skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The last mechanic I talked to said Snap-On tools had become overpriced junk, and Harbor Freight tools were a much better value. This is for hand tools, mind you. All the hand tools I've gotten from HF in the past few years have been excellent, better than anything I ever got from Craftsman (except torque wrenches; I haven't tried HF's, and my old Craftsman torque wrenches are excellent).

Yeah, if I were a professional, I wouldn't use HF power tools either. But we're talking about DIYers here, not pros. And even good-quality name-brand tools from Lowe's/HD are a better value than renting.

The only place I can see where renting a tool makes sense is for something pretty large, that costs at least $500. For instance, a ditch digger is something I would rent, not buy: it's big, needs maintenance, and probably costs several thousand dollars new. And it's not something I'd need to use much, probably only once. But power tool that costs $80? Just buy it. I'll come out way ahead buying it, using it, and then reselling it on Craigslist than renting it.
You are doing it wrong then.

Go out at night.

Spend the weekend.

Neither are hard to do.
Correction: It works great on mobile. My mistake.
I appreciate your point, but the difference is that in the "monopoly" scenario, the creator is the capturer of value. In the open source case, the creator does not necessarily capture the value. It is others (in the ecosystem, as you suggest) that capture the value. "Building on the shoulders of giants..." So ultimately it depends on your motivations. In the Peter Thiel book, I believe the whole premise was to have an entity that creates and captures.
The formula for alpha contains pi. Another pure number being the ratio of two lengths
I've been Executive Platinum (top published tier) on AA since the merger (came in as Chairman's Preferred with US Airways).

AA similarly has a "secret" invite-only level above that -- Concierge Key -- and rumors about how they decide who to invite into it (not so secretive: people who spend lots of money, and probably people who have influence over the travel contracts of large companies). Never been a CK, likely never will be. The game was interesting for a while, but now I just have a harder time caring.

Personally I look at it as a cyclic thing. When the economy's in the tubes, airlines lavish benefits on frequent business travelers because the rest of the country isn't flying. When the economy picks up again and people start buying flights to Disney for their vacations again, the benefits get slashed.

Right now we're in a slash/devalue period. Last year I "only" put a bit over 50k miles to AA, which will drop me to Platinum with them at the end of the month when 2015 status expires, picked up Platinum on Delta as a hedge, and went on a spending spree using up my system-wide upgrades. Flew myself in business class to Europe and back multiple times, flew myself and someone else to Hawaii in first, gave a co-worker a business-class upgrade on JFK-SFO, etc.

Irony is, of course, that last month I moved and now work in SF, and UA is the only one of the big three I don't have some kind of useful status with. But living near where I work also means less need to travel, so I'll probably just buy tickets by schedule/price from here on out. DL in particular is nice about cheap first-class fares since they want to fill the front cabin with people who paid rather than people using frequent-flyer perks.
I knew nothing of her work. Thanks for this.
The article describes the Justice Dept. doing exactly what has been so widely predicted on HN and elsewhere. Doesn't seem like good timing on the government's part to publicly announce the intention to seek numerous iPhone "unlockings". Rather it plays into Apple's argument about unleashing a torrent of court-ordered demands which will have adverse consequences for security.

Legal minds should weigh in, but I'm thinking the only effective remedy is going to be congressional action, to pass law that defines the limits of court discretion re: forcing firms' assistance breaching their carefully constructed security/privacy systems.

This news prompts me to write my representative and senators and strongly urge them to support enacting this form of protective legislation. If there's enough of an outcry from the electorate there's a far greater chance of putting sensible policies in place. The fact it's an election year can only make voicing our concerns all the more effective.
I think this is the key element here.

Tesla's whole idea since the beginning was to harness the earth energy itself to produce and power his invention.

Now, did he really find a way to do this more than 100 years ago?

I love to dream that there's that much energy just lying beneath our feet and all around us waiting to be used.
12 weeks in validates a market.. and proves you're easily displaced
The Expert Elite Preparedness Package
In the specific case of the Error 53 problem I don't see a problem. In the case fingerprint sensor has been replaced with a non standard version I really want to the phone not to boot because there is a fair chance its been compromised.

