs will get pissed off and may reduce their presence in China.
Practical Rocketry
While it might not sound 100%, my cats reacted as soon as it started playing and they normally ignore speaker sounds so there's that. I think they were much happier with the purr than when I try to get a reaction from them by playing kitten cries on YouTube. Very cool project and, like others have said, very relaxing sound. Nice work!
> Ok, the success of Mint proves me wrong, I just don't get it.

Well for one thing people are lazy and Mint devs actually take care of handling logins for all of those banks, credit cards companies, and credit unions.

I'm not entirely sure if there's any other alternative non web base software that can do this. I would assume those apis are different between all those companies.

Sure I can input my stuff manually but then again I'm lazy.
Mostly because no one has done it yet, and congressmen are much more open to corporate lobbying and serving elite and business interests than they are interested in serving the people, mostly because the government wants taxes. Taxes come from business, and business often comes from making things that should be easier harder. In a world of perfect competition everything would cost next to nothing and profits would be non-existing. The world would be at equilibrium. Lots of business is about making sure the world never gets to that state so the game can go on.
PTCL to Boost Evo and Nitro Limits to Upto 300GB with Improved Prices
It is certainly not the case that conservatives, who make up roughly half the government and who apparently constitute the bulk of opposition to return-free filing, want more taxes. The belief that Americans are over-taxed defines almost half of American conservative ideology.
1.) Start general ("I'm an x developer with y years experience.) You want to tell them 2-3 selling points ( I have a lot of experience with x, I'm great at y).

2.) Always be closing. Whatever you decide to tell them, put yourself in their shoes and ask "Does this person sound like a great hire?"

3.) Don't be boring. Your 2-3 selling points should prompt them to ask you more about those things. Don't recite your resume.
There is wanting taxes, and then there is wanting taxes. One is the tax rate, and other is how much business is done. The logic goes that if the government generates more jobs through lower business tax then they can get more revenue from the income tax. I guess I should restate and say that the government wants more revenue, whichever way it comes in and is more amenable to policies that produces more revenue for itself and for business in the country.
To serve as a noise blocking white noise machine (that is the main use of the site) but only with natural sounds, this one is my favourite (try with the Animate feature) : http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/windSeaRainNoiseGenerator.p...

In general, all the latest ones have my preference, as I am perfecting my skills, day by day. I am quite happy with the last one added two weeks ago: http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/circularBreathSoundscapeGen...

Check this one if you like sung voices: http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/himalayanVoicesSongGenerato...
If you prefer a narrower view, why not just resize your browser window to be more narrow? Some of us find full-width text more readable, and artificially constrained viewports are not something we can easily resize.
Look at Egypt Tours
New iOS Music Playlist Creation and Player App Great for Workouts or Parties
Whatever happened to Semantic Web?
She's a very sad individual. I feel sorry for her more than any sort of ire.

She cherry-picked right past Cordelia Naismith (later Vorkosigan) and her mother, both from "Beta Colony" where genders swap like day and night ("Shards of Honor," Vorkosigan Saga, Book One). You won't find any simpering females in any of Lois McMaster Bujold's novels unless they are a plot device there to serve as a victim and you won't run into gender discrimination from any primary characters (except for the old people ;-)).
It's an opinion. It would be very tedious to preface everything with "I think". It seem very common here to ask that everything be backed up if you don't agree with it, but don't ask the same thing if you do. Instead of dismissing comments, it would be better to ask for clarification or state why you are disagreeing. Especially as a moderator.

The accusation that my comment is "made up" is unfair, not only because it's only as made up as any opinion, but because you make that conclusion based on your disagreement with one of my statements. That is a fallacy if anything.

My opinions both about copying and commercialization in SV is well founded on texts like "A General History of Silicon Valley" [0]. That China is doing the same thing SV did in the beginning, is based on my experiences in Shenzhen. The example of drones is based on the great interests in drones in the US[1] and the success of DJI[2]. My last opinion is based on conversations I've had with people from SV, who quite often judge China by very different standards than the US. "ageek123" made a fair argument opposing this.

If there's anything that is frustrating on HN, it's not accepting that people have a difference of opinion, background and experiences. Things aren't given the benefit of the doubt to the extent they should, but instead downvoted, flagged, spammed into "controversy" or moderated. This creates an environment where discussions end up being about the "lowest common denominator".

