skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Currently, there is a special inquiry going on in the German Bundestag (Federal Parliament). An ex-drone pilot is reporting about the work he did in the US miltary base in Ramstein Germany.

It is utterly shocking and disgusting.

I fail to see why this is not murder. According to press articles reporting about this inquiry, boys from the age of 12 were cleared to be killed by drones.

In my little happy world, there is only one reason when you are allowed to use violence - and that is self-defense (to protect you or others).
And according to German law and probably the law of many other countries, your self-defense is only justified if the attack on you is (1) unlawful, (2) happening right now (has started or is immediately impending) and (3) if the means to counter the attack are within reason.

The killing via drones makes me feel very, very uncomfortable. I don't think it is compatible with human rights or any reasonable constitution.

EDIT:
The following is a quote from the inquiry - quoted by the German Bundestag [1].

"In diesen Einsatzgebieten hätten alle männlichen Personen im Alter von über zwölf Jahren als legitime Ziele gegolten. Wenn ein Opfer jünger gewesen sei, sei das aber auch nicht besonders tragisch genommen worden. Man müsse das Gras mähen, bevor es wachse, habe es dann geheißen. Mit anderen Worten: Aus Kindern wären später ohnehin Terroristen geworden."

My clumsy translation:
"In these areas of operation, all male persons above the age of 12 were considered legitimate targets. If a victim was younger, however, it was not regarded as a big deal. You have to mow the grass, before it grows, it was said. In other words: Children would have become terrorists later anyways."

This is revolting.

[1] http://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2015/kw42_pa_ns...
OpsDash now with MongoDB monitoring, custom metrics, HTTP APIs, PushBullet
Note that you don't need a discrete water heater to have hot water. I didn't have one in my current house until I got a new furnace a few years back.

Multi-unit buildings may also have shared hot water heaters which may factor into the numbers as well.
You're assuming/implying he isn't already being surveilled. For all n, n is being surveilled.

The only question at this point is whether that information is used for blackmail today, or at some point in the future. If so and so is "dangerous to state security" today, then it's today. If he's inconvenient later, then it's later.
is there a TL;DR or a version written in plain English? Facebook going to have to keep EU users' data in Europe and not store it in USA?
At the end:

To employers – ask your staff to help find new hires. Offer a bounty – enough to get their attention, say a fortnight’s salary. It’s a lot less than Shithead would cost. And their incentives are all positive: no-one will hire an idiot if they have to work alongside them and new staff with social ties to your team are far more likely to stay. You’ll be amazed how effective this can be.

There are limits to this, and having someone from your team refer someone they know does not guarantee they will be an excellent worker, but I would tend to agreed that the overall quality of your team will be much higher this way.
APPLE LOSES PATENT CASE OVER A7 CHIP
The idea behind the computer seems like a cool idea, but the implementation is going to make adoption very very difficult.

They claim to support Android legacy apps. What if you need to use Photoshop? Or some other Windows-based application like Excel? Can you install open-sourced apps like GIMP? Or Roll up a VM? Is there a shell? What kind of applications does it come with natively?

They really don't give much information at all. I'm not sure who their target market is but I am guessing it's geared towards people who just browse the internet, watch videos, stream music, send emails, etc. Why would you pay a subscription for that? I can't imagine large numbers jumping on for this kickstarter other than someone looking for a new toy to burn some money on.

I think they're trying to solve way too many problems at once. Seems like they're trying to create an entirely new ecosystem amongst the likes of Windows, OSX, or Android, but they're eons behind in that race.

The UI seems pretty neat, I wish they had more examples of usage.
I've recently created a similar tool at our company.

We found out that dumping the database table by table in a parallelized way is much faster than a full database mysqldump.

There's also mysqlpump soon available in mysql 5.7 to replace mysqldump and works in parallel.
The write-up of this article on the economist reported an insignificant % of people suffering from insomnia in premodern communities vs 20% of moderns
Have you tried to negotiate without a recruiter?

