skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right that legal precedent doesn't take rights absolutely. For example, there's the "clear and present danger" test for speech rights.

However, weighing against such a determination is what the OP explained: any competent mail anonymizer is going to be a dead end in the investigation, so the chances of a payoff is small. I'd be curious to see the actual warrant, to see what the judge approved them to look for.

And on the other side of the coin, I expect that the rights of those using the anonymizer (as opposed to those of the company offering the service) were not weighed, because the FBI never inquired as to who would be affected (at least as far as I know).

Those users of the anonymizer are not directly injured, but are collateral damage. However, the same is true of you: you're neither the threat-maker nor the target of the threats, you're just inconvenienced by the actions that the victim was forced to make.
Thanks, and thanks for the tips. Those finder buttons are some of my favorite things now.
It's possible that housing prices are much higher for good, because real estate was historically undervalued.

I know, I know, hear me out ;)

I remember reading an article during the housing boom that made a very interesting argument in defense of the high prices. It was wrong, of course, but it was different from the usual "there's never been a better time to buy... or sell!" crap you heard from the real estate PR machine. It was a pretty sober look at the numbers.

The argument boiled down to this - if you're going to compare current prices to the historical trend, you need to exclude the possibility that real estate was undervalued before you can conclude that current values are overvalued purely based on divergence from historical trends.

The paper argued that housing was historically undervalued because creditworthy people didn't have good access to credit. A house required a 20% down payment, and banks (back when banks held a loan for the entire life of the loan) wouldn't allow income to debt ratios to exceed a certain threshold. They argued that new methods to spread risk across larger pools allowed the extension of larger amounts of credit without a huge jump in risk.

An example was a loan made to two nurses with excellent credit earning a combined income of well over $200k, but who only had about 20K in down payment. In the past, this 10K would have limited their purchase price to 100K. Now, they could bid much higher - without, as the article described, a massive increase in risk to the lender, especially if that risk could be spread.

It was a well-reasoned argument, and I think what it missed was the profound level of corruption and dishonesty going on in the industry at the time. As we all know now, and as our wise leaders like Greenspan should and could have learned while they were reassuring everyone things were just peachy, is that the "two nurses" example was not at all typical of these "higher risk" loans, and the "spreading of risk" was in fact a way of dividing up and obscuring risk to make horrendous loans look better (and package them up and sell them, and then bet against them).

But this phenomenon will probably continue. Yes, housing prices are higher, but I suspect that once the dust settles, some of these "innovations" (my disgust with the industry makes it hard to use that word) may actually come into play.

In short, we may pay more for houses than our elders did, but we may actually have better, more efficient access to credit in the long run (I want to make sure nobody thinks I'm defending the antics of the banking sector during the bubble with this argument).

Oh lastly - I do apologize for no cite. Can't really remember where I read this...
I just don't know if this can happen... buying real estate is one of those American ideals that everyone seems to aspire to. Hell, I even do basically because its a favored form of relatively safe investment here and you get tax incentives for it. I think we are at a bit of a crossroads where a lot of things need to be re-thought, however, as investing, as a whole, needs to be re-examined to figure out what truly is sustainable and good for the future. Maybe new opportunities like investing in asteroid mining, etc are what we need to start putting capital into something more productive and good for humanity than just inflating real estate prices.
Better way to ask for investor intros
Why does Prismatic need permission to update my Twitter profile or post tweets for me?
Uh oh...I got a "Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently" when I emailed you.
Big Boulder Social Data Conference
I think that is correct. If it blocks signals from entering your house wouldn't that be good if you are around tons of other wireless routers that could cause interference with your own signals?

I think that this technology would be better used if it could block cell phones. That way it could be used in movie theaters and classrooms to prevent people from calling/texting.
First of all, all of these commands make perfect sense to me. I don't know why exactly, but I've never used a version control system that made more sense than this. I never really felt like I'm home with Perforce and SVN. Neither with Mercurial, although Mercurial is better than most.

git remote rm

This deletes the reference to a remote repository. The difference between Git and SVN here is that in Git you can have multiple remote repositories with which you can communicate.

This comes in handy when pulling and pushing to/from multiple people. Imagine swapping code between you and your colleagues, doing experiments, doing code reviews, and so on. It also comes in handy when you're dealing with Heroku, or when you've got an "open-source" core that's pushed to GitHub and another branch with proprietary additions that you push somewhere else.

Also, all commands for managing these repository references start with "git remote" and to find out how to do something with them you just do "man git-remote".

git branch -D

This deletes a local branch. It has nothing to do with the above. It does not use "rm" because that can be the name of a branch and this command is heavily overloaded.

git tag -d

This deletes a tag. It is consistent with the above command, as "git branch -d" (lowercase D) is also supported, but uppercase D means that the deletion is forced, even if the branch was not merged. Again "rm" was not used, as that can be confused with the name of a tag.

git rm

Deletes a file, but you don't have to use it. If you're confident about your editing skills, you can just commit all the deletions with "git commit -a ..." ... git will also be smart enough to detect a file rename, even though you did a deletion + addition.

