skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The issue is that it is not just the initial proposal. As the NYTimes article points out in the previous paragraph, and the complete FCC report [1] clearly states, there were additional events after the proposal was submitted where other members of the Street View team came in contact with the actual code while doing code review or debugging, but later claimed during interviews with the FCC that they were unaware that it was collecting data.

On page 15, the report even mentions "Engineer Doe" sending an email to a manager stating, "You might recall asking me about URLs seen over Wi-Fi...", and talking about the number of unique URLs retrieved (only 32,000 from 300 million packets). The manager asked if the URLs were sniffed from WiFi packets, and Doe responded in the affirmative.

[1]: http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/351298/fcc-report-on-g...
Great concept - your timeline is way off. Wireless network connectivity is unlikely to be where it needs to be for at least another 20 years for people who work with larger documents. Hell, I have a tough enough time in our corporate offices in São Paulo, Brazil accessing 100 MB Slide Decks in our Redwood City offices over _wired_ connections - I don't want to think how long before places like Belém get half decent _wireless connectivity_. Until then - I'll still need my Windows/Macintosh Laptop with local Apps/data.

Thick apps aren't going anywhere in the near future. Video Editing, Adobe Photoshop - they'll all be huge-honking local apps for at least another 10-15 years.
Snort Rules to Prevent Reading & Posting to ZeroBin
From a shareholder's perspective, does this mean Barnes & Noble is now, in essence, an e-book reader manufacturer/distributor with a retail presence? And the retail presence just happens to be doing terribly at everything except selling the Nook?

I'm trying to wrap my head around what exactly this means for Barnes & Noble. Any insight would be appreciated!
Why has this comment been downvoted?
Digg to be acquired by The Washington Post
Aura does do 2 column tiling
Written like someone who has never experienced 3rd world Internet.
A lot of people are talking about getting active to get all the benefits.
So I created a C++ app that bring turntable chat "alwaysOnTop"
https://github.com/alaingilbert/ttchat
Pretty usefull ! Let me know what you guys think about it.
Ron Conway: Tech is nowhere near a bubble
Note that if you'd bought the put option mentioned in the article you would have made a 4x return in 6 months. No borrowing needed.
I felt that way about some of the standard documentation but was relieved to find: http://www.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW/

I also highly recommend checking out Doug Hellman's book 'The Python Standard Library by Example'. He presents every (or almost every) standard library module with simple explanations and plenty of examples.
It is stable, but there are some really nasty warts.

To pick just one that bites Python programmers all the time: by default, the ssl library does not validate the server certificate at all. Not validating the certificate makes SSL/TLS almost useless. But this is still the default (see http://docs.python.org/dev/library/ssl.html#socket-creation, "CERT_NONE"), because the standard library is "stable".
Fexl standard context now defined in terms of elegant combinators
Backups, offsite too.
Digg For Sale? - teophone forums
Just out of curiosity, what does DuckDuckGo do that conventional keyword searches in Firefox or Chrome don't do?
"Cloud devices" can still use local hardware acceleration, storage, and memory for client-side things. Nothing is really preventing us from developing cloud-based video and photo editing software.

Some work might have to be done to minimize the amount of data that gets transferred when saving and loading, but that's about it. I'm sure if you compress your 100MB Slide Decks file you'll find it much easier to send over!
True, but he's admitting he doesn't access ("use") the data in the same month he downloads it. So downloading from his VPS IP address to the VPS's secondary storage, outside Canada, won't count toward his monthly Canada ISP's cap. It's only when he decides to download data from the VPS's secondary storage to his "local system" he'll begin using his monthly allowance.
AFAIK the correct term is "byte oriented".
> You would refer to documentation.

Right, but what if you want to document why you personally are using a particular option, rather than just what an option does? I agree that a lot of the time config comments are unnecessary, but they do have a place.
I wasn't very clear, I was speaking more in terms of ubiquity .
I love how the first example the article cites is Apple's innovative and new RoundRects: "In Hipmunk's iOS app, left, pop-overs have rounded corners, something that's more challenging on Android."

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_E...
Cheaper yes but if you know the courier services in the UK at the time, there is no guarantee it'd get there on time.
Well it would work just fine, but you'd always end up requiring the external dependency even if you didn't need to.

For example, let's say there was a new urllib released (its still called urllib). It's now version 2.0, but the stdlib version is 1.0.

If your package said "I need urllib==1.0", it would have know way of understanding that the version was already included within the standard library.

That said, it would download the correct package (assuming it existed) and work just fine.
Also think the example is bogus - the Android style for popovers, menus etc in ICS just isn't very rounded. The Android app matches the android style...
I've never seen this before, but that is an AMAZING improvement on the standard docs
Apartment List blog: "In response to today’s false accusations..."
The Fexl standard context is now defined very elegantly, in a way which scales very nicely even to thousands of built-in symbols.