Many companies are now sharing some of the recruiter costs with the employee if they go direct. In London [currently] it is an employee market, so this is a simple and effective incentive.
The workers are poorly pad because they accept the offers. The recruiters are there because companies like them, I don't know exactly why? Maybe the whole procedure results in lower salaries?
How a Dutch Satire Site Could Disrupt EU-Ukraine Relations
Working electricity, sewers, courts, police, and road netowork all require "a dominating government taking what isn't theirs to take" on the same level that free healthcare and university education do.

I was a kid in 80s in communist Poland. It was shitty place, with a lot of absurd propaganda nobody (including the people making a living spewing it, or beating up the protesters) believed. Free education and healthcare had nothing to do with it.

Main differences between communism and modern social democracies:

- independent organisations were banned or discriminated, now they are encouraged

- people were paid to spy on each other with the REAL money (you couldn't buy a car in a month with any amount of money, but if you told the right person that your neighbor listens to radio free europa and prints leaflets - you could get one no problem) - think this one through - no matter how good brain surgeon or rocket scientist or nobel prize writer you are - you won't get a car unless you wait for 10 or 20 years. Spying on your neighbors (or knowing the right people and doing them favours) can solve this in a week. Consider the incentives this sets up throught the whole society.

- there was just one employer (the state)

- social trust was nonexistent - you could only trust your family

- you had to apply for a permission to leave the country, and often when they gave you that permission you had to sign with secret service that you are a spy - so they can later blackmail you with it

I see no reason to think policies like free education till M.A. are in any way connected to these problems, since Poland had free education and healthcare both now and during communism, yet we don't do the bad things I listed anymore.

For the record - I didn't downvoted you and I don't understand why somebody woulld do that for asking a question.

BTW: free university education seems like much better than paid, because as a kid you work harder in school for better grades to go to better university. As a kid of poor parents in system with paid universities you just can't work hard enough to go to Harward (well there are stipends I guess, so they do see this problem).

As a parent it works too - in paid system you spend more time at work to afford better education for your kids. In free system - you teach your kids more so they get better grades and go to a better university. IMHO it's obvious which system sets up the incentives better.
The conservatorships have also strikingly failed in relation to our fifth and final objective of producing long-term mortgage finance reform. As Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson wrote, “We described conservatorship as essentially a ‘time out,’ or a temporary holding period, while the government decided how to restructure the [government-sponsored enterprises].” However, starting the conservatorships turned out to be easier than ending them, and the “time out” has now stretched beyond its seventh year with no clear path to reform.

What did the government expect? It's not like Fannie and Freddie are going to ask to be released from conservatorship and re-assume the risk that they are currently sharing with taxpayers. TARP, QE, bailouts, nationalization, and government conservatorships were all designed with the aim of preserving the status quo and keeping the system running on pre-recession paradigms. None of the organizations that benefit are going to voluntarily relinquish access to these crutches.

Releasing the two GSE's would be a great test to see if the Fed and government's plan for reform and economic stability has really been effective.
To raise another, less misogynist, possibility: she does indeed appear to excellent at selling her idea. So maybe that let to her success in VC circles. There's also a lot of precedent in people dropping out of college and being success. Not just with software but also, for example, hardware – which is more similar to biotech. Considering the Wozniak/Jobs success with hardware in the 80ies, I don't find it entirely implausible that a smart hacker could be successful in biotech even without a doctorate these days.
Wow. E-books such as non-DRM'ed ePub are great sharing and accessibility tool. I can't quite decide whether this conflating of e-books with the Amazon Kindle store is stupid or dishonest. The Kindle format/store is only "typical" in that Amazon is a major bookseller. There is nothing preventing every benefit listed there of printed books with ePub, and even people who are blind can access them too.
I stopped answering the phone to unknown numbers because of this.
"The software industry is broken and we have the means to ﬁx it.

