skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's more like a river basin event. My fervent hope is that Dodd draws upon his years of experience weakening the economy to weaken Hollywood to the point of collapse. Hollywood should figure out how to protect its products if this is important to them, instead of demanding that Internet service providers figure it out for them and pay for the privilege.
Every microphone in every powered device must be considered as listening if you are serious about security at all.

So what if the panel actually even disabled the mic preamp on the board? You could have a program/virus/trojan that silently re-enabled it behind your back, without you knowing. So I'd say this is nothing to be concerned about, because every device you own potentially "listens" with its microphones all the time.

The advice with plugging a jack into the line-in port is good -- if you're sure your hardware hasn't been tampered with, this should physically disconnect the microphone.

Obviously if you're really worried about your computer listening, you should rip it open and physically cut the microphone connection.
I don't think it is poorly worded, though this sentence is a bit clumsy:

The existentialists argue that any formal, self-consistent religious structure is necessarily broken -- God is dead -- not that the essence of religion, finding meaning by artistically living an authentic life, doesn't work.

That cuts to the chase, but due to its structure, it can be easy to misread.

[Edit: grammar]
It sounds like Congress needs an ignorance quorum before passing any law:

"Congress shall pass no law, unless 51% of the electorate can pass a quiz on the content of said law. Also, individual legislators must abstain from voting until they receive passing marks."
I was very amazed to learn that in the USA you can legally give money to politicians so that they would vote for something. It is illegal in my country and I have trouble finding rationale why on Earh, could this be legal anywhere?!
So in what sense is your tagline "The religious people were right all along." correct? Certainly not making decisions based on incomplete information.
I wish that more phone companies would produce plain Google phones, and not feel the need to differentiate themselves from the rest of the market by plastering their own designs over the top. Heck, I'd settle for _one_ company doing that.
I understood is as the stub was plugged into the input to avoid having the input automatically ignored due to not having a device connected.

I don't know (no experience) if Macs' analog ports were this clever, but considering the hardware to detect presence in the port is trivial, it wouldn't surprise me so that's how I interpreted it.
Ask HN: How do you learn about a new industry?
When researching new ideas, I have difficulty with attaining a really comprehensive understanding of a given market. For instance, if I were onto an idea that I think would help out online merchants, how would I go about learning about that industry, about the dynamics and specifics that keep it running, about what would work and won't work?

I find that at best I can achieve a rather superficial level of knowledge and understanding, and I think it's proven damaging in the past when I've steamrolled ahead with developing ideas that eventually floundered.
It would have been nice if the article had provided the actual quote where Wales said Dodd should be fired.
ah great to see more startups launched focused on educational apps for a change
I was a little dismayed at that point too - but I think the rest of the paragraph clarifies the point well. I think he's talking about a sincere spiritual journey, not "religious people" as commonly encountered. I'm an atheist, but I also think there's a natural "spiritual" instinct that has to do with artfulness, reflection, and transcendence (eg. the attempt to transcend your view of the world as a single individual)
In the startups I've been part of, we simply test them, and look at their portfolios (GitHub). They've been pleased to hire competent dropouts, and generally don't emphasize some BS grade. (And once in the company, people get a deeper idea of their skills.)

[Edit: after reading _delirium's correction below, I made a couple small changes. I've got a cold, and I'm afraid I haven't made my point well.]

I'm perfectly fine if students aren't graded (or if grades are a strictly private matter between the student and teacher). Many teachers think so too, so-called "radical" teachers, but of course they unfortunately have bosses... a few teachers get away with it, particularly in more democratic schools where students are more in control, but not enough do.

Personally, I learn all sorts of subjects, and the notion of someone conventionally grading me... would degrade the whole experience.
Doesn't seem to work for me in Safari Version 5.1.2 (7534.52.7). I simply get a black screen...
Some email clients also chuck anything after a line with just two or three dashes. I believe I recall that in things as old as Eudora or as recent as Entourage.

Used to be that you'd put \n-- \n before your sig, and then replies would omit the sig.

ADDED:

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_block

"The formatting of the sig block is prescribed somewhat more firmly: it should be displayed as plain text in a fixed-width font (no HTML, images, or other rich text), and must be delimited from the body of the message by a single line consisting of exactly two hyphens, followed by a space, followed by the end of line (i.e., "-- \n").[1] This latter prescription, which goes by many names, including "sig dashes", "signature cut line", "sig-marker", and "sig separator", allows software to automatically mark or remove the sig block as the receiver desires."

