skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems like you either think we should eliminate the ability for defendants to negotiate lesser sentences, or you want to make an entirely orthogonal point about the US criminal justice system. Which is it?

Prosecutors routinely have to decide between pressing an ambitious charge with a higher risk of acquittal, or settling for a lesser charge. This happens all the way up and down the spectrum of offenses; for instance, there's something like 4 different things a mugger in Chicago can get charged with. How exactly do this balance get handled when the prosecutor is by charter acting in their own interests and not the interests of the community?
> General conscription means radioactive fun for everyone!

Depleted uranium isn't a radiation risk.

If you can't be bothered to get simple scientific facts correct, why should I think that you're accurate on other things?
> A new developer will never be able to get 800k tokens while the new rules stand.

What makes you think that?

Twitter didn't set a hard limit of 100K tokens for all new apps. That's just the initial limit. You can request more, and I assume they would grant them to popular, legitimate apps.
It's more of a footnote problem. The critical details need to percolate up to public focus, and if that detail was only mentioned as a side note at the end, then that process is obviously failing. The scary bit is that the Challenger investigation showed this was a _huge_ issue, and apparently still existed many years later [1].

Granted, it's a terribly hard thing to fix, getting the right information to the right people with the right priority. But this shows how critical it is to do just that.

[1] Obligatory Tufte comments:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
(See also Feynman's comments on his experience on the investigation board in Surely You're Joking)
Taking your idea a step further... When I did an internship at an architecture studio, the design of the central plants that provide hot/cold water/air to their surrounding buildings would use the exhaust heat of say, a water chiller for the air conditioning unit, to help heat the hot water flow, taking load off of the water heaters. In one case, they had enough "excess" heat available from doing this that a school got a heated pool for "free."

You could do the same thing with the exhaust heat from the compressor to heat the restroom water for the data center's bathrooms.

Not exactly super exciting to most, but for whatever reason I think stuff like this is the coolest thing ever.
Yes, but while they paid Mueller for consulting, they are still denying paying him to comment on the trial. So, as far as Oracle and Mueller are claiming to the court, it's still an indirect relationship.
eigenfaces are very cool. i did a bunch of work with them a few years ago.
That very much depends on the size of the solution space. If they get one bit of 'answer' from each qubit used in the computation that's 2^81 possible solutions, in which case you'd expect random chance to require somewhere around 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 trial runs before they happened to get one right.

Now, I highly doubt the solution space is anywhere near that large. But without knowing more about it we cannot infer anything from the 13/10000 statistic presented.
See, I have my doubts about this... I dont think that many people actually signed up. I feel pretty strongly App.net is using the "Reddit" model of making themselves popular with fake users. "See all these cool people on this exclusive network? U know u want to fork over $50 to be a part of this special club..."

I'm willing to bet at least half of App.net users are bots used to incentivise people to join "to be a part of the club"
It's an old joke. You make a request and somebody acquiesces more easily than you expected, so you follow up with an absurd request like "Also, can I have a million dollars?"

And now I went and explained it. Sorry, tptacek.
See the excellent comments on this at [1] and [2]. The stuff that HFT currently does can't really cause anything too disingenuous.

[1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4395986
[2]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4395834
I'd argue that even though I might value your time and inherent effort of meeting me somewhere, I also would also establish that there are things more important than anyone's company and small talk over dinner. I would feel like a total jackass if I complain (even to myself, without voicing my distaste verbally/publicly) about you taking a call or message, and then you telling me that you have to leave because your father is in the hospital.

Sure I agree it's distasteful to answer a random sms while we're having a beer, and I would never do such a thing - but it's also very distasteful to voice concerns/annoyance about the value of any current interaction versus whatever inherent need a person has to be reachable for communication.

If you tell me that a I'm a jerk for answering a random call and interrupting for 5 minutes while talking to my girlfriend about trivial or banal stuff, I would totally agree. But that kind of sentiment should generally be saved for when you realize someone is being a jerk, not to immediately label a person for having his phone reachable or before an explanation of the reason for taking a call or message.
There are quite a few new services emerging that are making designers less dependent on drawing tools:

* Gridset (http://gridsetapp.com) -- for working out your grid and bringing it into a prototype

* Typecast (http://beta.typecastapp.com) -- design with web fonts

* Easel (http://easel.io) -- a browser-based alternative to Fireworks

* CSS Piffle (http://csspiffle.com) -- haven't actually used this yet but looks similar to Easel from the outside

* Adobe Muse (http://www.adobe.com/products/muse.html) -- not well received but maybe an indication of Adobe's future direction

[disclaimer: I'm part of the Typecast team].