Up until now, developers have been forced to either charge huge fees from a handful of enterprise clients or ask for pennies from individuals. We replace these outdated business models by charging all users a small monthly fee"

And split the money how? This solves nothing.
Ansible's Python as well, so will integrate well with the rest of RHEL, whereas Puppet was nearly the only Ruby tool in the Unix sysadmin community.

Not saying that one is better than the other, just than there's more Python out there in sysadminland.
Actually I think it's more the YAML config files than the fact it's written in Python. I learned 80% of Ansible in probably 10 days of writing playbooks and going through the infrastructure at my new job.

Also I used to work with Puppet in an 8000 server environment and Ansible and Salt both are so much more fun and easy to use than Puppet. I hear the same thing over Chef too.

Last Ansible is the only one that doesn't require any agents installed and does everything via SSH. At first I didn't think I'd like that coming from Puppet but, I can do everything I need to without another daemon to worry about.
You might want to think it as "SoluOS". Solu a is the Finnish word for "cell" (as in the cell in biology) - the team behind this is from Finland.

I totally agree with you on the lack of concrete info. From what I've seen/heard the OS itself is built on top of Linux and Android and apps can be developed with the HTML5 stack (and I suppose with Android's tools ?).

To be honest even after seeing some private technical demos, I was still left quite confused...

The main problem with this project is that the SoluOS itself is mainly a UI/UX innovation, but for some reason they had to provide HW and OS too. Why can't I install this on my Mac/Linux laptop ?
This is an angry angry rant... and I'm not sure I agree. Some recruiters are pretty good. I was placed by one and I consider another an excellent giver of advice; he actually advised me to take a competing offer from another recruiter (of which I did not mention the name or deal, just the parameters). Generally my experience has been positive.
Had really bad experience with recruiters in London

- Lies. From "They have a free gym pass" to complete bs like salary and position.

- Screwed up formatting of CV that I've sent (they wanted .doc) I've written that I have basic perl skills, recruiter changed it to good and destroyed the layout of CV making it unreadable. Good luck with perl question during the interview.

- Constant phone calls with no new information.
PIDs are great for espresso boilers where you want water around 202F (sea level), so below boiling. My home machine with an 800ml brew boiler stays within +/- 2F all day with the PID. My previous machine without PID could barely keep it in a +/- 5F range.

For steam boilers, pressure stats are actually quite effective, especially as they get larger.
Soviet PCs
Depends what you mean by "need".

If you mean "your business or life had a critical problem that could only be fixed by this tool", then no.

If you mean "your business or life could be significantly impacted and improved by this tool", then yes.

I almost never impulse-buy, FYI.
Zite was killed, so we rebuilt it for you in Pipes
On those older phones the radio and phone application tended to be highly combined and running on the same processor, so re-writing the firmware would require you to reprogram hardware identifiers (there's a handful of embedded PCs at the moment where the ethernet MAC address isn't actually stored in NV memory so also has to be set on boot). -but yeah, you _need_ IMSI and IMEI as minimum to register on a network.

As far as I know, nearly every "modern" or smartphone has distinct separation between OS+applications and the radio world to the point where they're not only running separate firmware (anyone flashing android images will have seen this) but they're running on physically separate CPUs.

The other sad thing about the older phones (I've got a 6310 and a 7110 on my desk at the moment) is that they often don't support A5/3 encryption, so you can't actually use them on most modern networks (I believe it's the encryption; if anyone else knows better please tell me) -so if you're desperate to change the IMEI for some reason you can't just use an ancient handset to do it. It also means I can't throw off the shackles of this modern world and re-live 1990's hardware :(

I guess my original question could be better phrased as "does anyone know if it's possible on a _modern_ handset -and as it's device specific; which ones?"