I also find it somewhat strange that after more than five years on HN with essentially no interaction with moderation, a couple of days after I e-mail about moderation you make this comment which seems more "aggressive" than usual. Instead of things like "makes grand claims without backing them up", "couldn't possibly know such a thing", "you've made it up", "wishful thinking", "not what we're looking for" and "cheap shots" how about you either disagree[3] if you disagree or do moderation on point if you're doing moderation. "Please substantiate your critic so people have a chance to reply on something other than opinion" seems quite apt. Not that this is a common standard on HN, but at least it would be making HN better.

[0] http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/sv.html
[1] https://hackaday.com/tag/drone/
[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2015/05/06/dji-drones-fr...
[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
I would say these so-called "ethical questions" are always a red herring (not because they're unimportant, but rather because we don't have a reliable authority to handle them); the real problems that should really be explored beforehand are matters of jurisprudence (e.g. commercial control vs. state control and its implications) and potential weaponization.
Newly discovered dwarf galaxy may signal dark matter
How did you get your two cats to peacefully purr in front of a high-quality microphone?!
It was a light-hearted article, but the maple syrup issue made me wonder, so I (unbelievably) did some checking.

The quote about "poutine, Nanaimo bars, and butter tarts" was in the context of "Some words refer to things Americans don’t seem to have:".

But apparently Americans do have maple syrup: "Vermont is the largest producer in the United States, generating about 5.5 percent of the global supply" [1]. Vermont apparently produces more maple syrup than Ontario [2].

Anyway, the majority of maple syrup comes from Quebec, but does it really count as a culinary gift of Canada? Apparently maple syrup is a First Nations' culinary gift that existed before Europeans settlers arrived [3].

On the other hand, recipes for poutine and Nanaimo bars date only as far back as the 1950s, and butter tarts to 1900 (says Wikipedia). For context, consider that Canada became a country in 1867.

So I guess it does make some sense for maple syrup not to make the list.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maple_syrup
[2] http://www.maplesyrupworld.com/pages/Top-Regions-Producers-o...
[3] https://www.historicacanada.ca/content/heritage-minutes/syru...
Ask HN: How to Improve our API's documentation
Hello,
We have an ReSt API that have been in use internally & now we have started opening it for our partners.

I have done the initial documentation by parsing our server logs to get the params, then tried the requests in POSTMAN. Once I had the params & responses, I documented them on http://developers.punchh.com/

Now,
the docs there are 90% correct but sometimes they are out-of-date, wrong or have grammatical/typos in them which I fix but there is little bandwidth. I am wondering if I should outsource this work to technical writer(freelance/contract) to make sure API docs are solid as the will work on it dedicatedly vs my team who's primary focus writing code.

However, I am still not sure if this a good idea. how do other companies make sure that their API documentation is awesome? Looking for some advice on how to improve the API docs to they are easier to read:

URL: http://developers.punchh.com/
4 Tips for Young Entrepreneurs on How to Build a Company
Using Git to manage vacations in a large distributed team
- KnockoutJS (to keep HTML generation logic in the HTML)

- jQuery (for small stuff)

- RequireJS (so that you don't have to load all at once)

- MomentJS (Date / Time management done right)

- AmplifyJS (Pub / Sub and localstorage)

I really like KnockoutJS. Easy to learn and it grows with you so that you don't have to complicate your app if not necessary.
Despicable Me: Minion Rush Cheats Hack No Survey
Italian city drops Open Office for Microsoft after four years
24/7/52 does seem more logical...
Transparency: Open Source (GPLv2) User Activity Monitoring Android App
> When quizzed about how exactly the network was supposed to stay secure without oversight, an official whose name is redacted from the document told the investigators: “It’s kind of like a self-policing, everybody’s job is to be responsible.”

So their security policy was to not have a security policy, essentially.
>> But look to the UK, to the BBC, and you won't find any

I see a few. Comedians Stewart Francis and Katherine Ryan are regulars on panel shows and DJs Heidi and B-traits present shows on BBC Radio 1. It may not be that many but I enjoy the ones that are here!
The point is that the desire to use a OTP typically hinges on it being "uncrackable".

By using a PRNG (even if it is a cryptographic stream cipher) to generate your pad, you've just re-introduced the same "crackability" (by way of the PRNG), and your system is strictly worse (same security, worse logistics) than an existing system.
Cool! I've hacked an audio mixer Flash AIR app, APK'd for Android, but I know there's a Java way to do it. Look forward to it!
I'm an engineer. Having a product manager is liberating. I can focus on engineering. Product and design can focus on product and design.

You've had bad experiences. Mine have been uniformly positive.
Improving Mobile Payments with Real Time Spark – Spark Meetup Talk
Q and a Session with Jacob Appelbaum at Debconf15
> Also when you refer to engineers and designers as being "yours," this is a huge red flag.

I think you're reading too much into a common shorthand for "engineers who I work with".