In particular here's the definition of "enhance", which is used to enhance the standard context with a potentially enormous set of extra definitions, spread across multiple files:

https://github.com/chkoreff/Fexl/blob/ced168cae71644ff9a9cb3...
The value Microsoft assigned to the Nook unit probably prices in that B&N won't try to disrupt Microsoft's Android Tax business unit any longer.
I can't believe someone at Kleiner funded this. Although I am not in the target demographic for Martha Stewart meets tech, the quality of the video content being put out by her "production company" is truly awful.
> One day the idea that you don't have internet access will be just as silly as saying you don't have electricity.

I don't think that day will be in the next 3 years.
"Every feature is someone else's bug."
Very surprised to see that Reddit still has around a third of the traffic of Digg at its height.
You "and others" are in the tiniest minority. Surely the current state of the market is clear enough indication of this?

I don't know you from a bar of soap but reading your comments, I get the impression of an American late-teen with a solid amount of technical knowledge, strong opinions but staggeringly little perspective.

Even amongst those who are capable of administering an 'open platform cloud infrastructure' there are few who have the time. In my own circumstances, ten years of programming experience, recently shifted from consultancy to an analysis role at a major financial institution, start up on the side, seven week old baby,ten year old daughter, wife, 33 years of age... Let me tell you: the more my technology 'just works' the better. I won't accept my rights bing trampled on but a system that is elegant and robust albeit a bit restrictive is far preferable to spending hour on end tinkering with something that I need to actually use as opposed to configure endlessly.
Yep, a decent amount.

I haven't used it since the big push towards Scala though. So whatever I say is based on the Java versions.

If your constraint is Java, then Play is a great way to get away from a lot of the cruft and overhead of that stack; however, you'll very quickly realise it's not all roses. The Java leaks through in a lot of places, and it's now quite far behind the stack it's mimicking (ie it feels more like Rails 1.2 - 2.0 rather than 3+).

For me, if I have the ability to not choose Java and I wanted that kind of stack, I'd just go to the horses mouth and pick Rails. If I had to use Java, Play is a pretty nice place to be.
No just there is a difference between large and complicated.
Collecting data using RSS feeds maybe (like several other startups here to collect CL data)? Much more benign to the servers.
Which is why we don't like them :)

Databases are for putting stuff in when you don't immediately need it. The DBA mindset pushes that the DB is the hammer for all nails.
C# as a language had numerous and interesting features implemented in the last years. I always wished that Java was that fast in making improvements, instead of spending years for every decision.
Tindie: an etsy for electronics
What if you need to encode arbitrary dictionaries, which may have keys like "//", rather than objects with specific named attributes?

And what if you want multiple comments in the same scope (say, a comment before each attribute)? From the RFC: "The names within an object SHOULD be unique." In practice parsers will just override values, as JS does, but I think it would be legal to reject JSON with duplicate keys.
Visual Studio 11 – Awesome New Features for Web Developers
I had the exact same experience. Moderators would boot/ban you if you downvote songs, or if you criticize anything ever. I havent touched turntable in months.

Simple solution. Moderators should be able to mute users. But not kick them from the channel. What's the point of kicking if we're just here to listen to music?

If they fix this, I think I'd go back.
I also often don't know the exact address, but browsers autocomplete URL for me. I think it's a fair bet those who search for Facebook already visited Facebook. Why search then?
kondro, first off thanks for the love in the Hacker News Channel on yCombinator.

The price points we started with for Kickstarter were based around manufacturer and delivery of 1500 tōd Smart Beacons and finalization of our architecture. The design is built around the Bluegiga BLE112a which retails for $26 alone.

We would love to eventually get the tōd Smart Beacons to sub $10 price range, or even come up with ways for the beacons to be free. However even at $40 (current retail price) they are still drastically cheaper than other options currently on the market with none of the flexibility that tōd has to offer.
I think I prefer Angular over Knockout. Similar concept but more intuitive and cleaner syntax.
Using The Addictive Power Of Gaming To Make You Exercise More
See the command pattern: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_pattern

Basically you encapsulate whatever you need to do with the database in objects (logic + parameters). And you describe for these objects not only the logic for updating the database (forward), but also for reverting the database to its previous state (rollback).
It's pretty radical for a brick and mortal bookseller to go after the eBook market so aggressively, to the point where even now I find it hard to call it "obvious." There are some really nice touches, too, like the ability to spend an hour a day reading any eBook on your Nook while physically inside a Barnes and Noble location. Not only does that feel less than obvious to me, it feels really well designed and thought out. I admit that before walking into a B&N and playing with one of the recent model Nooks I thought that the device was a case of too little too late, but I left kind of wanting one.
What's the Best Dental Insurance? It Just Might Be a Dental PPO
Shopping for individual and family dental insurance can seem like a never-ending array of new terms and abbreviations. One of the most common is PPO - or "Preferred Provider Organization.
Er, that 1/833 is not a lifetime risk though, it's a yearly risk. So more like 1/10 lifetime risk of a GI bleed. Which is not great, but it depends on how often they're fatal I guess.
whats flash got to do with anything?

search engines can follow links (sometimes) through flash. and search engines know what the most popular sites are even without counting number of links to sites, so hiding links through flash (or js, whatever) wouldn't help
I hate to be the one to do this, but: "Reply to an evening email reminder with what you did that day. The next day, get a digest with what everyone has done."