Photoshop and Fireworks are great and I don't see many designers abandoning desktop software entirely. But I think there are plenty of tools that can help you get into the browser more quickly.
IMO, the whole idea of electric vehicles is a waste of time unless the government (or at least a dominant market player) steps in and standardizes battery sizes for fast replacement at existing service stations. It should take less time to recharge an EV than it does to refill a gasoline tank, not more.

Anyone who has ever exchanged a propane cylinder for their backyard barbecue should understand why this is the only conceivable way to make electric vehicles work. I can't begin to imagine why I'm the only person who actually thinks that way.
Personally, I think any interface takes some getting used to. Even Win7 and Mac OS X seemed hard to grasp at first due to my comfort with the old Windows/Linux styles. But, with a small amount of time you realize their strength and actually start to like it. Also, Microsoft may easily make some changes based on feedback they get in this 90 day trial period (like yours for example).
^ non union lawyer.

This dumbass just took his proper private process they've just acquiesced to (silence == acceptance), and made it public in such a way that obliterates his remedy. I would have just slapped a $50k pricetag on my private correspondence, gotten their agreement (with another step for due process on their part) that they owed that money to me, then filed a lien with the US Secretary of State's office. once the lien is perfected, you file a lien against the CFO of McDonald's, and you can use the county sheriffs to seize assets on your behalf. This will work even if you're in France, and you're dealing with an American Corporation (UNCITRAL Convention is your guideline).

If you can script a mod for Neverwinter Nights, you can learn Contract Law. It astounds me how many people refuse to learn it, but allow their lives to be ruined by their ignorance in the subject.
Herein lies the problem. While your vault example makes sense, you can also say that someone selling knives or guns can't be responsible for people using them to murder someone else. Where do you draw the line? If you are merely providing something, where is the line where suddenly it's my fault instead of the fault of the user?

I think the difference here is that information and objects have an intended purpose - a knife is usually for chopping food, a gun is usually for... erm - however a vault key clearly can't have a use outside of using it to get into the valut. Where to .torrents fall in this? It's not the vault key situation, because there are definite good uses for them (linux distros, I believe Blizzard uses bittorrent to distribute updates?). However, the majority of torrent usage is for piracy [citation needed].

So I guess what I'm saying is that all objects have a potential for negative usage and a potential for positive usage, and we're trying to draw the line somewhere in a rather undefined way.

To me, it seems unfair and harsh to be imprisoned for something that by another interpretation seems okay. I have a reasonable expectation not to be imprisoned for creating a site where people can post content. If it's coopted by the community into a place where people post torrents, it seems that right now I could be sent to jail for that.

The problem here isn't the intention of the owner of the site, just like it isn't about Kim Dotcom's intention. I don't disagree that they were completely aware that they were profiting from other people's desire to pirate. My problem is that all of these legal cases against these people seem to be brought in a way that doesn't feel 'just'.
Ask HN: What's your favorite OS and why?
I'd like to preface this by saying I'm hardcore linux biased :) - but I'd love to hear your most favorite features of any other os as well as things you don't like about it/others. Basically, why do like your os setup and what is it?

Personally, as much as I like linux, drivers issues are simply a pain, who want's to have to spend hours in forums and on google before buying a monitor to make sure its compat?

But drivers issues asside, linux is great for me as a developer b/c, with apt-get ( or the non Debian/Ubuntu distros equivalent), I can grab libs on the fly in no time plug them in and start testing/building, the source is always there for me to run gdb on, I have an amazing list of cli utils (in coreutils, binutils & co), also having complete control over my os and tab switching through 5 terminals all running my nifty lil' tasks just makes me happy :) Also emacs keyboard shortcuts (which work just about everywhere on linux) allow me to fly on just about any task, who wants to traverse the keyboard and hit 'END' to go to endline?
I meant how do you avoid prosecution when analyzing these images for the purpose of catching the people spreading them? There is no "fair use" for contraband. Therefore, it would be hard to build a company around technology for stopping child pornography.
> If the battery costs $20K to replace, well, a gas engine + transmission + exhaust system in a $60,000 car depreciates as much in that time, too.

A Tesla with a failed battery is $20k away from being a useful vehicle. A depreciated Jaguar is a driveable vehicle.

And, even with a new battery, a 3-5 year-old Tesla isn't worth as much as a new Tesla (even if we ignore the likely advances in 3-5 years).
wtf. 2005 article.
First thing I'll say is that I really don't like the idea of using Flash, HTML5 etc any web technology for making games. However I see the need for it.
I'd like to get more information though how your game engine makes it easier to create faster/prettier games. I am a fan of Construct2 (http://www.scirra.com/construct2). They make it really easy to create HTML5 games (it is all point and click, no programming required).

What differentiates your technology from the many existing ones on the market now?