People also say "my friends", "my family", "my workmates", "my boss", "my bus driver", "my doctor" and so on without implying subordination.
Exactly, that's how I stumbled upon this. PyGopherd has a very nice feature that supports serving gopher and http on the same port...
Unfortunately none of the current latest versions of top browse supports gopher afaik. Firefox dropped it at 3.6 (but still possible with OverbiteFF).

Edit: here's the gopher link for it gopher://gopher.quux.org/0/Humor%20and%20Fun/Microsoft_KSH.txt|/MBOX-MESSAGE/1
404 error :/
I don't know, this sound makes me very very angry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho6HRBPOgM0
Matrix OST when I'm really hot
And... Chopin/Bach when I need to focus
The compliance tools for Yammer are pretty rudimentary. I've actually worked on a product for automating the Yammer data export, converting the raw data that that dumps to you (what looks suspiciously like a straight table dump, converted into an archive of CSV files), and pushing that into various compliance management systems.
Well, I assumed that the point of the quote is that it's fitting for the story, mentioning Larry was for attribution (which I see got removed from the title, I don't mind but I think it should've stayed in there for credit)
> It aimed to gather together all the world's knowledge and classify it according to a system they developed called the Universal Decimal Classification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Decimal_Classificati...

> UDC codes can describe any type of document or object to any desired level of detail.
Same story ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10093292

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101743

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10102256

Some scepticism expressed in the comments ...
I've also never really figured out what value Yammer, and other similar products, like Chatter from SalesForce, or IBM's Lotus Connections, was supposed to provide. As best I can tell, the rationale must have been something like:

1.) Well, our employees spend a lot of time screwing around on Facebook, so let's build something that looks almost identical, but that is supposed to be used for posting status messages about work, instead of BuzzFeed listicles, baby pictures, and venting!

2.) ?????

3.) PROFIT!!!!
Sexy Cyborg Goes Pentesting
RobotReviewer: Automatically Assesing Risk of Bias in Clinical Trials
ext3 with the default data=ordered was the filesystem that taught a generation of Linux developers that fsync(2) does nothing to improve data consistency and has crippling performance impact, so should never ever be called.

The inevitable results of applications developed for ext3 running on other file systems incurring data loss on system crashes then got blamed on those other filesystems (including ext4, ironically).
Any tips on profiling windows device drivers? I've tried xperf, but it doesn't allow you (or I haven't seen how) to change the frequency of the sampling, and can only do a system-wide profile.

I've also tried vtune, but it doesn't support stack-tracing (or things like lbr) for system-wide profiling, and it doesn't have a specific option for sampling drivers. You can attach to the System process, but then you're missing a lot of the your driver code, that runs in other contexts.

I kept thinking about implementing my own sampling profiler (using LBR for stack-tracing, and hardware performance events, like linux's oprofile/ freebsd's hwpmc), but I can't see how I could only profile my driver, and not the whole system, without hooking the Windows scheduler. I guess I will just profile the whole system and check if the program counter is inside my module.
Ok, I'm being repetitive but also trying to simplify:

Conservatives make up the core opposition to return-free filing.

Conservatives definitionally do not want more taxation, or complicated taxation.

So I'm not sure the notion that Intuit's lobbying has killed return-free filing holds up.
It was not about getting the cats close to my microphones, but getting the microphone close to the cats :D
What about the Canadian armed forces?
What Chicken Nuggets Taught Me About Using Data to Design
A Typical American Life, Week by Week
It appears self-evident that he's at least an adequate technology leader. He's leading a company that is the undisputed (current) leader in cloud computing and running an extremely fast growing and profitable technology business there. IMO, that put his well into the top 0.1% of technology leaders, but even if you don't agree with that, if results mean anything, I think you can agree that he's not terrible at it.

The Amazon UI might not be to your taste or beautiful, but there's no question that it's efficient at enabling customers to find and buy their retail items at a rapid clip. IMO, Prime Pantry's search is pretty decent; the selection over which they're searching is poor, but the search itself seems decent.
Because Stalin wouldn't have stopped at the Elbe, but pushed on to the Bay of Biscay?
The difficulty in realizing the promise of genetic engineering to treat disease, or even do the more esoteric things like enhance abilities or create new species has not been altering genomes. The difficulty has been and continues to be the tremendous difficulty in understanding how proteins fold, given a DNA sequence, and on top of that understanding the biochemical reaction pathways and feedback loops. In the 90's early work showed that sime changes could profound and often detrimental effects.
Previous HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9909429
Fun philosophical debate :) AI devs argue that the man responding in Chinese is consulting a look-up table (input to output rule-book). Table-lookups aren't tractable for complex AI agents, and so must be boiled down to algorithms which yield the same results (and can be represented in code more compactly / efficiently). If the man knew the algorithm to convert input to output, then he knows Chinese.
our office has been listening to jungle life and absolute rain all week at work. we love your site. if/when an android app comes out i'll definitely buy it.
He should care because you will go to his competition.
What is a good, active cloud based personal finance software service? The ones I have come across look ok, but aren't actively developed.
> Jackson Pollack has been decried as an alcoholic fraud by some, but like Da Vinci, it is the techniques he pioneered as much as his works that are fascinating