Is that it? $3/head/month? This does not sound "fundable" to me.
My definition of "stable"
Response to the use of "crowdsourcing" to flag inappropriate content
Functions, ghost functions and higher order functions
Cheap != Quality
Finally a Dummy SMTP for Linux
Ask HN: How to stepdown from the co-founder
I have this question in mind? I want to know what is the best way to quit myself as the co-founder and start a new startup.
Well if the world turns out to become as Google fantasizes and all applications will be ran in browsers, you can switch between apps with ctrl+tab.
I'm not really a Python programmer, but a hacker who occasionally has cause to pick up Python scripts and do stuff with them. Perhaps I've been unlucky, but every time I've done this, it's turned into a profoundly frustrating exercise. There have always been dependencies outside the standard library, and those have had dependencies -- which more often than not, are incompatible with whatever version of Python my environment is set up for. I've frequently run across scripts with dependencies that somehow only execute in mutually incompatible versions of Python, which always makes for an exceedingly aggravating day of programming.

As much as people love to bash PHP -- and I agree that it's pretty awful as a language -- its standard library is so comprehensive, backwards-compatible, and superbly-documented that I have never had a comparably aggravating experience with it. The same is true of Javascript: a language with warts, but whenever I try something, it Just Works.

Like I say, perhaps I've just been unlucky, but my distinct impression of Python has been that it's a beautiful language surrounded by a particularly problematic ecosystem of incompatible libraries and sparse documentation. I suspect that the Python community would benefit from paying less attention to the purity of the language, and a lot more attention to the quality of everything surrounding it.
You speak of the "installation barrier" as if it's something insurmountable. But why should it be? A native app zero-install mechanism seems more plausible to me than wide adoption of a hypothetical geolocating proximity web.

The reason is that native apps can move so much more quickly than web apps. I'll bet Apple could get widespread adoption of a zero-install feature on iOS in six months, simply by mandating it for the app store and featuring early adopters. But HTML5 YouTube has been in beta for over two years, and the <video> tag was introduced over half a decade ago. The web moves at a snail's pace by comparison.

I did try to watch the video, but scrubbing didn't work, which sort of illustrates my point.
Python has had a lot of cleaning in 3, but everyone is screaming about how 3 doesn't work just like 2 so I guess you just can't satisfy everyone.
It's not about the $1Billion
Why haven't web apps taken off yet?
The Problem With Big Data Is That Nobody Understands It
Not the same person. The Derek Low from dereklow.com never went to Berkeley, and that video is definitely a Berkeley dorm room.
I think you've really just been unlucky.

I've had the same experience before, but chiefly with Ruby.

Interestingly, my problems with this in both Python and Ruby have evaporated once I got in the habit of using virtualenv/rb-env/rvm for my development environment.

Python is about the cleanest/nicest experience I have in any language, for the record. Only language that comes close is Clojure.

Leiningen is...legendary.
Both web apps and native apps are here to stay. They have complementary strengths and weaknesses.
non-popular websites will start seeing some good traffic suddenly. It would be confusing for them :)
I am not sure if I disagree with the central thesis of the article, but the argumentation seems rather weak in many places, for example he says:

Let's take the example of the number of people who walk into a store and buy a certain product. By studying 10 customers you can get an estimate of the probability of the purchase and predict sales; by studying 100 customers you get a better estimate. By analyzing 1000 customers you have a very good estimate. You could study a million customers, but the results are unlikely to be vastly different from the results of analyzing 1000 customers and probably not worth the expense.

This makes sense only for very low-dimensional data sets, but most real-life problems are very high-dimensional and in high-dimensional spaces a million customers (or any other number of samples you might reasonably expect to gather) might still very well be only a small sample. So, there are situations where because of various constraints you will never be able to get to this level where more data stops yielding better results. You can watch a nice presentation from Peter Norvig about the unreasonable effectiveness of data:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvDCzhbjYWs

Or read about the well-known curse of dimensionality:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality
I just wish they would align the column order with the title order. It's such a minor thing but would make it seem so much more organized.
DoppioVM: a JVM in CoffeeScript
I surely hope not.