I also feel I should point out a couple of "good" reasons for the macro operators not wanting people to have the ability. As it's the hardware identifier, it's used to blacklist stolen handsets -and anything that discourages kids from stealing my phone at knifepoint is probably a good thing. Different handsets also have all sorts of odd network quirks too. For macro operators, being able to profile how different handsets behave on their network can be extremely useful just for the sake of keeping the network running properly.

My sudden paranoid realisation though is that if you're a TLA, being able to go from IMEI to make/model of handset and therefore know exactly what exploits to use, must be quite useful o_0
There was a ruling this week saying MPs can be surveilled by gchq, it'd be interesting to know where the immunity really is - the PM and his cabinet? Opposition leaders? The opposition leader? http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2015/10/gchq-allowed-to...

Oh, and David Cameron has already called the Labour party run by Corbyn a danger to national security. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-cameron-...
Do the other details matter? That Amazon had to recall the book and refunded customers? Not to me. They simply could not have "recalled" all books if they had been physically sold.

They are holding a loaded weapon pointing at our e-books. The circumstances that make them fire it are not as important as the bizarre fact that they have this loaded weapon in the first place.
It shouldn't unless you're very careless. A tag that just updates all of the settings files and restarts the services should have the same effect as the full playbook run.
One fairly recently cold emailed me 4 times in one day, the last email quite put out and angry that I hadn't responded yet; this was followed by numerous cajoling to censorious emails in the following days, and then a letter mailed to my home castigating me for not responding. And then more emails. He finally went away.

Then there is the current one - scheduling an interview without my say so, I demanded she cancel it immediately, yet I subsequently get a call from the company "Roger, where are you". She didn't cancel it. I told her to she was not to represent me in any way, to not contact me again. Yesterday, what shows up in my inbox? Demands to respond to her email with regards to a client with clear evidence that she is still shopping/talking about me. All this against a backdrop of me telling them my dog is diagnosed with a brain tumor, my life is occupied with dealing with it, and just leave me alone (true story, not made up to make them go away). Holy fuck.

I had an absolutely great recruiter once, he spent hours talking to me, working to find a good fit (something I found myself ended up working), but don't ask me how to find someone like that. Unfortunately his specialty is in an area (HFT) that I decided that I don't want to participate in.
Adding more details (the book's publisher did not have rights to sell that edition; customers were refunded) does not change the key message being communicated: Amazon removed books that had been purchased in good faith from Kindles without the purchasers' involvement or consent.

That's something Amazon could do (and still can) that would not be possible to do with paper books or ebooks that were not purchased through Kindles or other devices that are not directly connected to the Internet. Not without some sort of massive intrusive recall effort anyway.

Having said that, this article is quite straw-manny. I've an ebook reader that I cannot connect to the Internet, and I use it daily. For books that I purchase, I still need to do so electronically, and that usually requires identification (through PayPal or credit card). I have no problems with ebooks in general, though; not every ebook format or reader grants the same access to the vendor, and it's not that difficult to vote with your feet.
My Green Village Opens Its Offices in the Green Exchange
I don't think that's necessarily true - both Puppet and Chef are Ruby, and you'll often hear Ruby referred to as the "lingua franca" of DevOps.
Angel list with open salary range policy, glassdoor, friends, BATNA
Thank you for that link, I really needed it (I do cook on Sundays but not enough for a whole week).
yeah, they will need to be really careful with incentives.

For example, if money is given based on how much people use the different apps, there is a large incentive to do very simple apps that have a high ratio of people using them vs. short time to dev the app.

So maybe trivial mobile games like 2048 and the like will flood their store and complex software like Photoshop won't ?
I laughed when I read this, but there is indeed a difference. Here, a meaningful portion of your confiscated earnings is distributed to your fellow citizens. Moreover, the means of confiscation is predictable, as is the degree. In Russia, you'll get fleeced just the same. However, your money will primarily line the pockets of those doing the taking.
Rami Ismail to Indie Startups: You Don't Stand a Chance
A lot of the advice translates to start ups.
It's not even giving up security. All we'd be giving up is some profits.
About 10 weeks ago, I got an email from such a company, the payload being

"Our database consists of over 2 million resumes of qualified consultants that we rigorously screen and are ready to be deployed. Our footprint is Nationwide.