1. The links in Wikipedia reference RFCs dating back to 1994.
The way I see it, the only reason political parties need such vast amounts of money is to spend it campaigning. If you reduce the need or ability to campaign, by restricting advertising or making voting compulsory, the demand for money is lessened, and some industry or another threatening to pull their support isn't such a big deal.
I agree to some extent, though that could be one reason employers are so happy about grades: they really do want people with those kinds of competitive characteristics.

Experiments in reducing the grade-centricness of universities have mostly foundered on employer objections. UC Santa Cruz for a while was famous for giving narrative evaluations instead of grades. Clases were formally graded pass/fail to indicate whether you met the minimum requirements to move on, and then in either case the professor wrote a one-page or so explanation of what you did well and poorly in the class, some advice, etc. In a sense the evaluation was still quite rigorous, just not boiled down to a single letter.

Companies hated this because they wanted to know which students had the 4.0 GPAs, and which had the 2.0 GPAs: a string of passes plus a stack of narrative reports didn't fit their evaluation model. So UCSC moved to allowing students who wanted to receive a grade along with the evaluation to opt into an A/B/C/D/F grading model alongside the narrative evaluation; eventually they made that mandatory; and finally just dropped the narrative evaluations.
Slacktivism - On blackoutsopa.org and online activism
An open, next generation CPAN API and search site
Very nice. Is performance suffering because of accuracy?

A bit faster in Chrome than Firefox but still not realtime.

I guess wireframe has exponentially less work to do http://andrew-hoyer.com/experiments/cloth/
Where are the biggest box office movies (not) streaming?
Screencast: SmartOS Setup
I don't normally wish people any kind of death other than a good natural one when they're extremely old, but I can certainly wish the corrupt politicians slow excruciatingly painful deaths.
Small government vs. large government IS about good government, because it's about if the government CAN be good.

If yes, it might be small or large.
If no, then it must be small.
Why Facebook, the Leading Social Network, Is Not Actually Very Social
I'm learning Haskell ATM and it looks similar to lazy lists in WHNF, as at each step you get an element and a "thunk" that can be used to compute the next step.

The code for the cycle Haskell function is really simple:
http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/base/latest/doc/...
>The data at my college shows that students who get an A or B in a math class have a very high probability of passing the next math class. Students who get a C in a math class have a much lower probability of passing the next math class.

But that's not a counterargument. Your simply restating your own point, which I disagree with. It's pretty obvious that someone who would score well in an artificial testing environment A would score well in such an environment B if B is a followup of A. That doesn't disprove the point that grades are a fundamentally flawed concept in education.

>My personal experience is that tests are an effective method of determining who should proceed and who should not.

Again, based on what? Conformance to a completely artificial testing environment? Again, tests have nothing to do with reality and are a flawed concept. If anything, they show if you can work under an extreme time constraint with limited resources available. Are we really basing success or failure in all of our education on this limited and arguably pretty unimportant skill-set?

>Lectures do work. They have been working for hundreds of years. This isn't an appeal to tradition. This is a statement about evidence that they work.

You're still ignoring the context, and that is that we have a better alternative to physical lectures now. Let me present an analogy:

"Books work. They have been working for hundreds of years. This is a factual statement about evidence that they work."

While principally true, that doesn't change the fact that printed letters on dead trees are no longer a viable model of distributing knowledge. It's an appeal to tradition because you ignore the context at hand. Your only argument is "we've always done it that way, therefore it must be right, why change it?".

>Lectures work so effectively that people want to put them online so anyone can watch them.

What are you trying to argue with this? Yes, online lectures are better than traditional lectures. To extend on the book analogy, while it's fundamentally still the same as reading a physical book (you're parsing words), an electronic representation of text is in every way superior to a printed book. The same holds true for online lectures.

>They won't sit through a 20 minute lecture on how to solve quadratic equations. (Except a core group of good students.)

Let me present you with my anecdotal experience as a student myself: Next to no one but a core group of good students will sit through any physical lecture unless it's absolutely mandatory to attend, either. As I've put it in another comment, if you're not at the university because you want to learn, what the fuck are you doing at the university?
Beat me to it. Though I find the tone of this article incredibly overparanoid.

I'll also link along http://roguemaobea.com. They produce a line of audio apps that can hijack and route sound in OS X for a range of actually useful purposes. They've got tools for doing timed recordings of system audio, Line in audio, or audio from specific apps, as well as a tool for broadcasting any of these audio sources to Apple's Airport Express.
It used to be impractical due to obvious infrastructure reasons. But with the internet, is it still?

The history of electronic voting is not particularly encouraging for the various "democracy in technology" theories.