"rm" is also the name of the command that does the same thing in Unix, being associated with the removal of files.

git remote rename old new

As I said, "git remote" manages references to remote repositories. This just renames the reference named "old" to "new".

You could say that they should have used "mv", like in the case of "git mv", however this is not a "move" command. This is just plain renaming.

git branch -m old new

This renames the local branch named "old" to "new". It is indeed inconsistent with the others, but that's because the "git branch" utility has been overloaded a lot. This command does confuse me from time to time.

git mv

Like in the case of "git rm", this command does a "mv", while registering the action in Git. It is also not necessary if you're doing a "git add . && git commit -a".

"mv" does make sense here, as it is the name of the Unix command for moving files.

And a final tip for beginners: use the "man" pages. In a terminal input any of the following commands when you need help ...

man git-remote
man git-branch
man git-tag
man git-rm
man git-mv
man git-push
man git-pull
man git-reset
man git-checkout
etc...
I'm pretty sure that just by having done that IAmA alone, that guy has already done greater good to humanity than 99% of all human beings on this planet ever will.

Questioning his subjective opinions on morals sounds a bit of a waste of energy after this.
The HEAD version is a bit different (less clear?), although the intent is more or less the same:

"describe changes in imperative mood, e.g. "make xyzzy do frotz" instead of "[This patch] makes xyzzy do frotz" or "[I] changed xyzzy to do frotz", as if you are giving orders to the codebase to change its behaviour."

http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=blob;f=Documentation/...
I think what OP meant was that Microsoft should not be hobbled with deadweights compared to, lets say a startup competing in the tablet market. I don't believe he was talking about special incentives.

Competition is almost always good, especially seeing that Android tablets are hardly making any traction and even Kindle Fire sales dropped like a rock this quarter.
This is becoming increasingly common in recent years. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230359240457736... It's not just having to pay extra tax every year, the mere act of filing a return abroad is headache enough and if you make a mistake you might see jail time.
Facebook Posts for Sale
A million times no.

The Android homescreen is incomprehensible to me as an iOS user and the main reason is the clutter and weird alignment.
You're right -- I mention that right at the top of this blog posting as what inspired me to do this 1 hour hack.
The fact that his comment is capped at 74/80 characters and signed only corroborate your feelings.
One thing that's been key for me is namedtuple (in the collections module). It's immutable like a tuple, but the values can be accessed by name just as if they were object attributes built with the class keyword. It's great for creating generic functions (think Lisp and CLOS) instead of using Python's prototypical system. And since tuples can contain any objects and functions are objects, you can bind callables like lambdas to those names, which allows you to have 'methods' if you want as well.

That said, the standard library leaves something to be desired for the functional style. It makes sense for object-oriented programming to have non-mutating functions return the result and mutating functions return None (think sorted vs. sort), but this can get rather irritating when you're trying to write in a purely functional paradigm.

Also, am I forgetting my Python, or does it not have a great solution for appending to the front of a list? One thing I love about Lisp is that it's ridiculously easy to write (cons item some-list), or even (cons item1 (cons item2 some-list)). Doing the same thing in Python is irritating, because insert() doesn't return the result list.

...or maybe that's what I deserve for trying to write Lisp-like code in Python, anyway....!

EDIT: As noted in the comments, the '+' operator will suffice here. Though since lists are really arrays and not linked lists, this functional way of thinking will result in horribly inefficient CPython code.
This is awesome - a number of tools i've never seen before. I think i'll find them very handy.
I can think of a few reasons for the grammar rules in the commit message...

It is direct, concise, consistent and tends to active voice rather than passive voice. Further, not everyone writing or reading the messages will be a native English speaker. Avoiding past-tense forms just makes it easier.
Might be cerebral hemispheres taking turns. naarf.
They'll probably add this. Windows 8 supports lock screen notifications as well. It's really great to see your next meeting and weather right on the lock screen.
I find this to be extremely interesting.

When people in America have a hard time getting a house loan, or have shitty health care, or are living on food stamps, they simply say "Well, at least we are better off than everyone else".

THAT is extremely scary.
Ooo, I like it.
please link :)
Isn't that exactly what introduces the biggest usability problem that televisions have today: knowing how to set the monitor source channel to correspond to the set-top box one wants to use?
Z Kombinator
I totally agree. The past few links on HN to comments by Tovald have been full of inflammatory, juvenile language. I'm sure the guy is intelligent and certainly deserves a place in CS hall-of-fame, but I think the way he carries himself in these forums has tarnished his reputation.
A tip - you can use master~5 instead of master^^^^^.
Can you please quote me the line where I specifically say that? I said he might have made a mistake in the retelling of 'the story', not that he was the actor that said it was 3000 pages long.
>Mozilla has been critical of Apple too.