(That said I think Apple's handling of the issue was terrible and it should have given a much more specific error and Apple should have been much less douchebaggy about replacing the sensor with an official version)
Homan Square: Is Someone Prototyping Domestic Rendition?
Ed Snowden inspires NSA video game
On any case where he would have had a deciding vote, the result will now be 4-4. That means that the lower court decision stands, that there is no national precedent (appeals court decisions are only binding precedent within their circuit), and that the Supreme Court is very likely to take up the case again when there's a 9th judge. Essentially as if they had never taken the case. I doubt the current members of the Supreme Court would agree to waste their time hearing a case where they know it'll end up 4-4.
PCA and similar techniques are quite useful for exploratory data analysis in bioinformatics, in particular determining which experimental factors or batch effects have the largest influence on the data. Generally, if you can't identify your effect of interest in the first few principal components of a gene expression dataset, you're going to find few, if any, significant genes.
Drone Racing and the Augmented Future of Sports
You're out of touch. It might not be common for families, but it's very common for young adults to share an apartment. And you're trivializing what activists are trying to do when they talk about making sure people have a "living wage."
That's a pretty simple special case of English language: if a reduction is indicated by a multiplicator greater one, the result is the same as multiplying by the multiplicative inverse of the number.

So 10 reduced by factor 10,000 is clearly 10 * 1/10000 = 0.001.
> I am only spitballing here, but does anyone else think the heat has risen for federal law enforcement to set some precedents on this stuff now that Antonin Scalia has died?

Scalia often ruled against law enforcement's attempts to abuse their search powers.

Examples:

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2000/99-8508

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/11-564

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2014/13-9972

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2008/07-542

It's not clear to me how he would have ruled in this case, but I don't think it would have been open and shut.
The food in the Singapore airlines lounges in Hong Kong and Singapore are great.
lee, i copy/pasted one of my hn comments below, that describes my meditation. there's a lot of lingo in your link that i don't understand. can you comment on what i describe as stage 1 and 2 below, and if that is related to stream entry, etc.?

--

2009: 1 hr

2010: 30 min

2011-2014: 10 min

2015-present: 0-10 min

these are my daily averages. i have one rule: before I go to bed, I must assume the lotus position on the floor in front of my bed.

2015 was particularly a challenging year for me (startup problems), and it was all i could do to even assume the lotus position for a second. so for much of 2015 i really didn't meditate, which was ironically when i probably needed it the most. such is my life.

it takes around 4 minutes for me to reach what i call stage 1. this is when all the normal chatter in your mind ceases and your breathing is synced (i've also noticed that it takes around 40 breaths, which is roughly 4 min, so sometimes for shits and giggles i just count to 40). after much trial and error i've noticed i don't even need to do anything; it's the mere passage of 4 minutes that gets me to stage 1.

thereafter is when the real effort begins. it is a constant effort to reach what i call stage 2, or what i consider the beginning of true mindfulness, which means you are neither thinking of the past nor the future. i would say i only enter stage 2 at seconds at a time, only to fall out again into stage 1 (usually by an intruding thought, and that thought is usually "oh, i've got it!").

to be honest, i don't know what the effects have been for me. i seriously don't feel any different. anyway, how are we to separate the effects of meditation with the normal process of maturation or aging? am i getting calmer because of meditation or because i am getting older?

i take it on faith. faith in data and science. our personal experience with meditation cannot be the guide with which we measure it's effectiveness, because subjective experience is exactly that. i liken it to flossing. i floss my teeth every day but still have worse gum recession than those who do not. my periodontist and dentist chalk it up to genetics, because that is the best they can conjecture based on the current science. we can measure flossing easily; without a brain scanner in our basement we cannot so measure effects of meditation. so from the research i take it on faith that the effects must be beneficial on my brain.
Right, all Linux distribution move their patent encumbered software to a special Indian-based repo server. Or someone else does it with donations from Westeners to keep the servers running.

I can dream. But should this work, then that's the end of the U.S. and European hegemony on abstract ideas like business processes, patents based on processes "that use a computer" and any mathematical concept - which puts paid to patents on most network protocols and compression algorithms.

And what a great world that will be. The first grand step in killing all patent trolls.
Omega is much more interesting. For informaticians...
but 'me' is a personal pronoun
> IME it's impossible to reach a person unless you're a multi-million-dollar org

I am sorry to hear that, but I can assure you it's not the case. I'm an engineer on a newer (and therefore smaller) AWS service, and I help investigate customer complaints, from customers of all sizes, all the time. I'll also note that not only do we handle cases that come in via our paid support, we also do deep dives for customers who post to our service's forums and indicate issues.
It used to be but not anymore; you can use it separately now.
Sadface. :(

I know your feels. I've worked at companies that do things because "that's what people use". Never fun.

What sort of documentation do you and your team maintain other than your API docs?

