skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Asking Twitter to produce the message with a court order seems better than the government having their own database of public tweets."

They do have their own database
http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acq...
excatly. And it does not mean, that a journalist doesn't notice you. If a similar story comes up, he might remember your mail and call you up out of the blue.
AI systems could fight cyberbullying
10,000 hours of practice makes perfect. :)
Time to Carry a Real Camera Again
Surely gambling would be a better descriptor than gaming.
1. Blizzard has their name / track record to stand behind.

2. derpmeister has a month-old HN account, which is backed up by/linked to nothing else.

3. (for example) If Linus Torvalds had posted what derpmeister had, I would be more inclined to take it at face value.

4. derpmeister's post automatically takes itself into 'troll' territory by starting off with the 'Blizzard apologist' comments. This makes the anecdote seem less believable without anything else to back it up.
I'm a journalist, not a tech journalist though.

We write for the readers.

Some pointers.

1. Use the Who, What, When, Where and How.
Who are you. What do you want. When is it happening. These are the three most important points to get across.

2. Press releases are usually technical jargon that makes no sense to readers. Explain what your product and service to help the readers. E.g. iPod can hold 1000 songs, not 10gb of songs.

3. Think of the readers and pitch it such that your story will be exciting to the readers.
The problem is that a lot of inconsistencies are caused by the software, not I/O or cache. For example, if your database is in a middle of transaction and everything is in the memory, you can't "let the stuff complete" without installing a software on the database server to monitor power failures.
Is there a specific reason why this ship is vertical? Or just because we can?
Has Higher Education Become an Engine of Inequality?
Slight nitpick - you mean English & Welsh libel judgements. Scots law is pretty different in this area (no idea about NI).
Well the issue with this more than pastygate or the fuel duty is it's not good for British citizens as a whole. It sets a worrying precedent of them kowtowing to U.S media interests when they've already said "We don't think it's worth the time in prosecuting internally". Sure, this is a larger scale thing but it indicates that British citizens are now not only subject to laws of their own country, but also of America if they so choose.

Granted they've probably bowed to the extradition demand because America has a 'special relationship' for us in terms of economy and the like, but it reinforces the belief that we're essentially puppets for America.
It's interesting to compare the almost-unanimous condemnation of this sale with that of other HN articles about acquisitions. Not even one 'attaboy, Jeff' comment for the founder cashing out?

I wonder what the response would have been if the buyer was Google, not TWC.
> Suppose I offer friend X twenty dollars. Now suppose friend Y also demands twenty dollars, and accuses me of violating my offer when I refuse it

That's a false analogy. The government has a different responsibility to it's citizens than you would have to two of your friends. You are free to treat your friend differently based on any arbitrary criteria you choose...it's a relationship that is an extremely poor model for understanding how government works. The fact that you would bring something like that up, does not bode well for your argument that your ability to reason is intact.

The Government has a responsibility to treat all of it's citizens exactly the same. If it treats one group differently it has to have some pretty solid reasons. In the United States, the "default action" is that you are free to pursue your life as you wish unless the state has a compelling reason to stop you...furthermore if the Government extends some privilege to some ALL must have the opportunity to pursue it, if only in theory.

> There is nothing to take away; gay rights activists are not just asking to be left alone

This is extremely specious reasoning. By that rationale many atrocities of history are justified...the slaves wanted us to expand our definition of "human" and "free man".

> Furthermore, no punishment is made due to "brain chemistry"; we are not testing individuals and discarding them based on the presence of certain biological markers (either externally or internally visible)

This is based on an extremely dubious and narrow definition of "punishment".

> We are simply choosing that we do not want to incentivize, endorse, or equalize permanent homosexual coupling as we do with permanent heterosexual coupling.

Yes precisely. Except the government can't just randomly decide to "incentivize" one life style over another for no particular reason. We "incentiveize" a murder-free life style because it's necessary to have a functioning society.

There's absolutely no evidence that homosexuality is harmful to individuals or society at large. There's no reason to actively discriminate against it, which is what is going on.

At some point in time, some group of people sat down and decided marriage was between a man and a woman...that was an act of actively discriminating against another group of people. It's natural that it takes an action to rectify it....just as slavery couldn't be stopped by all the white people suddenly deciding to be nice to black people.

The sorry state of marriage rights in this country exists only by virtue of how indifferent and ignorant the general population is. The good news is that just as we look back in horror at the times we burned people at the stake, the people of the future will look back at the time we finally started to respect people's personal lifestyle choices. Unfortunately, they will probably be seeking comfort from some new horror.
Thanks, but I usually wait until Wednesday to have my faith in humanity crushed.