Care to link to them? I am not being facetious, I am genuinely interested in seeing their official statements on this and if they've publicly called Apple to open up iOS to Firefox. Bonus points if they've alluded to antitrust law.
Qt GUI testing tool Squish now supports Qt 5
He says he is Polish.
And only Windows and MacOSX support, unlike dropbox's:
Windows, MacOSX, Linux, iOS, Android and Blackberry.

The reason Dropbox will continue to prevail over these offerings is its ubiquity. iCloud? Mac only? Ha! Useless to me. This? No Linux or Android support? Still useless to me. Not worth another second thinking about.

Not to deride Cubby too hard, I'm sure it's another neat thing, but I get tired of people thinking any of these things have a shot at dethroning Dropbox. They put a lot of work into being as cross platform as they are (I presume (since no one else has matched it)) and they deserve their top spot.
Yes. http://nodeguide.com/style.html#line-length
I don't know much about CSS, but I think what happened is that their source for the fonts have taken the files down. For instance, one of the referenced fonts is http://dshap.com/fonts/Gotham-Book.otf which now yields a 404.
I particularly like that quote about magic. I'm curious to see if this technology will just be a novelty or wether it will actually lead to the creation of some more sophisticated tactile UIs.
Studying engineering, there probably is a list floating around of German universities that have an engineering program.
I wonder how this differs from AeroFS (YC S10).

...I also wonder what the heck Yuri and co. have been up to for the past few months. Things have been awful quiet over there.
I value no-nonsense style in itself. It's efficient and direct to the point. If you don't have something to back it up, then it is no no-nonsense whatsoever. It'd be just plain nonsense.
I did specify "McDonalds" for a reason. McDonalds has always had great employee relations. In-n-out is even better than McD's in this regard, but the total opportunity for growth is limited because of the smaller footprint.

Hardees (Carl's Junior in the west) is almost the polar opposite of McDonalds. Its founder was a vocal opponent of labor laws, and for a while in the 1990s was one of the principal financial backers of the effort to repeal the minimum wage and overtime laws.
The One Chart That Explains the Rise and Rise of the Super Rich
It's opt-in, is it not? Phones are very personal devices, and if you don't want yours to be that way, then don't use the feature.

Honestly, the biggest reason I want it is for things that apps aren't allowed to access anyway: a global control on the Springboard to disable WiFi, or change screen brightness, for instance.
Polish nationals studying engineering in Germany should narrow it down quite a bit.

Edit: definitely not a Pole. Likely in former Eastern Germany though (lots of people there have a working knowledge of Russian / Polish, people from the Western parts not so much).

Universities in former Eastern Germany with an engineering department?
Forks -- as top-level named entities -- draw attention and resources away from the original project, possibly leaving both projects with too-few resources to survive afterwards.

This is why "forking" an open-source project was considered a nuclear option prior to the emergence of github.

I rarely even get pull requests from people forking my code on github, and when I do, they almost never have bothered to discuss with me prior to implementation. It's a relatively recent phenomena that is largely encouraged by the tools.
The Android homescreen can look however you want including almost exactly like an iphone.
Meg Whitman: cyberattack of 9/11 scale likely, be aware of global terrorism
Yes, please. People don't often share their phone, but the "family iPad" has become a fairly common phenomenon.
Linus is kind of infamous for his rants and have been for years (especially on the mailing lists.. I've seen him tear into people for willful ignorance on the kernel dev lists more than once).

I've never really seen them as cranky because they're spot on. Cranky old men usually don't have anything other than opinion behind their rantings.. Linus can at least defend his position. Given his contributions to the world of technology, I'm more than willing to let the acerbic attitude slide.
Bitcoin really isn't any different from cash, except that its retail online presence seems to have been uniformly built by people with a teenage-level of engineering experience?

I don't want to bag on the guy who wrote Bitcoinica, except that I wish he had done what I said earlier and built a play-money exchange instead of a "real"†-money system like this.

But I'm happy to berate the people who talk up Bitcoin, the Bitcoin economy, and the ecosystem of Bitcoin services and then, when things fail to the tune of 6-figure losses for customers, try to apologize around it by saying "oh, well, that service was built by a teenager; wait until the serious engineers get around to building Bitcoin services!". It's a frustrating and intellectually dishonest argument to make.

