skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I applaud Rick for having this discussion. Normally I (perhaps like many others) would be turned off reading about a topic like this. When the first thread [0] came up, I ignored it. However, as it slowly accumulated more votes on HN, I felt a desire to challenge myself to read it and see how it constructively discussed the issues around child pornography.

Sure enough, I found it a very well put together piece.

I think the same can be said for this follow up article.

The discussion reminds me of the discussion around the Australian artist Bill Henson [1], who got in strife for photographs of a 13 year old. I personally don't have strong opinions one way or the other as to the rightness or wrongness of this type of art, but it was interesting to have the debate blown so widely open in the mainstream media here. Having said that, the debate was more about "Art" vs "Child pornograhy" and didn't touch on the additional areas that Rick discussed.

I do think that one point Rick may want to touch on is also the slippery slope to do with your own young children. When they are one or two years old, it is fine to take photos of them playing in the yard naked for the family album. Hell, its even frowned upon if there aren't photos like this to embarrass a child at their 21st birthday. Just as this is ok, it is also not okay for a parent to take photos of their 17yo child naked for the family album.

It seems that it would be difficult to legislate the specific point at which it is no longer okay to partake in this type of photography, but it is interesting to consider these things.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4495914

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Henson#Images_seized
Ancient flower lives only on two Spanish cliffs, and uses ants to survive
Where by "live 12 volt wiring", you mean "live 12 volt wiring, , but only 'live' when both the ignition and the brakes are on (or sometimes the tail-lights where they use dual-filament bulbs), which is suitably fused so it wont catch fire if you short it, and which is completely safe to touch unless you manage to pierce through your ribcage with two conductive spikes and connect opposite ends of the low-voltage supply directly onto your heart muscle", right?

Seriously, I'm trying to imagine any scenario where ham-fisted attempts to change a brake light bulb could result in anything more dangerous than a mild surprise and a blown fuse if you manage to short the contacts. You are, in my experience, _much_ more likely to injure yourself kicking the cat 'cause you end up so frustrated having to remove 47 easily breakable plastic clips holding the shitty carpet/trim in the trunk to get to the bulb - than being in any danger from a 12V electrical system, live or not.

And, as someone who lives where out wall outlets provide 220V AC, and who's taken more than his fair share of belts from not only 220V but also 415V three phase power, I find it vaguely amusing when people are deadly afraid of puny 110V electrical systems ;-)
Cue people whinging about a system they know almost nothing about.

Why are there so few true paypal competitors? Because paypal makes it so difficult to compete against them with their stellar service and low fees? No, because it's a legitimately hard problem, and you can't really avoid doing what paypal does while still abiding by all the relevant laws and financial regulations.
Am I the only one that read/saw Rorschach as the only absolutely moral character? He refused to compromise on the truth and held everyone to the same code. His inability to accept the moral compromise offered by Ozymandius leads directly to his death, which he welcomes rather than pervert his own morality.
> It doesn't help that the shortest way of declaring a function in Javascript is function(){...};

-> is much shorter.
After reading your post http://www.igvita.com/2012/06/14/debunking-responsive-css-pe... It seems merely adding a media tag to the link tag would prevent webkit browsers from hanging.
No Duty to Secure Wi-Fi from BitTorrent Pirates, Judge Rules
Workshop on Big 'O' Thing Delayed ... re 'Plan X'
I loved SoftICE, especially the NMI button that you could slide into an ISA slot.
Shamoon Has Been Cancelled
Except he misses the part where nobody actually thinks that.
Did not know that. Why is that such a commonly held belief?
For anyone looking, I found where it went. You can hide a post, then it will give you subscription options.
"We will not win this battle with diplomacy; our enemy has no desire for it. We must stamp out the medieval death cults that threaten us, and this will require force."

