skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a really poor metaphor.

It's more a like a nuclear arms race. We focus on mutually assured destruction if you come after us. Keeps the checks and balances in place and stops random invaders and gets us respect.

The problem we face is the terrorists getting arms themselves (the patent trolls) and attacking us with nothing to lose.

Sure it would be awesome if we had no arms and I would support disarmament but it needs to all happen at once by everyone. Until then, we have to play the game.
I write ipad apps for a living. I understand how scaling works.

The point is that a scaled up android app will usually look a lot better than a scaled up iphone app.
As a New Yorker who's lived in Berlin for four years, I can't think of much.

I've noticed on certain English-speaking forums that there's a tendency to exaggerate and obsess over incredibly minor cultural differences. Like jaywalking, which isn't even an issue in Berlin (people do it and nobody cares).
For example econet and token ring were purged from 3.5. So in some ways this is the most unbloated linux kernel in some time.
Well, maybe that's _exactly_ what they meant...
Open Source Smart Meter Hacking Framework can Hack into the Power Grid
"Get the rich" is not a good justification for policy.

Do you have kids? It turns out one big economic incentive, particularly late in life, is to make money not for yourself but for your children. A lot of people hate the concept of an heir running around with money he/she didn't earn, but i mean, it's Not Your Problem so long as the money was fairly earned by the parents. Furthermore, a billion dollar estate is probably something that has already been taxed, possibly several times, possibly in a compound fashion, so I don't think there should be any worries that rich heirs have not paid society for their money.

There's also serious implementation problems with estate taxes, as other posters have described. Levying very large taxes on illiquid and hard-to-value possessions is unfair no matter how you slice it.
Termineter - Smart Meter Hacking Framework Released
I'll give it another go Monday evening UK time. While you are doing a support ticket for the email address filter, uk schools use sch.uk.
It works so well with drugs. I mean they are illegal and you can't buy them on the street--oh wait.
+1 Allen, great example! I also have a side project where I am making multiple sweeps thought the wikipedia XML data. I did this in Ruby using a streaming XML parser, but I am going to try your approach.
Would you mind sharing your .emacs so we can see how you have that set up?
It's just a complete waste of time to think about these kinds of things. Some humans malfunction and do this kind of thing. It happens quite rarely, and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. One's probability of being harmed by the occasional insane murderer (or terrorism for that matter) is microscopic compared to so many other things that we can actually do something about.
I'd argue that prosecutors pandering for votes are worse than the cops in terms of information leakage.

And while laws limiting access to firearms may be part of a longer term solution, we should be exploring limiting the celebration of sadism that modern Hollywood has become.
Because in Germany it's a building that my own ancestors, relatives, or family friends may well have owned or inhabited before being forced out.

Putting the war behind us is a good thing. Getting cheaper housing prices because Berlin has never entirely gotten over the war... is not putting the war behind us. In fact, it's capitalizing today on the lingering effects of the war.
You think some person with a handgun would stand much of a chance against someone in body armor with an assault rifle?

It would not be certainty a fair fight. Even so, a murderer is forced to engage civilians who are shooting at them rather than civilians who are simply defenseless. The only thing a person with handgun can do is buy time for a SWAT team to arrive and the slower the SWAT are, the more likely for death. (See the North Hollywood shootout as an example of this)

Nonetheless, I consider the defenders having guns to be an equalizer. In the Virginia Tech massacre incident, the murderer have only two handguns, but he was able to kill 32 individuals.
>The women are better than in the UK,but far from the best looking in the world.

Woo, casual misogyny \o/

>The internet in Germany is borderline third world quality

Germany, the completely authentic sub-Saharan information drought experience...

>but I'd doubt it that you go there more than 5 times a year.

Culture's about more than clubbing.

>however there are cheaper places in Eastern Europe with better tech talent availability overall.

1 City vs. half a continent. Good comparison.
Another good article is "Five myths about super PACs": http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-supe....
BeatBearing
Can we use the term 'defect', then?