† Heh
Looks like he replied through email rather than the github interface. His mail client would have formated the email and signature.
Siri Thinks the Nokia Lumia 900 is the Best Smartphone
I think you greatly overestimate how much power a billion dollars provides...especially since the IRS would lay claim to that billion if he ever tried to return to the U.S. Why would they work out a deal when they could get their hands on the billion and have an example for future tax evaders?

Note: I use the term tax evader in this context because if Saverin attempts to return to the U.S. in the future (as a resident or citizen), it will be clear that his renunciation of citizenship was primarily for the purpose of evading taxes.
The irony of having a centralized banking institution compromised, and having currency, designed to be decentralized and controlled by the individuals and not organizations, stolen from them--is too much.

It's like the GitHub users who cry when GitHub is down saying "How are we going to do work?!", not realizing that Git was designed to be completely decentralized and not dependent on one single repository.
The man wrote git for use on the Linux kernel. Trying to argue with him about how to use git with respect to your tiny patch to the Linux kernel seems... like missing the point on a great many things. The rules for submitting kernel patches are laid out in great detail. Do you really thing arguing with the gatekeeper is going to change anything?
> If I were Microsoft, I would hold my ground.

You mean to justify such kind of crooked behavior?
I feel like Tovald should watch DHH's railsconf talk on progress & the 'old' mentality. This feels alarmist, but he like any other githubber gets to choose what gets accepted or rejected.
I doubt you'll see that - at least in CPython. Guido's been very clear about how he feels about implementing functional paradigms in Python, so it will probably never support functional programming in the standard implementation - just a bit in syntax/interface.
> I don't mean to be overly critical, but is it just me or are the 'godfathers' of computer science starting to sound like cranky old men?

I think it's a response to the relatively recent over-abundance of attention and coverage given to wheel re-invention and uninformed opinion. I personally tie it to a particular subset of startup culture that relies heavily on convincing young developers to serve as grist for the startup mill by appealing to their ego.
Which directly implies that financial systems that require massive investments of new software infrastructure to make them useful to the public are especially risky.
Money in bank vaults are insured and recently 200k is also insured by FDIC so even if the entire financial system crumbles, 200k is guaranteed by the government.

When a robber steals money from a bank vault, its not like one day you see. oh shit look at that someone must have stolen my money from the bank. =
If someone even robs your safety deposit box, i'm pretty sure that it's insured.

Also when markets collapsed people did and still do bank runs and convert their paper money to gold.
So it's not like the dollar hasn't experienced a lack of confidence before.

Currency is all about confidence.
A Day in the life of a working DJ
A typical Saturday for this man who started professionally DJing after losing his job.
Except the state doesn't actually protect, they only enforce consequences after the fact. If someone wants to destroy your property, the state is powerless, and the aggressor will more likely than not be successful, depending on their and your level of savvy.

I know this sounds incredibly pedantic, but feel it's important to make the clarification.
I agree that companies violating German privacy laws are a big deal.
Ah, that sounds like a really awesome idea.

Why does it need to be screensaver-activated? This sounds like something I could use all the time.
>There is a huge difference between iOS and other platforms.

>Apple, in legal terms, makes Firefox on iOS impossible. This was not the case with Windows; Microsoft was using covert means to undermine user choice.

Microsoft was using.. are you referring to the end 1990s or now?

Does the 'huge difference' between them go away if Microsoft puts in a legal clause similar to the one in the iOS agreement?

>To make a blanket statement that Mozilla thinks Apple's banning Firefox from iPad and the iPhone is 'not a problem' is wrong and disingenuous.

Then where are the similar posts about Apple's actions? Surely, the iPad has a much bigger marketshare and Windows RT can easily prove to be a real dud and be DoA? Why is only Microsoft being threatened with hints of anti-trust complaints and not Apple when they are the ones with a near monopoly. Remember "There is no tablet market, there is an iPad market".

There is constant talk of the post-PC world in the media and on HN, and I doubt they're referring to Windows RT instead of the iPad in those discussions which frequently claim that MS is dying in the new computing world.

To summarize, I am really failing at seeing a "huge difference" between iOS and Windows RT that you are.
It's weird because it kinda goes the other way too. Why in the world does GitHub truncate my commit messages now? The 80 char thing is a guideline. If git is willing to dutifully accept longer commit messages and my team and I are willing to read and write them, what's the point of forcing us to click to see them in the Web UI? If a project really wants an 80 char limit, that should be a project prerogative, not forced on everyone.

Mini rant aside, it's a bit confusing. Because as Linus notes, there's no indication of the 80 char limit when authoring in the Web UI -- you're only penalized for it later. It seems there are competing sets of best practices.
Apple has never been a company that believes in opt-in. Rightly or wrongly (and, to be fair, usually rightly), it's a company that believes you having the choice to do something it thinks is dumb is a bad idea.