Besides, even if you sorted out the infrastructure requirements (see security etc), you'd still be left with the day-to-day drudgery of real politics: reading thousands of pages of bills, proposals, analysis, point, counter-point, etc etc etc, is boring and a time-sink. Which is why a professional "political class" has emerged in most countries, and why part-time politicians are invariably rich from the start (i.e. they have a lot of spare time). To fix that, we'll need good AIs to summarize and simulate. I'd actually prefer to have that over a fully-networked, always-on poll booth.
http://www.opencongress.org/
BTW, my apologies for the length of the screen-cast (almost 13 minutes). My editing could have definitely been better.
There is probably a definitive history of college sports in America that I have not yet read. ;) It's certainly an interesting topic.

I think big-time college football and basketball may be pure historical accidents. The sport of American football had its earliest success as an Ivy League college sport; back when the rules were being firmed up Harvard was the national champion. Wikipedia:

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, gameplay developments by college coaches such as Eddie Cochems, Amos Alonzo Stagg, Knute Rockne, and Glenn "Pop" Warner helped take advantage of the newly introduced forward pass. The popularity of collegiate football grew as it became the dominant version of the sport in the United States for the first half of the 20th century.

And basketball was literally invented by a school sports instructor as an indoor sport suitable for play in school gymnasiums:

http://www.kansasheritage.org/people/naismith.html

... and the inventor immediately joined the University of Kansas.

So basketball and American football may have been born and raised in schools, which explains why they're historically tied to schools in their native land.

My impression is that the other big-time American college sports are late additions to an existing big-time college-sports system. For example, baseball grew up with a complete minor league system operating independently of colleges, and college baseball has only become big within the last few decades. And ice hockey is a regional college sport in the USA but in Canada, where they take it seriously, it's a club sport with a hockey team in every town larger than a critical size. (My impression is that the critical size may be as small as "six people". ;)
Who's to say we can't "lobby" without throwing money at our representatives? Give information without bribing them to no end about which way they should vote. Instead they should LISTEN to both sides of an argument and make an informed decision rather than voting based on who will give them the most money.
All expenses are indeed tracked by virtue of using a credit card. Electronic receipts are forwarded to a shared email address. For everything else, we're willing to run the risk of an audit that might argue over the purpose of a lunch to save our employees the hassle of expense reporting.

Acceptable risk and cost of running the business.
New Vimeo Beta Launched
Ironically, one of Dodd's final acts in Congress (opposing filibuster reform) basically made any kind of substantial lobbying reform impossible.
yes, agreed, I provide 2 functions, one which you override to determine whether a given websocket can connect, and one where you determine whether a given fake zmq socket can connect. you should definitely override both and set them to something sane a list of allowed connection sockets, etc... I might end up making a list of allowed sockets required in the future, or go with your approach of requiring some mapping of strings -> sockets, so
chatservice -> tcp://127.0.0.1:9001 for example and then teh client must reference chatservice, rather than tcp://127.0.0.1:9001
Perhaps instead of voting on legislation directly, it would be a public (online) veto-only vote once the House/Senate passes a bill?
Oh. I was wondering why there was such a heavy military presence on the panel.
Boxee Live TV first impressions
"That government is best which governs least." -- attr. Thomas Jefferson
Visualizing geographic connectedness via Twitter geotags
I haven't seen the first part be true, perhaps outside of startups. Companies like Google and Microsoft definitely look at degrees and GPAs. It's not the only thing taken into account, but whether your GPA is 1.8 or 4.0 will definitely impact your chance of getting an interview. Even more so at more BigCorp engineering places like Lockheed or Aerospace Corp.

In fact that's mostly why the "radical" teachers' bosses force them to give grades; UC Santa Cruz's 1950s-80s experiment in giving narrative evaluations instead of grades was mostly ended because employers demanded grades. If it hadn't been for outside pressure on the administration, mainly from employers and students worried about employment prospects, much of the faculty would've liked to continue the previous approach (though support was less strong among engineers and computer scientists, who for various reasons were more in favor of a letter-grading model, and saw the narrative-evaluation model as too "soft").
"DuckDuckWin" - Abandoning Google Search for DuckDuckGo
Also, get some sleep before launching. :-)
> Science will never be able to transfer your mind into a machine. Yes, maybe one day in the distant future some miracle will happen where all of your mind can be analyzed and copied, but that will only be a copy. The "real" you will die.

How about this? The -real- you dies every second (or, every "Planck time") and is replaced with an almost exact copy of you
Don't even joke about that.

In Denmark we pay "license" to the state, to keep the public television and radio channels going. Mind you, this isn't part of the tax and it's completely optional whether you want to pay it or not.

Except, if you have a television, an internet connection, a cellphone, a radio or any device capable of receiving a television signal via an antenna or internet connection - you have to pay. After all, you have the ability to watch/hear the content. Whether you do or not, that doesn't matter. If we paid this through our taxes, it wouldn't be an issue (compared to what else we pay for). This being a pseudo-tax masked as an optional thing, that's ridicilous though.