"Culture war" or use of "force"? Or does "culture war" involve force?
In a strange way I sort of did this with my EE and math degrees. I did draw the line at the Hartree-Fock approximation for doing ab-initio band structure calculations for silicon though so there's still room at the bottom for me. Since then I've come to realize that programming is more fulfilling to me but I do feel prepared for this particular line of rabbit-hole questions :-)
With all these online courses going on, the recruiting will change. Not now, but it will.

I'm really into this kind of teaching, and I hope it helps the poor, cause there's lots of job openings but not enough talent.

This is just one step, a big one, but not the hole solution.
The Secret of Learning To Code
Apple: Sorry, Those BitTorrent Apps Were Approved by Mistake
Anything have to do with binary formats and I/O would qualify.

Let's say for example you're trying to load a binary file and the header format is like this:

16 bit magic number,
8 bit file size,
3 bit version,
5 bit header size

Now, are you confident enough in how structs are laid out in memory that you could use a bitfield to read these values in? Are you sure it would work on 32 bit, 64 bit, big and little endian machines? What is all that packed structure nonsense in GCC?

That's something that C abstracts away from you and can lead to errors.
The site was cool but I found it funny how every person on the most wanted list was hispanic or black. But at least only one was because of drugs, the others committed legitimate crimes.
The pitch may be a bit awkward and I can't attest to the quality of other contestants, but I have a good impression overall from Your Mechanic.

Car repair is heavily stuck in the 20th-century model of businesses. Individual shops open from 8am to 5pm, you want to find someone good? Without Yelp you're basically relying on word of mouth to not get ripped off, or Yellow Pages. The main form of contact is calling mechanics up, driving around the city at 8am before I go to work and then dropping it off.

Sometimes I get in to my favorite shop and they have too many cars and can't help me. My options are now come back another day, or heading to a random unknown shop if it's urgent - risking the cesspool of bad mechanics. Google offers onsite oil change and basic maintenance, which is a much better experience than taking an hour + off to run back and forth in business hours. I've had to go to the shop many times in the past 9 months, and overall the logistics have not been a great experience. The only thing is I don't really trust Your Mechanic to offer me a reliable/honest mechanic - I've been relying on referrals, reviews and Yelp to find places, some good experiences, some bad. I feel like Your Mechanic's system may or may not be good depending on how ratings and the network effects work out.

Overall I'm excited for Your Mechanic to start making some changes.
"lower than the rate among US factory workers". This is a common comparison fallacy. The baserates you appear to be comparing with are all general population baserate. The baserate that I was thinking about was how many factory workers committed suicide on-site. That is the Apples-to-Apples comparison. Eg: How many Apple employees committed suicide on campus vs how many Foxconn employees committed suicide at their factory camp/dorm.
NOAA/GLERL Great Lakes Surface Currents Map
Those two investors were investors in many of the entrants and finalists.
oooooh font pron.... dat ascender.
I think the hardware is great for the new IPhone. I think the real problem is that they are now going to have to really create compelling software as Google is catching up. They also really need to rethink the user experience a bit. Some new design blood for their UI would be a nice change.
How good is the UI that points out the contraction of "Facebook style changer" wanting to modify all sites? And does this dialog include a warning for extensions that are able to record all activities and phone them home to third party servers, a combination of capabilities that most extensions should not need? There's certainly underlying work that needs to be done to make the latter a reality, but at least trying to solve the problem is better than giving up and falling back to centralized computing.

It's true that users have been desensitized to important decisions through an onslaught of mswin uninformed-consent OK/Cancel dialogs, but at some point they have to be responsible for sensible security decisions (even if that just means downloading Chromium from google.com and not google.com.ojwqodkja.ru). The only way to completely protect a user from themselves is to revert their computer into an unmodifiable display terminal, an idea that should be appalling to anybody who values the concept of a personal computer.
I'm using ubuntu. I am a big windows fan but python on windows is really frustrating at times.

I like eclipse + pydev, and with other monitors I have my tests running.
You may be referring to paco[1], which has always been kind of a hack. It also appears to not have been updated in a very long time.