Throwing paint at the wall like a baby projectile-vomitting rainbow-colored Gerber puree'd carrots?
yearly pricing seems more appealing than monthly, because there may be no months with vacations scheduled, and it might appear that you're paying "for nothing", but there will very likely not be an entire year with no vacations.

$15 feels sort of like the upper end of the price range, unless there's some integration with a payroll service.

I'd encourage considering a flat rate for small companies - $99/year for up to 12 employees, or something like that.
Running your domain on HTTPS for free
Silicon Valley: How Can I Survive in the Bay Area?
Profile in Computational Imagination: Tim Hopper
And also to define guidelines on what to do if shit hits the fan. As an example (nothing related to DNA modification but anyway), I have a few neighbours who planted balsamine plants (I guess it's this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impatiens_glandulifera) because it's a bee friendly plant. The problem is it's an invasive plant, it's now absolutely everywhere and spread kilometres away from the original point. I don't mind because it's harmless and the pink flowers are quite beautiful but it's an example of the kind of unforeseen consequences that can happen.
Isn't Yammer's business model to entice corporate users to start using it publicly and then charge (extort?) companies to sell them admin access to control it?

That's a pretty scummy business model, IMO.
I will hazard a guess that many HNers know Jim's author through another pretty piece of software he wrote: Redis.
It feels a little odd that Jim is not the scripting language of Redis.

There has been some talk that Tcl 9.0 will build on top of Jim or on top of ideas from Jim. I don't know what current status of that is.
Ian McDonald's Everness series has main characters speaking in Polari, and where I first encountered it as a thing. And the books, even though they're aimed at young adults are really good.

What surprised me is how many words I use regualrly had their origins in Polari. I don't know whether it's because they've made their way into mainstream language, or just a regional thing though.
If I had money to invest, this is why I'd be dropping it into commercial battery backup manufacturers. Losing the ability to store electricity will cause greater discrepancy in costs during peak hours and non-peak hours. Instead of just maybe $0.03 per Mwh between peak and non-peak we might start seeing $0.05-$0.10 differences. It won't even be about being able to sell the energy BACK during peak times, it'll be so companies have more control over the costs of this utility.
I have installed UC Browser on my android just for HN. Double tap for zoom and the text adjusts to the width.

Older versions of android stock browser used to act this way, but latest chrome on android does not.
Right, maple syrup goes back to colonial times, and we still make enough in Michigan that with a little effort you can always buy locally produced.

At least some Michiganders say "eh", too -- my impression is it is especially common in the UP. It's not at all surprising, the border here has been pretty porous for centuries. When I was a kid, we'd have to cross over to Canada for Chinese food or hard-packed ice cream cones...
Remote Code Execution in Dolphin Browser for Android
Beautifully said. Wow.
Google API Keys from GitHub Search
Facebook's response seems predictable if the intern had just thought about it a bit. I'm not arguing that FB did the right thing, only that they took a predictable action.
Conservatives want lower tax rates. One common conservative argument is that if you tax less, businesses will expand more and you may even make more in taxes overall.
Social network tools were found as very productive (since ppl are familiar with them from home). This caused employees to form work groups on commercial products like Facebook, WhatsApp, etc... companies want to give employees those same tools but under the control of the company and with enhanced governance.
Blockchain tech can eradicate corruption in Asia
Review of the New FFIEC Cybersecurity Assessment Tool
Reid Hoffman on best strategies, valuable lessons, the PayPal mafia [video]
Uber lets riders use cash in Vietnam
As Randall Munroe has cleverly illustrated, a system is only as secure as its weakest point: https://xkcd.com/1200/

IT administrators can secure everything under their control really well, but if a third-party web application used by employees is successfully penetrated, poof! IT infrastructure is now exposed to threats from the inside. Meanwhile, the only people who can evaluate and improve the security of that web application are the people selling the application.
Because it's extremely convenient, and they provide a useful service? The trade-off between someone else doing work for you, so you can do something else you want to do, is never going away.