Still, that's a nice bit of social engineering to auto-filter for people that are either naive or have too much time on their hands.

As an example of too much time on their hands, it's funny watching some of the spam girl accounts post cards with a totally different person's name and sex on them.
Given the number of stories here that get mod-edited to the source site headline almost immediately (even when that headline is meaningless) this is a lose-lose situation
The UK is a really good place to live.
FLIP is designed to study wave height, acoustic signals, water temperature and density, and for the collection of meteorological data. Because of the potential interference with the acoustic instruments, FLIP has no engines or other means of propulsion. It must be towed to open water, where it drifts freely or is anchored. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RP_FLIP
pgnoob here: wouldn't "install extension" have been more accurate? It's probably doing something 'create'-ive under the hood, but to install something with 'create' doesn't seem at all intuitive. If this was something legacy from 30 years ago, I'd understand changing at this point doesn't make much sense, but this seems recent.
Make relationships, it's simple as. You can very easily do this on Twitter but it's similar to investors in the sense that they won't pick up on you without an intro or building a prior relationship.

To get the most out of journalists at events you have to do your research. I went to TC Disrupt and got almost no press at all but did start some relationships. Six months later I went to LeWeb and prepared and was able to get an interview on the Wall Street Journal, TNW, Huffington Post, France 24 TV (CNN of France) and many other publications.

All I did was research who was going to be there and emailed them telling them about me and my startup. They then lined me up as a target to interview rather than me having to follow them. If their editor already knows about you before they go filming then you have a better chance as the editor has the real control, if they like what you've said in the email or call then the chances are they'll be wanting to get a lot from you as they think it'll be used.
> the player base has already been cut in half.

By? Am I missing something?
California’s Bioterror Mystery (starring the redgum lerp psyllid)
A new open-access mathematics journal venture from Cambridge University Press
It takes time to boot up VMs, basically. System booting is one of the most expensive operations in virtualization, especially when the disk image is somewhere in the network. There will be a lot of random I/O, memory allocation and high CPU usage. It takes a few seconds of CPU time for a decent server to initialize a KVM VM. Try multiplying that by hundreds of thousands of instances.
Show HN: Ask friends - socialize your mobile search
I like the design but the grey font is a bit hard to read against a black background for me.

The fading coloured squares which fill space look pretty but they were confusing to me - are these links to more pages of results? Mousing over them in Chrome changes my mouse pointer as if they were links, so it took me a few clicks to decide they don't do anything. I like how they look so I'm not necessarily saying get rid of them; maybe just put some text over the top making it clear that the user has seen all the results.

Seconding other people's comments about Facebook and Twitter integration.

Finally, I see you've recorded the location of artists, and I'd love to see a browse by location to see if there are any local-to-me acts on here.

Good luck with the site!
How does this compare with the popular gAnalytics app?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.e6bapps.ga...

I find the gAnalytics app is really good. It's easier to navigate to relevant stats than the actual Analytics website. Curious to see how the official app stands up.
I've now gone and done a search. The source for all this is the story on V3. That was submitted a couple of hours ago and got no upvotes, no attention, no comments, and sank without trace:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4193182

The more sensationalist headline (which I quoted unchanged) from a different article has got dozens of comments and dozens of upvotes.

An audience will get what it deserves. Link-baity titles get attention, even (especially?) when inaccurate. With the constant re-submission of so many stories, it's now unsurprising that the hyperbolic, emotion-laden submissions are the ones that get rewarded.
Here is an easy to understand article about implications of this discovery:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/07/higgs-boson-breaks...
If that's the case, and that's the whole of their justification, then it seems a pretty flimsy pretext. I'm not trying to be obtuse, but in almost all the cases like this I've seen in the media, there just hasn't been anywhere near enough information about the case to come to an informed opinion.
I understand (from your own source article) that people who very much are lawyers disagree that providing a link is a crime, and that the only UK prosecution of such did not provide a decision either way.
Heheh, a quick look at the page source reminds me of a web based testing tool I saw in high school. The teacher never figured out why we all aced that course.
Can Open Source Software Suck for Startups?
Pros and cons of the new IVA in bankruptcy
It's undeniable that the added complexity of AWS makes it harder to predict how it will behave in any specific failure condition, which is one of the basic things you want to work out when designing it. "Traditional" infrastructure is hard enough (especially networking), and still fails in unique ways, and we've had 10-100 years to characterize it.