1: http://paco.sourceforge.net/
The typical way we handle this is to a) charge much, much more than a full-time employee does over a similar increment of time and b) when we want to take a vacation, we simply don't schedule engagements.

As a freelancer/consultant doing programming, your rate should be comfortably high enough that your cash flow situation is rock-solid without working on a week to week basis. (If you disagree that your cash-flow situation is rock solid, HN reader, you are not charging enough. Raise your rates. If your cash flow situation is rock solid raise your rates anyway, you're still undercharging.)

The typical target utilization rate for a consulting firm is 70~80% ish, which means you get 10+ weeks of vacation a year. My business is a little quirky, but I would probably get 30+ weeks. It flows naturally from charging appropriately and, critically, never, ever, ever depends on a client saying Yes to your vacation.
As much as I love to see people iterate on the boring old command line, this will never catch on.

1) It's too difficult to remember all the tricks to make it useful, and the cost of memorizing tricks that I saw in the first screencast isn't worth the efficiency it provides.

2) It's too difficult for new users to remember the tricks that are supposedly "better." It's a lot like Python vs. Perl -- Perl is a really smart and clever language, but you can type just a few characters more to write Python and it'll be a lot clearer as to what's going on.

The one exception to all of this is the MySQL stuff I saw. The MySQL prompt has sucked for a long, long time, and building SQL queries is something you do iteratively anyway.

All of the above said, I still think this is pretty neat. But I won't use it.
For reference, the other finalists were:

Lit Motors (runner up): http://litmotors.com/

Expect Labs: http://www.expectlabs.com/

Gyft: http://www.gyft.com/

Prior Knowledge: https://www.priorknowledge.com/

Saya: http://www.saya.im/

Zumper: http://zumper.com
I think the most compelling argument made in this article is that a law that by it's nature is only going to do what it's supposed to if applied selectively is a bad law. The manga image posted in the article looks more like art to me, but in the US is probably CP, though it's hard to tell at this point.

The article also touches on a more widely applicable idea that we should all push for more evidence based law making. In this case, continually making harsher punishments for simple possession, disregarding any evidence that those punishments may in fact be detrimental to preventing child molestation. More widely, I think it should also be easily applied to internet piracy law and drug decriminalization to take the low hanging fruit of evidence free lawmaking.

I'd also like to say that I appreciate a politician actively making a choice to talk about an inflammatory topic, taking an unpopular position, and risking his career to stand up for what he believes. Whether you agree with his interpretation or not, that's something I'd like to see more of.
> There is a food shortage in Africa.

No, there's a distribution problem, but I'll play along.

> One way to solve this would be to kill 80% of the African population.

Nope. Killing 80% of the African population will not solve the food shortage. (It also won't solve the distribution problem.) Why? Because Africa's food production is roughly proportional to its population and not limited by anything that will be helped by killing lots of people.

The "end" of killing 80% of the African population is that 80% of the population has been killed. Some "good person" might have thought that some good (less starvation) would result from killing them, but the end was a lot of dead people who got killed by said good person.

Thanks for providing an example of where "he meant well" had a horrendous result, as it typically does.
Take off your one undergarment. Use your finger as a pen and your fecal matter as ink. Draw an x-y coordinate plane on the ground. Now throw your undergarment in the air and note which direction the elastic (or top) part is facing. Once again re-ink your pen and note this angle (from 0 to 360 degrees). Do this as many times as you feel will satisfy randomness. Take the sum of the angles and divide by the number of times you did the experiment (theoretically once should be enough).

To expand on the range do this another set of times, except this time take the sum (no average) and use this as the exponent.

Congratulations, you have successfully generated a random number using only your finger, fecal matter, and a little bit of math.

Now sit in this room of solitude until you die or are released from Guantanamo Bay.
No Derek Sivers? :(
Congrats to the team. I thoroughly checked out the site, and this is clearly backed by a smart team. I see dozens of subtle smart decisions, and no obvious mistakes.