As in "the computer was defect, so I put in the junk heap"?
I'm an engineer who visited Berlin earlier this year and loved the city - it's like my home town of Melbourne, Australia which I love, but just MORE of it.

I already had the itch to leave my 9-5 and go somewhere for an adventure, so when I got home I set about working out what I'd need to do to head over there and how much capital I'd need for about 6-months self sustained living in Berlin (came out to about $15,000AUD, thanks to the current strong AUD).

I found out one of my close (engineer) friends was also looking to leave his job and do something interesting and exciting, so I've convinced him to come with me too. Succeed or fail, it really seems like we could be part of something exciting in Berlin! Any advice on dos and don't would be appreciated.
Ask HN: Are there any basic primers for Comp Sci?
What I'm specifically asking is not tutorials or code academy-like websites.
I'm looking for primers/website/books that organize information about computer science and web development, for example: how does the web work? What is a session? What are protocols?
The information I'm looking for is the type you learn in a Computer Science class, not something like Udacity.
I want to know and why how stuff works, not just "this is how you do it."
The reason for this is because I’ve had some entry-level web dev interviews, but I didn’t know enough of the basic foundational questions to get past the 1st round. I attribute it to my lack of formal education in the computer science field. At best I can categorize myself as someone who just hacks code together (I think someone used the analogy on HN, the difference between a cook who cobbles food together and a chef who creates and innovates?).

EDIT: Thanks! I've got a lot of information from everyone and I'm going to go through it bit by bit.

I realize I wrote a rather misleading question. I am interested in Computer Science and its abstract topics as well as networking/web topics. I want to know what technology I'm working on and how it works, and I want that theoretical background so that I can be a better programmer.
That depends on what it is trying to do.

Personally I hope it will become possible to run Firefox OS programs on IOS and Android, so that it is easy to write for both platforms but I guess Apple would prevent that as it would destroy one of the barriers to competition.
The ability to figure out how a piece of code works is different than being able to take that code and reuse it elsewhere.

View source is important both for the sake of debugging in the case of 3rd party javascript, and also for the sake of being able to teach others.

Regardless of the minification issue, it's possible to use a code formatter to expand a minified file and at least identify where declarations are being made and what functional behavior is being specified. Minification makes viewing source inconvenient, but that's not equivalent with closed.
> The UK has had several massacres where in each case over a dozen were killed with no apparent motive (Dunblane in 1996, Cumbira in 2010), and there have been several smaller scale incidents along similar lines.

This is disingenuous. There have not been 'several cases where over a dozen were killed, and several smaller scale incidents'. There have been exactly three in recent UK history: Dunblane (16 schoolchildren killed, and has to be the worst criminal act in modern UK history), Cumbria (12 adults in a lone gunman killing spree), and the Hungerford Massacre in 1987 (16 murdered by lone gunman).

Going further back, there is the Shepherd's Bush murders in 1966 (3 policemen and 2 members of the public shot dead) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepherd%27s_Bush_murders as a possible example of 'several smaller scale incidents along similar lines.' But this is hardly how you phrased it.

Now look at the United States list as a comparison:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_the_United...
"Sign out" logs you out. "Switch account" lets you switch accounts. Or at least it does when I click it. Does it really log you out when you click it?
Our Ridiculous Approach to Retirement
If nothing else, I think Firefox OS will find a niche in breathing new life into 2+ years old Android phones which would otherwise end up on a landfill. At some point soon, WebRTC will become a viable technology, so I see these devices used for VoIP over WiFi, sort of as the free-as-in-freedom equivalents of the iPod Touch.
I'd really like to see some science behind this hand size -> bad free throw shooter statement. This is spouted all the time, and everyone likes to point out Dwight and Shaq. People seem to forget that Kareem, Yao Ming, and Shawn Bradley all shot pretty well from the foul line and were all significantly taller (and I'm guessing at least comparable hand size).