Having a common provisioning API in a bunch of physically diverse centers IS a huge advantage for availability, cost, etc, though. If you have 100 hours to set up a system, and $10k/mo, you have two real choices:

1) Dedicated/conventional servers: Burn 10 hours of sales and contract negotiation, vendor selection, etc., plus ~10-20h in anything specific to the vendor, and then set up systems. Get a bunch of dedicated boxes (coloing your own gear may be better at scale but 10-20x the time and then upfront cost...), set up single-site HA (hardware or software load balancer, A+B power, dual line cord servers for at least databases, etc.

2) Set up AWS. Since the lowest tiers are free, it's possible you have a lot of experience with it already. 1h to buy the product, extra time to script to the APIs, be able to be dynamic. You could probably be resilient against single-AZ failure in 100h with $10k/mo, although doing multi-region (due to DB issues and minimum spend per region) might be borderline.

In case #1, you're protected against a bunch of problems, but not against a plane hitting the building, someone hitting EPO by accident, etc. In case #2, you should be resilient against any single physical facility problem, but are exposed to novel software risk.

The best solution would be #3 -- some consistent API to order more conventional infrastructure in AWS-like timeframes. Arguably OpenStack or other systems could offer this (using real SANs instead of EBS, real hw load balancers in place of ELB, ...), and you could presumably do some kind of dedicated host provisioning using the same kind of APIs you use for VM provisioning (big hosting companies have done this with PXE for years; someone like Softlayer can provision a system in ~30 minutes on bare metal). Use virtualization when it makes sense, and bare metal at other times (the big Amazon Compute instances are pretty close) -- although the virtualization layer doesn't seem to be the real weakness, but rather all the other services like ELB/EBS, RDS, etc.)

Basically, IaaS by a provider who recognizes software, and especially big complex interconnected systems, is really hard, and is willing to sacrifice some technical impressiveness and peak efficiency for reliability and easy characterization of failure modes.
AWS officially recommends CNAME records for ELBs, but the IP addresses don't change regularly and also CNAME for root host name won't work if other records are present, so many sysadmins straightaway use A records with the ELB IPs.
You really feel OK supposing that all Apple did for smartphones was swipe to unlock? Really?
Like there was no difference in smartphones before iPhone and after?
You are implying that all of Apples R&D was to patent swipe-to-unlock, and presto, iPhone is ready, because everything else was done by other companies?
One may hate Apple if he wants but this kind of twisting is just stupid.
The world is a really good place to live. What's your point?
Your response here is beyond ridiculous. I think you should try to separate your emotions from the discussion.

If Apple has a "no trespassing" sign one would expect them to shoot first. That doesn't give others who have a "visitors welcome" sign the right to shoot people on their property.
Ask HN: Your favourite style guide?
I was laying in bed and suddenly found myself wondering, what are the best examples of style guides for different languages. As a python enthusiast and moderate Google fan boy, I thought I'd take a look at how Google does things.

I've visited Google's Python style guide several times before, but never really spent time reading through the fine print and digging into the company's reasoning for their style choices.

In retrospect, there are many mistakes I could have avoided and good practices I could have adopted, had I originally read Google's style guides more comprehensively.

An example of some interesting things I learned or of which I was reminded:

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pyguide.html

* utilizing methods of the 'operator' module instead of composing lambdas to perform basic operations

* cautioning against testing for 'implicit false' when dealing with numerical values (to avoid conflating 0 and None)

The experience left me wondering, which style guides hackers have found most helpful for different languages. I'm also curious to hear opinions on whether these style guides are adequate for all skill levels (do they help programmers grow) or whether they cater to building a 'good programmer/code base' rather than a 'good programmer'.

best wishes + happy hacking,

- mek
There is an implication; that a "need" must to be justified before it can be permitted, rather than the reverse, that constraints ought to be justified before it they can be implemented. The very question is absolutely predicated on this; the question has no point otherwise. Answering it at all risks accepting the (invalid, IMO) premise.

Rather than say we are slaves except for those things we are permitted to do (and those permitted things need justification), we should be free except for those things we are not permitted to do (and those proscribed things need justification).

I think an oppressive state is the only reasonable implementation of the former. So, with only a small amount of hyperbole, I invoked fascism as the assumption behind the question :)

(And I mean this at least partly seriously. The path to fascism is paved with perfectly good intentions, much like this one - presumably to reduce road fatalities.)
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The problem here is not one of competence or failure to think through implications. Facebook know exactly what they are doing, and you can be sure the potential implications of these changes were debated at length within the company at a high level. They were taken precisely because of their implications for non-technical users, not in spite of them - FB has replaced users contact details because they want Facebook to be the only way most people can contact others online.