Before the negative/hate comments star pouring in, maybe the OP/founders can give us an insight and some more information on what their plans are.
Voter ID laws are racist and Un-American
Firefly: Our performance graphing tool based on d3.js
Another point that's not explicitly mentioned in the article: raising money isn't fun and afterward makes the whole venture less fun. If you do a good job generating and growing revenue, hopefully you don't have to worry about raising money until a lot later than you would otherwise. I think most people here probably agree that Github's trajectory should be the goal: crush it on revenue early, and then raise money for scaling later, if you want to.
This reminded me of the problem of unit testing vs integration testing. Sometimes, no matter how much code coverage you have, the unit tests don't find that critical bug that takes everything down. Just like testing the 2 square feet of foam didn't find the problem. You also need integration testing.
That's the startup's problem and not their users. It's too much work to reply to every email you get which you wish you didn't.

I realize it's hard but the onus is on the startup to get this right. In the process they'll piss off some users but that's the process.
4chan has bans, and authorities are frequently called when illegal content is posted. Try again.
I agree with this. It degrades relatively quickly into a Wikipedia core group of elite editors kind of thing, where the disconnected ideals of a clique dominate.
Campaign to build Nikola Tesla museum hits $500k in less than 48 hours
MariaDB is the free (GPL) branch (actually more of a fork at this point) created by Monty, the primary original author of MySQL.
PCA is a very useful tool in lots of places. But be warned that when you use it on stocks, you'll find correlations, make your investment, then discover that during a financial crisis all sorts of things that were not previously correlated, now are. Thus your analysis falls apart at exactly the moment you would least want it to do so.

Incidentally if you take answers to a wide variety of questions that are meant to test intelligence, how the component of your score on the first component on a PCA analysis should be fairly well correlated with IQ or your SAT score. The second component should be reasonably well correlated to the difference between your math and verbal scores on the SAT. And people have much less variability on the third component than on the first two.
That explains why nearly every Filepicker blog post makes it to the front page! :)
Interview with Custora Co-Founder Jon Pospischil – a Y Combinator startup
Interview with Custora Co-Founder Jon Pospischil. During the interview, Jon introduces us to Custora while sharing some really valuable advice abut applying to an accelerator program and the startup process.
followup

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/10/06/guy-who-was-busted-f.ht...
Something tells me the support tickets with advertisers looks more like that App.net thread.
I venture because, while it's not simple, it's easy. Or, while it's not easy, it's simple. It feels like a real 'hard nut to crack' that people can get in to computationally, but I agree, it doesn't solve much (at least for shopping scenarios).

And yes, also agree - recipes, mixing with what you've got at home vs at the store - good idea. Additionally, just recipe suggestions based on scanning an item. If I scanned pears and salmon, having a mobile app suggest 5 other things to buy that would make a great <whatever> (I'm not a cook - I can't think of what I might cook with that) - that would help clueless people like me do 'real time recipe discovery' when I'm at the store. Thinking I'll do this somewhere else, build up a 'list', then share it or look it up when I'm near a store - for me, no dice.

Perhaps that's where grocery list apps all plan to go, but I'm not sure why they don't start on that end first. Or perhaps some have, and my discovery on this is so bad I've never found one.

EDIT: From TFA

"AnyList also sports a smart recipe system that culls ingredient lists from huge recipe depositories (think Allrecipes, Epicurious, and the like) to blogs "

Does it show you recipes based on something you scan though? That wasn't clear...
http://code.google.com/p/acme-sac/downloads/list
Ask HN: Do you ever click on the "ask" link?
Submissions without URLs are penalised in the rankings, so don't reach the Front Page as often, and don't stay as long even if they do. To offset this there is the "ask" link in the header.

http://news.ycombinator.com/ask

Do you ever click on it?
I don't think he does. You have to take the argument in context - he's talking about Nassim Taleb, who's interested in "Black Swan" 50-sigma outcomes.
Taking your example of image analysis, companies in this space will build applications that - for instance - identify which images of the 10,000 on a bandit's computer are all the same kid. The software company would use sample images of clothed kids to demonstrate how it works, then only law enforcement would input confiscated CP images to do the analysis.
Indeed, crashes happen are nothing new, and HFT algos going wrong are only one of the billions of ways that it can happen. That's what you get when the market has ways of deciding prices--through people, machines, or contracts. It's possible that things can go wrong, but investors acknowledge that risk, and take responsibility if things go wrong. It's no great moral failing of the world that the market can go south.
There's a world of difference between "citizen spotted using SSH" and "citizen spotted using Tor".

