skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I want to be excepted from state policies based on my religion

It is sort of a gray area. On the one hand, you don't want people to start worshiping the gods of Norevenu and insisting that paying taxes goes against the beliefs of their pantheon so they don't have to do it and the Constitution says they're okay because that's part of their religion.

On the other hand, you don't want politicians to be able to write laws that clearly harass or deny religious freedom to believers.

Where the case in the article falls on that spectrum is open to debate. Some of my personal heuristics for policymaking are:

1. If you do things the way they've always been done before, the risks are more of a known quantity. We should apply a penalty to the score we assign to any policy that involves doing new things, to represent the risks we don't understand.

2. Government often manages to screw things up, so smaller government is usually better. That way if things do get screwed up, at least there's a good chance it'll be on a small scale and/or for a short time. We should apply a penalty to the score we assign to any policy that involves a larger or more intrusive government, to represent the risk of greater inefficiency, corruption, scope creep, and unintended consequences.

3. You should apply a penalty to anything that costs money and a bonus to anything that generates or saves money, if balancing the budget is a concern. Right now, this applies everywhere: At the federal level we're running many deficits, and most state/city/local governments are being squeezed by the recession, declining grants from higher levels, and increasing costs.

All of these heuristics point in the same direction on this one.
As my first open source project, I would have been happy
if it got ten watchers. Now it got 439 which meant a
great responsibility.

This part really rang true to me. I’m working on a hobby project on GitHub I think is going to be great, important, and well-liked some day (as everyone does with their own, I’m sure), but I really like that I can fly under the radar for the moment. At least until some asshole links to it somewhere high-traffic. :)

I am this close to having nightmares about a deluge of poorly-worded issues and pull requests with the most asinine remarks about my project. The fact that there doesn’t seem to be a proper mechanism for managing people like that on GitHub only exacerbates this fear. Funnily, this is also something I have to deal with withing the context of my own project concept, it being community-based. It almost makes you long for something that plugs into GitHub’s own system to make this scale.

I would actually love to read an article about how GitHub projects scale—not the code itself, but the managerial task of managing Issues, Pull Requests, and entitled users. I don’t recall anyone ever doing that. The just-released django-admin-bootstrap has already been inundated with feedback—which is great and all, but seems to be managed much like your e-mails, lest you want to end up in a position where you can’t keep up.

Maybe this could be the occasion for you to do that, reporting live from the battlefield?
Just so I have this clear, is the author making fun of wanna-be entrepreneurs with just an idea looking for technical co-founders?

I think people like that have value, but only if they can raise money and land a co-founder. They might not deserve as much credit as they want, but they aren't worthless. I can't tell if the author thinks so.

That said, it is likely annoying to be constantly pitched by non-technical people who downplay the difficultly of building things.
Crash course on web performance by guys from Google
Interesting to note - while the adjoining areas are well covered by Apple Maps, they don't have a marker for "sandy island" in that spot of ocean - so clearly using a different source.
Awesome! That's really cool, Matt. Cheers to helping everyone get a little higher on Maslow's pyramid today.

On that note... Here's a link to donate to the SF food bank's holiday food drive.
https://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5420/shop/custom.jsp?do...

Happy Thanksgiving all!
The data really don't give me so much confidence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Great_Gatsby_Curve.png

Yes, the US is better than China, but when you realize the US is much closer to China than say.. Canada, it is a bit disheartening.

Yes, you did succeed with little to start with: congratulations. I could find people with your story in China as well. The sad truth though is that most people in your situation did not do as well as you; what happened to all of your high school classmates?

GP may be exaggerating a bit, but there is an incredibly high correlation to parental wealth and success in the US. For high school, if you don't go to a nice expensive private school, it'll really help to live in a (expensive) neighborhood with great public schools.

I attended a public university, but it was very clear that the kids there disproportionately had high parental income. And.. the kids with the high parental income tended to a) get higher grades and B) get better jobs afterward.
No, they're just sugar. It has no relation to whether you can use them to optimise things or not.
Lots of networks is pretty common everywhere I look. In commercial buildings with lots of tenants it is even worse. I live in suburbia (detached houses) and can see between 5 and 10 networks depending on which corner of the house I am in. Only my own AP was on 5GHz, but discovered someone else has finally started using that range too. It also looks like several of my neighbours turn their wifi off when they are not at home!

If you want to collect this kind of data, then an easy way is to ask Android users to run "Wifi Analyzer" and use the Share menu to send you the results. It is a glob of XML but includes all the necessary details.
The student refuses to wear the id even with the tag removed. Can someone explain to me what she is protesting against?