Now I'll admit that it is easy to cherry pick players on both sides of the argument, and players at the center position historically have lower free throw averages, but my instinct says that it has less to do with hand size and more to do with their shooting style/habits/practice.

Watch videos of Dwight shoot free throws. His shot is far from what anyone would call smooth. Now go watch Yao Ming shoot free throws. Smooth as butta.

When Dwight's shot looks like that and he's still chucking up bricks, I'll give more credence to the size argument.
I had a personal log book for about 2 years which I would write in everyday.

In the end though I didn't think there was something worth writing about everyday or even most days, so I sort of dropped it.

Has anybody else found a good way to run a personal log/diary?
You're missing two key understandings of the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act: First, the Act allows museums and similar institutions to own and transport bald eagles. Second, the article states that the bird was acquired prior to the Act taking effect in 1940. That means that current possession is legal, provided that it doesn't change ownership. For a similar situation, look at zoning laws. A property can be "legal nonconforming" because it was, at one time, in compliance with zoning laws but is not any longer. Why? Because both types of laws carry criminal penalties and it is unconstitutional to retroactively make something a crime. The artist can keep the bird, will it to his heirs (generally, passage to one's heirs doesn't trigger "change in ownership" laws), and do the other trappings of ownership but No One Else Can who isn't able to comply with the law, like a museum. Ergo, his heirs can't sell it except to the museum. The museum isn't willing or able to buy it--the piece is already on loan to them for free--so there is no market and, therefore, no value.
I don't see "Switch account", I only see "Sign out, and sign in as a different user" for YouTube.
I also think it's a little disgusting how he's assuming bad faith on the part of his fellow HNer.
Oh come on. Is expecting them to pay taxes an "enormous ... pile of stress"? Is it not treating them as humans? They inherited an incredibly big estate consisting of illiquid assets. They did not have to work to inherit the assets, now they have to either actually do some work or hire a professional to do their fiscal duties. If that is too much stress, not accepting the inheritance is a stress free option as well, but of course it means they don't get to never have to work for money again.
Build It: URL Shortener
Lua is a better language than Javascript in every possible way. I have half-a-mind to hack LuaJIT into Webkit, but I'm afraid that it may be futile at this point. The biggest shame in all of web development is the "type" attribute on the HTML "script" tag...
You have to begin where users needs are being ignored. With Firefox is was performance. IMO on mobile privacy is the topic that's most critical for users and most ignored by vendors. If Firefox OS can fill that space it might have a chance
Through out
histroy
addrss
releavant
dilligent
loggbook

Thanks for writing this, but I found getting through the post a bit tough because of the typos. Could you run it through a spell-checker, please?
Having good parents is worth more than money. Should parents give up their children to the state to make sure nobody has unfairly great parents?

Maybe the state should control mate selection as well. We wouldn't want all of the best people pairing up, what is left for the rest?
>Actually patents were an adaptation of an existing system where royalty would give monopolies away to companies they liked.

Do you have a historic reference for that? According to Wikipedia, the earliest known patent law was in Greece, 500 BC, and modern patents are said to have originated with a statute in Venice in 1474, but no mention is made of this being an adaptation of royalty favoring companies with monopolies (which obviously was a practice that extended long after 1474).
Ask HN: Getting a math degree as a working adult?
My question: I've found a math degree to pursue, what (1st or 2nd hand experience-based) feedback can you provide as advice?

I am thinking of enrolling in this online BA in Mathematics program through Southern New Hampshire University: http://www.snhu.edu/mathematics-BA-online.asp

I'm a software engineer already working in the field I want to be in for the next 5-10 years (data logging and analysis).