* is a company that specializes in providing Project/Program Manager, Architect, QA/Code Testing, Business Analyst, DBA, ETL, Virtualization, Disaster Recovery, Storage/Backup, Cyber Security, Analytics, Cloud, Financials, HRMS, ERP/MRP, Business Intelligence, Business Objects, Data Warehousing, Front end/Web/Mobile Development/Design, Middleware, Supply Chain, Logistics, Warehouse Management, Inventory Management, E-Commerce, SDLC, Networking, etc. specified contractors/consultants for contract/contract to hire projects."

I had to like the use of "specialize".
I was in Vivace's the other day and Schomer's latest quest seems to be around water. As I understand it they are starting from purified water then adding in their own blend of minerals to achieve the consistency they want. (apparently only the Capitol Hill location is testing this, more here: http://espressovivace.com/index.php/water-formulation/)

I have a PID'd Silvia (https://www.seattlecoffeegear.com/pid-retrofit-kit-for-ranci...) and it does make a difference. But man, the black hole that is making repeatable excellent espresso at home doesn't end there. You start wondering about your tamp pressure, need a $700 grinder to have consistent adjustable grinds and start roasting your own coffee.

It is an expensive hobby, but a tasty one at least.

If you pass through Seattle, make sure to drop by Vivace, they define what proper espresso is.
You want to do scrum? Start with daily reports
This is mostly an angry rant, pretty amusing to me how upset the author actually becomes at times, I think its quite harsh.

I did like this idea towards the end of it:
"To employers – ask your staff to help find new hires. Offer a bounty – enough to get their attention, say a fortnight’s salary. It’s a lot less than [a recruiter] would cost. And their incentives are all positive: no-one will hire an idiot if they have to work alongside them and new staff with social ties to your team are far more likely to stay. You’ll be amazed how effective this can be."
And where are pelmeni, vinaigrette, olivier? And fried eggs with jam is weird I've never heard about that.
> Screwed up formatting of CV that I've sent (they wanted .doc) I've written that I have basic perl skills

Isn't unreadable a plus in Perl? :-p
Emphasis yours. That line has existed in journalism for decades. I think it's interesting that the perception exists that this is somehow arrogant; to me, it seems to protect Red Hat/Ansible from the perception that they're uninterested in public relations. Source: I work for a newspaper.
> I've an ebook reader that I cannot connect to the Internet, and I use it daily.

I don't think you're "fairly typical" in this regard, nor is most of the HN user base. Most people are doing what Amazon publishes as "most convenient", which is internet-enabled e-readers with all of Amazon's restrictions.
With Tower I have dynamic inventories and variables. I can make it as descriptive as I need to and view everything in Tower.
My summary is the sole reason that this guy thinks twitter might be dying. Nothing about problems making a successful business out if it (which seems to be the main topic of this place). Don't get me wrong, I hope it does die. I hate the modern web and it consolidating content into a few silos.

"Meaningful dialogue" is not a feature that twitter is capable of providing. Not just because it's limited to 140 chars. Allowing arbitrary length tweets is pointless. It would degenerate into any other blogging platform.

If abuse is such a huge problem then it cannot be solved with the current architecture. Everyone has a block button but I can see that endless new accounts get around that. What each person needs is their own filter. Problem is that twitter would never allow that. People would use it as an ad filter which defeats the entire point of the platform.
I also came from operating one puppet environment to using ansible, and just like you the major sales points were ease of configuration with YAML and agentless deployment.

But development of the project has been fueled by skyrocketing participation. Myself and a friend of mine have both contributed small bits of code to the project without being professional developers, and looking at the github contributors they are in the thousands for a 3 year old project. Compare that to cfengine's 73 contributors.