Also: +1 for Sphinx! <3 ReST
I didn't do anything but sign up for club access on a website, link my number to my credit card, and tell them at work my number. Everything else is done automatically. I have 4 free return flights saved up now, ready to go.
I was equally shocked at the state of CS education at University of New South Wales here in Australia. They don't seem to cover many fundamentals (like CPU, algorithms and data structures, operating systems) compared to what I am used to in Europe. Either not at all in the undergrad curriculum or only very late.
Its interesting to see the different landing pages for posts on Show HN.
I've made feedback on AWS docs, and every time I get a followup from the person responsible for that documentation (different section each time).
"I love ... your chain able methods that keep me wanting more." That's what I loved about jQuery, and one of the reasons I despised having to work with Dojo, who was an unpredictable mess. Some methods were chain able, other's weren't, and you just never knew which ones.
I wonder if this has to do with Amazon's streaming music competitor being more of a threat to Spotify than Google's?
Dimensionality Reduction using PCA
Sounds like you haven't read Mythical Man Month. There are a ton of issues that dictate the success or failure of an IT project and money isn't one of them.

You should read the post mortem on the Target Canada debacle to understand the pressures behind a huge software project.
It may have started as an ass-covering move, but I also think of it as a common courtesy for letting people know that you're offering non-specialist advice and to take it with a grain of salt.

I kind of wish people did that for more things: "I am not theologian/windows user/empathetic person, but..."
Explain? My locked + encrypted android (nexus 5) did initiate a self-erase after too many failed unlock attempts.
I've got some screwy eyes (astigmatism, nystagmus, myopia) and have definitely noticed that sometime over the last few years the lighting situation has gotten more annoying. Some things I've noticed are particularly annoying:

The screens of cellphones and certain OLED displays having visible screen refresh rates, especially if my eyes are panning across them from a distance.

Shitty LED display lighting with a visible flicker. It's especially bad on a place nearby that has window frames outlined in what are effectively Christmas lights--almost enough to give me a headache just looking at them.

Certain LEDs and phone backlights tend to leave trails in the dark (once my eyes are accustomed to it). This is probably normal, but is a little disconcerting.

Projected images can have minor chomratic aberration, which can be distracting during a presentation. If I twitch my eyes purposefully back and forth, it gets worse.

~

I love graphics, but that shit is annoying IRL.
Well, also interesting is the fact that Apple originally agreed and it was the judge that suggested for raising an objection...
Haha. I was running around to datacenters all over the world for a while many years ago. I eventually told the folks I worked for that I was going to start staying at least a few extra days because I couldn't tell any kids I had in the future "Yeah, I've been to London/Paris/Wherever and all I saw was a datacenter." It was a lot more fun then.
[satire] How to restart a computer
Honestly, I'm not sure. If it was really an issue, it'd be trivial to change the script to render things as nested divs and spans. The appeal of custom elements, at least to me, is that it makes everything more concise and readable. I prefer reading <type>whatever</type> to <div class="type">whatever</div>.
Not to mention the repeated references to Lincoln as a "depolarizing" figure, which is historically ludicrous. His election was the trigger for the Civil War.
The API just returns JSON; paging through that is much cleaner than hooking into events and parsing HTML with regex.

https://color.adobe.com/api/v2/themes?filter=public&startInd...
> As long as for-profit companies are running the reactors, they’ll end up saving everywhere, and, like we’ve seen before and before, it ends up in meltdowns (for example, due to refusing to maintain the emergency generators properly, see fukushima).

Counter-point: See Onagawa - http://thebulletin.org/onagawa-japanese-nuclear-power-plant-...
Ahh totally makes sense. Thanks a ton for the insight, it's super helpful!
That's not the point. The more ads there are at the top, the more google is effectively allowing you to pay for good ranking. This violates a lot of the search neutrality that makes google so useful. I think of it like Yelp. I want the services other people like, that are relevant in some unbiased sense, not the ones that paid to get there. The harder google makes it to find unbiased info, the worse the service.
I took this class last semester and our team won best overall project from approx. 100 teams. iPython notebooks and writeup can be found at http://project.chanceme.info/
The legal question here is really whether the All Writs Act can be used to compel development of new products with specific features law enforcement desires, because that's what it boils down to: they want a custom iOS build with custom security-bypass features that can be loaded onto any phone they want to snoop into.

And when framed like that -- government ordering a private company, without negotiation or contract or even agreed-upon -in-advance compensation, to develop a product -- I don't think there's a chance in hell of it standing up. The question is whether the court that ends up hearing the final appeal will frame it like that.
This makes a lot of sense since the government could issue an order through FISA and afaik apple would be required to comply with it.

The fact that they can resist the order and in a such a public way feels a little bit theatrical, given what we know about how these things work.

I wonder how much of what's happening between apple and the fbi / rest of the government is the tip of the iceberg.
> As long as for-profit companies are running the reactors, they’ll end up saving everywhere

Right, because government never cheaps out on massive infrastructure projects...
Well, you say that the software wouldn't be written, but then I don't believe this. Just because someone wants a monopoly on an idea, doesn't mean it can't be useful to make someone else money. If the idea is valuable enough, then someone will make a product from it. Then someone else might improve it, or make it cheaper. That's competition, in a free market.