I want to get a degree in math for a couple reasons:
a) For me. I've always deep down wanted a degree but couldn't admit it to myself. I would for whatever reason regret it if I never earned a degree.
b) When giving people advice around data I would like to train myself around many of the biases we are all so prone to. Learning though on the job in a business intelligence role seems like a very expensive feedback loop. (Imagine making a mistake in a recommendation that costs the company millions of dollars)
c) I would like to eventually move into more machine learning and recognize that for now and the foreseeable future statistics and other math will play a HUGE role in that. For jobs in this realm a masters degree is very much encouraged.

Some background on me: My company and myself all work remotely so the discipline that an online degree requires isn't at all an issue for me. Also I am a self taught software engineer so I'm looking forward to taking whatever I learn through my courses and building on top of it as much as possible as I go.

Just to clarify my question is: I've found a math degree to pursue, what (1st or 2nd hand experience-based) feedback can you provide as advice?
i dun see any GS or JP exec doing such things... could it be that lenovo is being mgmt by a china inc now.. some of the replies & cynics here is just ridiculous!
Birth of a robotic arm
Create A CSS 3D Push Button
I think it's a fantastic thing to try, especially if they can really get smooth animation with CSS+JS.

It's quite simple: web developers will flock to build apps for it, because it's 100x easier than learning Objective C or Java etc.

Indeed, I could easily see Firefox OS becoming a "default" choice for low-end smartphone models, just because it would be so insanely easy to drop-in and customize. I mean, just hire a cheap front-end developer and "skin" your model's OS with just CSS in a matter of days. And from there, it can expand upmarket.
There are already tools to compile your HTML5 app to a "native" app with JavaScript hooks, etc.

This could just be another one. So while it might not be possible to run them "natively", someone will surely come up with a library so distributing them on the Apple app store will become trivial.
As another commenter pointed out it may not be possible, but it certainly is "more useful" in most everyday situations. System 1 type thinking vs System 2 type thinking(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory) is relevant here.
I disagree that Lua is better in every possible way. There are at least a couple of ways in which it is merely equal, yet where improvement would be possible.
>Besides: I can't think of language-neutral bytecode projects that ever worked. Remember Parrot?

Really? Remember the CLR and JVM?
Does anyone know how the start-up scene in Berlin compares to that in Paris? They seem to be two of the biggest contenders for the SV of Europe.

I think Spain tried something similar with Barcelona that ended up fizzing out.
I think this is the idea - if the item is unable to be sold at the original valuation, the valuation is wrong.
Learn how Airbnb beat being cloned by the Samwers
The Turing Omnibus is an interesting survey of computer science. For any chapter that interests you or that you don't understand to your liking, you now have a starting point for further focused learning. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=the+turing+omnibus

For more specific topics, look through the entire O'Reilly catalog. There is bound to be something there that covers at least part of what you want to learn. http://shop.oreilly.com/category/browse-subjects.do

For stuff that you do while you're doing something else, I really like Unix Power Tools. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596003302.do
I think you vastly underestimate the number of man-hours that some of those steps would take. I'm talking specifically about steps 1, 2, 3, and 4.
تحميل برنامج VLC 
تحميل برنامج VLC تحميل برنامج VLC تحميل برنامج VLC تحميل برنامج VLC تحميل برنامج VLC تحميل برنامج VLC
"If developers get on board — at least one Mozilla bigwig has stated that they “want to attract hundreds of thousands of developers” — and lots of open web apps begin to appear, then Google can simply implement the same specification in Chrome, Microsoft can implement it in IE10, and Apple can implement it in Safari"

I don't think the author recognizes that that would be a successful outcome for Mozilla; it'd mean that the web truly is the platform, and developers would be able to create an app using that platform and make it available to users on all the mobile OSes. That's cool!

Although I'm pretty sure we'd also like the phones and OS to be successful, of course. :P
OhLife works great for me.