Facebook have always wanted to replace the internet entirely with a system they control. Hence the walled garden approach with incessant prompts to signup to view content, the use of address book import to spread virally, the use of beacon to track and announce users activities, the use of like button js to track activity, the launch of Facebook apps and single sign-on to attempt to corral web developers within their ecosystem and make them dependent, the launch of a competitor to email/IM etc etc.

This latest move with email is simply the latest in a long line of moves consistently attempting to steer users into spending all of their online time within the confines of Facebook, it is entirely consistent with their past behaviour and we should expect similar moves in future.

So the arguments about how they could have done this differently, or whether Facebook has made some mistakes here are largely irrelevant - they will always push to own your data, email, photos, and digital life, because it's in their DNA, this is not a mistake, it's a pattern of behaviour - they can and will control your digital life if you choose to hand it over to them. Consider the quote from FB on the way their FB email works:

Regarding the "email loss" this may actually just be confusion around the Messages Inbox: By default, messages from friends or friends of friends go into your Inbox. Everything else goes to your Other folder.

All messages which do not come from FB contacts go into a folder which is effectively a junk folder - they want you to use their email for everything (hence the recent changes), they want your address book to contain nothing but FB contacts, they want you to forget email even existed, and they want you to encourage your friends to join FB so that you actually receive their messages. That won't work for all their users of course, but their hope is that they keep enough of the user base on board that they can dominate the internet and replace email with FB and the web with a network of sites where they control login and user info and all roads lead to FB.

So replacing email with FB mail wherever they can, hiding other contacts and trashing user address books is not a mistake, it's part of a broader strategy, one which is not in the best interests of their users, but which they hope most will go along with anyway.
Akka Patterns
The load balancer itself can always be a single point of failure, no matter how many layers of packaging you have. By default, DNS system doesn't support failover because multiple A records will result in round robin. So there are two possible solutions: 1. Use a DNS with health checking so that records can be changed dynamically for failover. 2. Use Anycast for load balances to broadcast only healthy nodes with the same IP prefix. Both ways are imperfect and not widely used in production systems.
I was actually kind of hoping that would get brought up, because it leads into a useful parallel to the extradition case.

The US libel-enforcement ban does not name specific countries, so far as I'm aware; rather, it simply bans enforcement of any foreign libel judgement if that judgement is inconsistent with the US Constitution's guarantees of free speech. In other words, it refuses to enforce a libel judgement if that judgement could not have been made under US law.

Meanwhile, the extradition at issue here boils down to a treaty which permits extradition if the alleged act would be a crime in the UK.
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I can second it. Some people I know, never used Java before in their life and started now to code apps for Android.
Vertical ship like that is quite stable due to immunity to surface waves. Make sure to read background info links provided by jeroen, interesting stuff.
Marketingbogen.dk - onlinemarketing: den røde tråd
En bog om hjemmesider, Adwords, Analytics, SEO og Facebook.
A hardware keyboard.
PHP Error - Error Reporting Done Right
This is in response to another blog post that was floating up hn recently. The title of that other post is the origin of the "fucking janitor" thing.

In my opinion it is not worth finding the original by the way. It was pretty shallow analysis and a little cliche. The language was obviously there solely to attract attention.

I think this (replying) author could have dropped it from the title but maybe there was a search strategy in keeping it.
I believe it was for symmetry with already existing CREATE commands. Especially CREATE LANGUAGE comes to mind. CREATE LANGUAGE is very similar in that what is does is installing a stored procedure programming language into the current database.

Another advantage of using CREATE is that it is an already existing convention in PostgreSQL which means it is obvious that there may be an ALTER EXTENSION and a DROP EXTENSION (both exist). If they had called it INSTALL then it could be either UNINSTALL EXTENSION or REMOVE EXTENSION.

In summary: It is meant to be intuitive to people who are used to SQL databases.

EDIT: And yes, it does "'create'-ive" under the hood. I.e. the various CREATE commands generally insert new rows in the catalog tables (the tables that store the schema definitions and users). pg_extension is the catalog table containing the list of installed extension.
How Much Is The Obamacare Penalty Tax? (Breakdown by Income)
Trending on Google+?

So all 5 Google+ users posted it?
Wrong, the third option is precisely what they're trying to do. Which is why the parent mentioned it.