The funny thing is, if software patents were only for 5 years, then it's unlikely this would be a story. The market could be capitalised on still by first-movers, and then competition and those who want to contribute further to society could cool their heels, even study the designs, and move product for consumers, and provide additional jobs. Mass market distorting giants couldn't get unfair advantages and innovation would thrive. The technology would improve because then that same company could file improvement patents, but not stop the old patent from being used. Patent trolls would not be a thing, or at least a very limited thing and at the very least all easy processes would be documented.

Teams of PhDs would still invent things. We'd still have cool tech. Open source people would make amazing things. Matheticians would continue collaborating. The world of commerce would not come to an end.
Subsequent executions took only 1 second. So, I suppose this only happens at first. Thank you for your answer.
I'd be happy to sit next to you, then, if you kept your arm off the armrest :)
I agree about the homework, but that's why the project component was worth 40% of the grade and took the final month of the semester.
It makes total sense that the givernment would use it's forensic capabilities whenever the need arises. The question at hand is: "can the All Writs Act compel a company to proactively defeat its own security measures?" The answer will apply to all cases.

The more important question is "Should the government be able to access citizen's digital data with a court order? And if so, how can that be enabled without compromising the general security of the device?

I suspect we'll ultimately wind up with mainstream device manufacturers maintaining some kind of per-device master key that they turn over when ordered.

This will enable government to access data in the typical case. Including foreign governments. Sophisticated bad guys will continue to use zero knowledge software, which government will attack by other means. The per-device master keys will be compromised eventually, which will force enterprises to upgrade their fleeta but normals won't care.
and finally they came for the pedants...
Dive into the uncanny valley with Boston Dynamics’ newest bipedal robot
I don't think the question turns on unreasonable searches. Apple isn't being searched here.

Instead, the question is whether the All Writs Act grants sufficient power to compel a company, third-party to the action, to build a tool for breaking into its product. This is different to your telephone interception example, because that interception is authorised by a specific statute, not using a general writ issued under the All Writs Act.

The argument here is executive overreach - that they should be asking the legislature to pass a law specifically to require this kind of assistance, rather than using the All Writs Act.
It was the author's example, and also her point. Your parent comment points out how easy that was to infer, and assuming your parent's commenter is a 'normal person,' the author (and maybe you too) would have a difficult time communicating with them.
Let's end drug prohibition first, and then discuss whether to hack the remaining phones, if any. This whole fiasco has nothing to do with terrorism.

Alternatively, introduce a restriction that this form of forced labor can only be compelled in terrorism cases where lives are in imminent danger. How many phones will be left to hack?
> Essentially you will have to argue that compelling a company to create an exploit to satisfy a warrant constitutes an unreasonable search if that exploit can also be used to perform illegal searches.

From the majority opinion in another All Writs case that made it to the Supreme Court[1]:

"[The lower court] was apparently concerned that sustaining the District Court's order would authorize courts to compel third parties to render assistance without limitation regardless of the burden involved and pose a severe threat to the autonomy of third parties who for whatever reason prefer not to render such assistance. Consequently the Court of Appeals concluded that courts should not embark upon such a course without specific legislative authorization. We agree that the power of federal courts to impose duties upon third parties is not without limits; unreasonable burdens may not be imposed."

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/434/159
With this and father.io, how much will we be seeing video games being played out in real life by folks wearing VR headsets at home?

Does that even make sense to us yet?
Here is my take on the recent apple vs justice saga:

Being the cynical fuck I am, a former action arm of the darkside, I have been telling friends and family for years that they should assume anything with a cellular modem in it is potentially comprimised by a nation state or above actor (yes, "above" nation state exists... Its called the deep state you fool).

I automatically assume that such publicity is actually closer to a honeypot to entice foolish mid level criminals into thinking iBrain devices are "secure", when I think they probably have miltiple backdoor avenues in place.

Of course, I'm just the hn resident conspiracy theorist, so it's probably just me being paranoid...
Wow, nice! You are very welcome. I live in Seattle so I get to see the whole plant illuminated in the afternoon/evening. Not quite the same experience as for you but it still makes me happy every time I open a new tab.
The All Writs Act doesn't say any thing about having a special or unique ability.
If this problem affects all veth drivers, why does Docker's NAT IPv4 is safe?
Now you can get paid for answering questions on Quora
I always found DHL Global Forwarding a pleasure to work with, because it was so personal. People answer your calls. I'm sure that's not great for profits or high volume customers.
Then MenuetOS/KolibriOS people are still waiting on you to catch up. Might be language choice. :P
Please feel free to forward the ticket to me at jani at google, and I'll look into it.
I half expected the video camera to turn around and show the audience that all of the footage was shot by an Atlas model. Maybe that could be a stretch goal for the next generation after Atlas.