It sends you an email every day to which you can reply, along with one of your previous log entries.
Ask HN: Best way to stream video from an event?
I'm planning a wedding the end of this year, and have relatives and friends that want to watch it from around the world. I'd like to stream it online, but Ustream.tv and Justin.tv both don't really seem like the best options. Is there anything else you'd recommend, preferably something that could be password protected, ad-free, and not $99/month.
It's not so much the lack of time as much as the side effects of that lack of time.
Actually it's quite easy to bruteforce by hand if you mention that point set has multiple symmetries. For example, you only need to start drawing lines from (0,0), (0,1) and (1,1). Any other combinations are derived by rotation and mirroring. After several minutes you can prove that solution in impossible under implicit presumption that every line must terminate at a dot. And after that puzzle is really easy.
If an unlimited use license is $10, it's not worth the patent owner's time to write a letter asking for the license fee.

My impression is that many of the ideas covered by software patents are independently "discovered" by each entity that happens to use them. The patent is now inhibiting innovation by dwelling on an old idea that is apparently not so novel after all.
One point many people forget is that Smartphone is possibly only one application of such operating systems. There are many more possible applications where Android, Firefox OS etc can be used.
No, it's called being a corporate (or startup) cog in a PC hegemony.

As a matter or fact, it is very far from adulthood: for one, all kind of childish behavior is ok if its within PC bounds (from super hero comics to LoTR, and from pop music to nerf guns and "hackathons").

Second, it's de-sexualized, another sure sign of non adulthood.
Minecraft Hacks and Cheats
The best website for Minecraft hacks I have found!
It's extremetech. A gawker-like sensationalist, pageview-driven piece of rubbish.
Cold, emptiness, and detachment is also characteristic of snowmen. Snowmen usually don't commit mass murders. There has to be some other factor, and usually that other factor is aggression of a type where you stick pins into a voodoo doll and derive pleasure from doing that. That is what Christians call evil (deriving pleasure/release from inflicting pain), and it is a pretty specific concept actually. You don't have to be Christian or even believe in supernatural to understand it.

I noticed that people who claim that evil doesn't exist simply have a completely messed up (I suppose, by schooling) moral compass, and they have no idea how common that aspect of human personality is (and that it nearly always has negative consequences both for the bearer and for society at large).
Amazing video.

Technical question: is it possible to do low-light time-lapse filming that produces realistic "motion blur"?

At the beginning, there are a lot of shots where lights occupy long lines, as the earth turned during the exposure. Then jump to next frame, and the line has abruptly jumped forwards. Which is what must happen with sequential frames in low-light. So the total effect looks jerky.

Now let's suppose these were 30-second exposures. What if the camera instead took 30 1-second exposures, each of which were severely underexposed. But then software would add frames 1-30 to generate a well-exposed "final frame 1", then frames 2-31 to generate "final frame 2", frames 3-32 to generate "final frame 3", and so on. Each final frame would have full exposure, but the final output would be beautifully smooth, with "natural"-feeling motion blur.

This probably requires on-the-fly computation far beyond any kind of consumer camera. But does anyone know of software that does this? It would be fairly straightforward to write.
Point taken... "equal or better" in every possible way. :-)
Startup life in india's organized chaos
This is the high tourist season, not the cheapest time to stay in the Bay Area. But the best deal is Green Tortoise hostel. A little funky, but safe. Includes dinner every other night, breakfast every morning (make PB&J sammiches for lunch later!). They have laundry and full kitchen. Free internet.

http://www.greentortoise.com/san-francisco-hostel/index.php

The other hostels are good, just not as fun. Avoid staying in cheap motels in SOMA & Tenderloin districts.

There is an excellent hackerspace, noisebridge:
https://noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge
2 blocks South of 16th & Mission BART

UC Berkeley and Stanford are up by San Francisco. Melno Park was where a lot of magic happened back in the day. I would try to find housing in the East Bay (NE Oakland, Emeryville, Rockridge, or San Leandro) and commute to work near a BART station. There is light rail between San Jose and San Francisco I think.
I wonder is this why central banks are having to print money if this amount is being stashed away and not allowed to circulated in the economy.