In the first case you are just one in a huge number of people using SSH to avoid sniffers. With Tor the authorities know you're doing something you'd rather not be seen doing. It's a much, much bigger red flag.
Taleb and Salmon are thinking about a non-normal fat tail distribution (that's the point of Taleb's book) so it's entirely possible.
I honestly haven't run into a site (except this one) that forces mobile sites on you without allowing you to opt out - however, I also use Chrome, so my being a mobile device may not be properly detected yet.
My experience with people who like to cite edge cases for their habits is that those cases are either extremely rare, or that issues of less importance are "artificially escalated" to high importance to support their case.
That's his point though - extreme success requires extreme luck, not extreme skill. I think you're in violent agreement with Salmon.
When I first heard of filepicker.io I thought it was a stupid idea. File uploads aren't hard to do, after all, so why pay a third party service for it? However, used Filepicker at the NY eCommerce Hackathon recently because we needed to implement file uploads in a hurry and was very impressed with it.

Took about 5 minutes to get image uploads enabled in our web app, including allowing people to take pictures directly from a webcam. No screwing around with file POSTs, sanitizing, storage, CDNs etc.

Looking forward to using it in a real project.
I would say the field is even broader than just those two areas. Much design literature is on a third focus, the interaction between desiderata and materials, which has a significant overlap with engineering. This is perhaps most obvious in architecture (the kind involving buildings, but also software architecture / API design), which is as its core not primarily UX or visual design, though it has elements of both. Herb Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial is my favorite book in this area, though Donald Schön's The Reflective Practitioner is also a good book on design in this broader sense of producing human-usable artifacts out of materials.
Ah man- I played with OnLive a little bit and it seemed like a product that had so much potential to revolutionize the industry. Maybe it was ahead of its time?
This.

I think (in your edit) you are stating the point I'm trying to make rather better than I did.
I think we're already there for anyone who has at least one eye open. I mean people talk about a Silicon Valley eco-chamber, but it sounds like some people have been stuck in a Wall Street echo chamber if they haven't noticed the enormous value that has been created in recent decades by people who are comfortably dressed.
The problem with the investigation into foam loss on STS-107 was that when they tested small sections of foam, it was free of material defects. At the time, investigators concluded incorrectly, by exclusion, that it must have been faulty installation that caused the loss of the shuttle. NASA management blamed those workers for the loss of Columbia. When Discovery's External Tank had cracks and found it was cracking from thermal stresses. This meant that the blaming it on faulty installation was wrong, and for which Wayne Hale apologized.
> But seriously, ditch the real time sharing stuff. I don't know why so many todo lists focus on that.

It's a common scenario for me and my wife to share a list and update it real-time as we traverse the store. We might split up and pick up different things, or I might be at the store while she's at home and remember something when I'm already out. Real-time sharing allows us to communicate accurately through the list.

What we don't do is any recipe management. We know what we make, we don't cook extravagant meals requiring more than 3 or 4 components, so we think about what we like, we pick it up, and we mix & match when we get home. E.g., we have chicken, pasta, ground beef, a variety of sauces, some miscellaneous vegetables and do different combinations depending on who's cooking and how the cook feels that day.
I was going to say that since this system very visibly shines red lights on your storefront windows it might actually serve as a beacon for savvy criminals.
Just curious, have you (or many others that have the same issue with the Mac App Store) decided to switch to some sort of package manager like homebrew?
Why would you use a C Corporation to solve this problem? You'd probably get very similar protection --- perhaps the same protection --- from an LLC.

Here is roughly the mental model I've built about incorporation choices (there are several lawyers on HN that may stomp on me for posting this):

* LLC - cheapest, all money goes straight to principals as if each was a sole proprietor or freelance, tricky to issue equity to employees

* S-Corp - enables the FICA "reasonable salary" cheat, enables employees to easily get shares, enables principals to get W2 wages instead of paying quarterly on everything (LLC's can get this too if they "file" as S).

* C-Corp - company pays corp taxes, company can have multiple classes of shares.

All of these structures provide people acting on behalf of the company, having disclosed that fact clearly to their counterparties, with a reasonable belief that they are authorized by the company, some measure of protection against contract claims.

It's also very important to remember, if you're incorporating to avoid a foreseeable legal event, that corporate liability protections don't shield you from torts. The DMCA stuff you're talking about is tort law. If you are negligent or deliberately cause damages or commit fraud, the corporation isn't going to protect you. Similarly, some things you'd assume would be a matter of contract law (such as payroll) might not be depending on what state you're in.

If I was in your situation, I wouldn't consider laying out money for a C-Corp, and I'd only do something beyond the barest formality of an LLC if I had more than a couple founders or more than one "kind" of founder.
Track your college grades
Example of what private companies can do - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/20/facebook-photodna-m...
Ask HN: Why Twitter put user cap of 100,000 on 3rd party client apps?
Is there a logic behind such number ? Why not close the door now ?

https://dev.twitter.com/blog/changes-coming-to-twitter-api