Compared to YC companies, they are way ahead on SEO and other web marketing strategy. YC demo day companies tend to suck at SEO in obvious ways.
To reproduce:

1) Open Google Reader http://www.google.com/reader

2) click the red "Subscribe" button

3) paste the rss url from your site's sidebar http://blog.automicrofarm.com/rss

4) click "Add"

5) GReader says "You have subscribed to 'AutoMicroFarm Blog. ... "AutoMicroFarm Blog" has no items'
Thanks oz, that makes me happy. There is a podcast episode coming up in the next few days about consulting, which anyone interested in this topic would be well-advised to listen (or read -- transcript available, as per usual).
I'd just take my shoe off, throw it up in the air while spinning it, and use the wall it ends up pointing to.
Google Drive is the new home for Google Docs
Hmm, interesting..
"sure most folks at YC feel like they try harder too"

It's great to be the underdog it makes everything fun as you are trying to get somewhere. Once you get there you have something to lose. So you either becomes paranoid or you can become lazy and complacent.

You might remember the Dirk Diggler character in "Boogie Nights". First time he won the award he gave a big speech and thanked everyone. Next time a little less, next even less. After he had won so many awards he would just go up on the stage and say "thank you" as if it didn't even matter anymore. Later, he couldn't even "get it up" he became impotent. That's what you have to guard against. Your strategy is great.
UnsocialReader
Another reason this is not recommended is that, if you rename the files, you can send them to the server and then reload your app.

If you don't, there might be a small amount of time before your app is reloaded where your app uses newer resources.
You mean set x0 to 1, right?

People who do linear regression at work don't add a x0 feature? During the lecture the prof. only said that adding a x0=1 for all samples m, is by convention and helps simplify the computation. Unless I missed something during the lecture that's the only explanation that was given.
The whole argument is moot. Quicklisp exists now, and you can install anything with it, with one command.
just spitballing here? How about mashing up NPR story locations, so people can see recent NPR stories about events in their area?

alternatively, if you can find an accurate source of data on where FM and AM radio reach, and genre's they play, you could do a mashup with mapping software, so people going on long trips can put in types of music they like and know when and what to switch the radio to.

or create some sort of plugin for shoutcast that allows shoutcast broadcasters to have a map of where their listeners are and interesting related geo analytics.
A quote: "Well, people are arguing the efficacy of treatment for depression on the Internet. Quite honestly, this dismays me. The matter has been studied. There are papers. There are books. There are (pardon me while I appeal to authority) people who spend their careers arguing for and against certain treatment modalities."

You would do well to avoid appeals to authority in scientific matters. It happens that a recent meta-analysis demonstrates that depression medications simply do not work for the majority of people.

It seems that, over the years, Big Pharma funded a lot of studies of depression medications, and systematically threw out those that didn't support their position:

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...

A quote: "Meta-analyses of antidepressant medications have reported only modest benefits over placebo treatment, and when unpublished trial data are included, the benefit falls below accepted criteria for clinical significance."

Read the last sentence carefully. It means the depression medications don't work any better than placebos for the majority of people. This is perhaps the best-kept secret in psychology.

The nest time you're tempted to say, "The matter has been studied. There are papers. There are books", remember this study -- it summarizes all those papers and books, and shows that these drugs do not work.
‘EVE Online’ Community Mourns Death of Ambassador Killed in Libya Attacks
Users can still install extensions from any source through drag and drop.
If you're interested in location and music, you should talk to Joey Flores
of EarBits.com fame (YC funded). A concept might be shows or events
happening soon in your general location, and a taste of the music from
the given musicians.
Users are trained to want apps. They are not trained to add to homescreen.