Oh and on top of that we pay an extra tax (which goes to the artists) on casette tapes, CD-R's, DVD-R's, VHS tapes, etc. After all, we might record songs & movies on those mediums. And before you ask, no, despite us paying that tax, it's still not legal for us to do so.
Lottery would be way better than what we have today.

I would also prohibit government employees from voting. With an exception of military veterans.

But these are not honest criteria. I have no idea about what would be a set of good criteria. Thus far I can only see that populist rule is leading us nowhere fast.
Writer's Notebooks are Not Just for English Geeks
Another way to look at it is that lobbying distorts free speech. Instead of each person having an equal, free, say, a person with more money has a 'greater say', if that makes sense. Sooner or later we'll have to work out whether free speech or true (as far as representation goes) democracy is more important to us.
Entrepreneur's brilliant idea may be used by Gov't as a job creation tool
The way I understand it, the Citizens United decision made that type of bribery completely legal.
You have quite a bit of latitude in how high ceremony your expense tracking needs to be, though. "CC hotel / travel expenses to our standard address, put everything on the company card" is likely adequate, as long as there's a contemporaneous record of business travel. Many places keep that as a formal log book, but since the IRS is pretty much ambivalent about the exact form of your records as long as they capture the important stuff, a Google Calendar entry with "Bob speaking at $FOO_CONF in Boston 3/14" probably suffices. In the event of an audit, you'll be asked to provide supporting documentation (again, wide latitude) of a small sampling of those expenses, because they have no more desire to read five thousand pages of records than you do to write them. If you're unable to provide those records, but don't strike the examiner as actively malicious, they'll say "Alright, there's two ways I can do this. My book says we think you have about $X of legit deductions for this category, which is $Y less than you're claiming. Pay $Y plus our below market interest rate for making an honest mistake. Otherwise, you and I get to do things line by line, and I'm going to suddenly get very picky. Which would you prefer?"

There's also a certain element of "In the vanishingly unlikely event the IRS audited us, disallowed every expense our employees charged in the year, and then charged taxes on those plus the standard penalty interest, that wouldn't cost us enough for us to even notice it."
I was James's Rails mentor and I can testify that he definitely did not know Ruby on Rails at the beginning of November, but he is sharp.
Anything that my Mastercard would accept that isn't Paypal, really.
Couldn't find beta users, so I created this service
Well this is pretty much a given isn't it? It's just a SQL implementation. It doesn't say anything about the underlying storage and guarantees. Given that it runs on GFS and Bigtable, unless these tech supports ACID, don't expect Tenzing to be able to support it either. Here's a quote from the paper:

Tenzing is not ACID compliant - specifically, we are atomic, consistent and
durable, but do not support isolation.
I needed this a few years ago badly. I ended up forwarding all email to my gmail. Then... And this is considered excessive by some... I forwarded all those to a MobileMe account and check it all in Apple Mail. It automatically detects what email address my email came to and when I reply that's the email it will show from. Works great and haven't changed my setup since.

From there you can create rules and whatever else you need to.
If countries outside of the US can manage to run their government without extreme interference of lobbyists, then there is certainly a way for us to do it, too. The problem here isn't "well, how will politicians get accurate information without having to spend loads of time doing research?" It's more an issue of the culture in the US. If we make a shift towards a system more like the one in Germany mentioned above, it will become the cultural norm in the US. The problem is making that shift and breaking our current financially-driven habits.
don't even know how to use it, what is it for? one more hacknews junk
It's getting less different over time.

Let's go back a few thousand years and ask Plato. Suppose he says "Literacy is not as basic of a skill as speaking and remembering. Proof is that it takes speaking and memory as foundational skills to read and write."

He's probably right for 500 BC. You could get by just fine without reading or writing. Literacy was for specialized purposes such as government record keeping. But society grew more sophisticated, to the point where, in the last century or two, it's hard to get a job or function on a basic level in society without being literate.

Well the world turns quicker and quicker. It used to be that one could get by on brute force mental work. But a mere 70 years after the first gigantic electronic computing machines, computational automation is becoming a necessary part of our lives. It may be possible to avoid it now, but it's getting less possible every day.

Abstract computation is a new way of processing and understanding information. It is the next stage in the evolution of information processing, beginning with spoken and then written language. It isn't on the same level as speaking and reading yet, but it's getting there, and we won't do our children any favors by letting them think it's optional.
They were competing in a pretty saturated space(hair metal). Fan base mattered significantly more for this than something novel like 'grunge,' but I'd still say it was solely their songwriting that pulled them through (Sweet Child O' Mine, Paradise City).