The web is for documents.
I hate to break it to you, but a web browser is just an arbitrary native app running data over TCP/IP. Native apps aren't going anywhere.
Viewport Sized Typography
...and before you know it, your system that is built using various third party libraries contains 'JSON' files with various comment conventions:

- # in column 1
- # in column 1, backslash at end of line escapes the newline
- # as first non-blank
- # as first non-blank, backslash at end of line escapes the newline
- -- as first non-blank
- C-style multi-line slash-asterisk comment asterisk-slash
- C++-style //
- Python style doc strings
etc.

Then somebody will attempt to write the comment filter that will handle them all, somebody else will make a JSON parser that round-trips all different versions. Net result: a JSON 'standard' that is ugly and leads to parsers that are larger then necessary, not 100% reliable (how do you guess whether a backslash at the end of line escapes the newline?)

I would rather have a simple standard with one kind of comment.
No, but I am. I'm Steven Sacks, the CEO and founder of http://plug.dj.

plug.dj is not just music, it's videos, too. Everything comes from YouTube and SoundCloud so licensing is already taken care of.

We love our users. Building a community is everything we are about. We listen and we care. We are involved.

plug.dj is international, and not just in name. We have localized the site into 8 languages so far and our chat translates over 50 languages in real-time so you can talk about music, videos, and anything else without language barriers. You can connect, discover and share with people from around the world.

We have dancing avatars. Every avatar has a unique dance move. We have strobe lights. We don't have room caps. We support the amazing up and coming artists, djs and producers who use YouTube and SoundCloud to share their music with the world. We accelerate the process by which they gain fans, we expose them to a wider audience, and we let them to engage with their fans from around the world in a way no other site does.

A little about me. I was a DJ for 16 years, and unlike Turntable, plug.dj is lead by somebody who loves music, and my team eats and breathes music. We regularly go to shows, concerts, clubs, festivals, raves. We hang out at record stores. I still have my vinyl collection and Technics 1200s.

If you haven't seen our site, yet, check it out. Join our party and say hello.

Cheers!
Just looks like someone with a load of expensive gadgets neatly arranged in a room, i.e. a moron with a load of money rather than a geek with a genuine interest.
Kegbot Kegerator Project
this can be easily argued by looking at the demos of stochastic ANNs used for various perception tasks. for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LTG64s6Xuc
patterns of characters images that emerge during simulations can be thought of as symbols
For what it's worth 4.0 also added co-variant and contra-variant generics which are surprisingly useful.
But you wouldn't use the same amount of capital on an options trade. For example, if you're bankroll is $25,000, you might use it all to short the stock but it would be foolish to use it all to buy a put. It's more likely that you'd use a much smaller fraction of your stock purchasing unit size for options trading since the risk of losing 100% is higher.
http://plug.dj is available in Australia. In fact, our backend developer lived in Brisbane until recently.
www.plug.dj works down under.
http://plug.dj is available everywhere, including Canada and Australia. Check us out.
Sounds like a load of FUD. Fragmentation can cause issues, but it's hardly the nightmare it's portrayed to be in this article.

Speaking as a game developer, if you can't make your software fit in more than one resolution then you're headed for trouble anyway.
Things come and go, and we have seen a number of deprecations in python already. urllib predates urllib2, while subprocess deprecates a number of things itself that really came from C. getopt was a port of the eponymous C library, which optparse meant to replace, which was itself deprecated on favor of argparse.

I would really not be surprised to see envoy, requests and so on come up in the standard lib at some point.
Why never short?
This article seems to be discussing a very different 'Big Data' to that I see. I'm sure the author's points are true in their world, but largely they aren't in mine (mostly online media stuff). Here's a rebuttal of a sort:

This data collection is a recent phenomenon: only since media moved online has it been cheap enough to collect sufficient data to do interesting things. Furthermore, you can actually use that data is more meaningful ways (e.g. recommendation systems) that weren't possible before.

That value is not being extracted by the companies that do currently collect data: surprisingly true from my discussions with media companies. The largest companies (Yahoo!, Netflix, etc.) sure do, but the second tier don't.

That companies will need outside help to extract insights: This perhaps indicative of the biggest difference between our worlds. It seems the author is talking about batch jobs, where you do some rudimentary analysis on a data, makes some slides, present to management, and go home. The people I know are talking about deploying automated systems into production (think recommendation systems again). This requires a large array of skills (machine learning, software engineering, distributed systems, etc.) that many companies don't have. "Minitab, SAS, SPSS, Systat" are not sufficient tools in this world.

The insights gathered from ever larger data sets have more value and are more accurate than insights gathered from smaller data sets: The conventional wisdom in machine learning is that more data trumps more sophisticated algorithms. E.g. http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/03/more-data-usual.h...

Unstructured and cross functional data have huge value waiting to be extracted: Here we agree!