Apps get notifications.
You raise a seemingly valid point. But, your data seems to be different than mine. Many companies, especially large multi-national ones have an excellent track record of media manipulation and the ability to successfully hide massive problems. Think about how rare whistle blowers are. Easy example that I was personally affected by: Vioxx from Merck where Merck knew about the problems with the drug but pushed it through anyway and got away with it for years. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6192603/ns/health-arthritis/t/re... . Think about big tobacco, think about Chiquita and its activities in Columbia, think about Dow Chemical/Union Carbide...
With Google Analytics, AdSense and DoubleClick, Google already has tags on 88.4% of all web domains.

http://knowprivacy.org/
Peer-to-what-now? People in YourMechanic's market used to have to comb through useless Yelp ratings to find a place to take their cars to and leave them for a day or 3 to have basic repairs done. Now they can type some things into their Googles and have their cars fixed at home.

As a card carrying member of the "160k miles, last 20k with the check-engine light on" club, this is the best thing ever and I can't wait for them to get it to Chicago.
"make -p"

Of course this only applies to GNU make.
As a piece of propaganda, I'd say it's pretty nice considering I can count the sites using good Parallax effects on one hand.

Unfortunately, the selection of images doesn't help their cause. Considering their history, I would think there would be more pictures of Cops helping kids and old folks as opposed to images of urban attack vehicles and cops in SWAT gear.
Kind of a bummer. I still use a few GreaseMonkey scripts in Firefox and one of the main reasons I still use some pages in FF. OinkPlus is still a great tool for finding new music and artists.
YouTube Hasn’t Removed Video That Sparked Middle East Protests
Introducing New Mobile Photo Pages
I've read it several times and gave it a few minutes, and I've got nothing.
Help people and be grateful for what you have.
Ears-On With Apple’s New EarPods: Better Bass, Better Looks, Just Better
The Screencasts page seems broken in Chrome?

update: works in Safari though.
30 Inspiring Sessions From Digital World-Changers
I think you simply refuse to understand - a nail may be pinned using a pickaxe, but when you have a hammer available, which does the job neat , why would you go for the pickaxe? HTML5 is the pick axe which does the job ugly. Mobile developers have little reason to adopt it.
What Every Entrepreneur Thinks Before They Even Lift Their Head Off The Pillow
Crippled by Nostalgia: The Fraud of Retro Gaming
Managed DNS Provider Comparison Report
The point is that pg popularized LISP, and Clojure is the closest extant LISP to the ideal that pg describes in http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html, http://paulgraham.com/arclessons.html, and #6 of http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html.
Squid 3.0 was released in 2007. It can be argued that this is an out of date recommendation. My experience using query strings has been fine.
FWIW, I don't think he has the slightest clue what leiningen is. It is hardly "basically a shell script which Does Things". It is written entirely in Clojure. All the shell script does is tie it together and bootstrap things. I'm fine with criticism, but not blatantly inaccurate information.
Two game developers arrested in Greece under suspicion of espionage
I would downvote this comment for extreme, petulant vagueness if I had the karma to do so.
Couldn't both of those complaints apply to, say, Vim, the golden child of HN?
Thank you! I have been looking for that website for years!
Some Unconventional Investing Rules
Solid Gap. Anyone with a car can appreciate the problem !
Something like Eventful, but solely for music?
So will they do this with the regular downloads too? Because you still can download malwares with Chrome isn't? And extension developers who aren't accepted in the Google "walled garden" can create a regular downloadable software which forces their extensions into Chrome.
Credit card-sized flexible screen+battery device: the Bitcoincard
This runs at like 4fps on my MBP running Firefox 15 :-(
Zuckerberg Shows He’s The Right Man For The Job. Now That Job Needs Doing
The FCC keeps information on radio stations, but it doesn't include anything on the station's genre. This could probably be fixed with a classifier that learns based on the station's website.

I've never heard of Shoutcast, I'll have to check it out.

EDIT: SHOUTcast's API doesn't seem to support anything that would allow a show host to gather info on users. That's probably for the best though ..
Works fine for me, for both aquaemacs and macvim. cool idea, still not sure how I can use this yet, but will give it more tries.

the doc need more details, still do not know how to save a menu.
Ex-Nokia employees produce multi-country wifi hotspot device
Of course all of this is useless in the context of mobile web views because Android dropped web workers and IOS just picked them up.
A platform for everyone