Why shouldn't schools know where the students are on campus and when students enter and leave campus? Attendance would be much better if parents could be called immediately when kids leave campus to skip. Kids could be kept safer since its harder to get away with violence with a log of everyone's location on campus.
Yeah, I can't tell you how many Valley newbs say they have a startup idea, they just need coders, and ooh, they can't tell you anything about the idea because you might steal it.

These are the same people who end up living in their cars, then moving back home with Mom and Dad.
> physically trying many different keyboard combinations just isn't something people do.

you are so right. I did this exactly once, when I discovered that <Win>+<some other key> did special things in Windows, so at some point I decided to just try them all. I learned the <Win>+<Tab>, doing the silly 3D task switcher, that way (I already knew the useful ones like <Win>+<E>, <D> and <R>).

There's considerable risk in this approach, you don't know what the commands are going to do. I just did it because I was 1) very curious and 2) didn't have important things open and 3) kind of assumed they would not put a "really mess up your computer" command behind a single shortcut key.

Now that I think of it, I learned the <Win>+<number> commands from a blog somewhere, so I didn't even discover that tremendously useful shortcut :)
How Many Planes Are in the Air Right Now for Thanksgiving
Open sans is the body copy, not the hashtag text. My wild guess is something from the Droid/Droid Sans family.
Coincidence, but I was from Yorkshire and the village I grew up in put a CCTV camera on the community hall to view the playground as it had gotten to the point that a couple days couldn't go by without someone finding a dirty needle. Once that camera went up, the junkies didn't go there anymore.

A camera is far more cost effective to the parish council than sending someone to search for health hazards every morning.
You're once again believing the ridiculous notion that somehow all CCTV cameras feed into a central state monitored control station. They don't.
USA asks Google for information about users the most
I'm wondering what's the efficiency (speed) limit on ducted fan relative to altitude for the electric airplane concept. Would like to have some data on it
Special Constables are properly trained, qualified and warranted volunteer "real" police officers.

PCSOs are paid, barely trained normal citizens with a police-like uniform.
I'll say it this way: Americans have never been so privacy deprived and frightened of their government as they have been in the last decade.

No one expects Obama to defend your civil liberties. He's invisible most of the time. A middle man to the oligarchy. Some say he is a great "centerist", but I say he's a man with no morals.
No, it's nowhere near as high tech as the article makes it sound. In contrast to how it works in the UK for example, in Saudi Arabia you have to go through passport control whenever you leave the country. This new system checks if the person leaving is a child or a woman and texts their father's or husband's phone number if they have it registered. They can find that information because it's all part of the ID system that's been implemented for decades.
Yard Work: Demo of my first javascript game
They do. The People app has specialized it though, because in the birthday date picker the year is optional, whereas in the stock one the year is required.
I think an important realization is that the public is not generally okay with CCTV installations when they find out they are the recycling VHS type. They are okay with them by default, and don't even bother asking.

I suspect that if you stop random people on the street, point to a camera, and ask them "What kind of camera is that?" the most common response will be along the lines of "I don't know, who cares?" These would presumably be the same people who don't pay CCTV cameras any mind in their day to day lives.

It is not that people don't mind because they are recycling VHS cameras placed by private citizens, but rather that they just don't care regardless. The fact that there is a widespread myth that all the cameras are government installed and networked actually drives home this point. People incorrectly think this and they still don't really care.
All of you people are over reacting taking this person's side. She refuses to wear the ID even with the tag removed!
Cook Like a Pro, Freeze Dunk a Human Turkey
The United States sends them billions of dollars worth of arms, surveillance tech and other tools to oppress the Saudi populace. It does this (and has done this for many decades now) in order to keep the oil flowing.

In other words, it props up an illegitimate dictatorial family, and in turn they keep the oil flowing at a fairly stable and cheap price.

And now you wonder why young Sauds who are oppressed by this situation hate the United States? The people's oil is taken out of the ground by an illegitimate government propped up by the people who buy the oil at what they perceive to be below the fair price.

Make no mistake, the source of the problem is the United States.
Meteor & angularjs
So Long And Thanks For All The Turkey Patents
It's called Type Specialization http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1542528
More police mean more people. More people mean more mistakes. And when police make mistakes people die or at best go to jail unnecessarily. Law enforcement is entrenched with a stand-your-ground-to-hell-with-the-facts culture.

Their job is essentially to find "bad guys" so when there are many more cops then bad guys, the category of bad-guy gets vastly expanded.

In 2002 at LAX there were so many cops it was ridiculous. My friend got a ticket for littering and I got one for jaywalking. Actually he was going to arrest me at first.

So yes, please, I want that experience everywhere I go. If I walk briskly, well then I should be stopped and questioned. If I stop slightly ahead of the line at the crosswalk, I should get a $500 fine every time and eventually lose my license.

But the police of course can simply turn on their sirens and go through whatever red light they please, or park in front of a hydrant, or on a sidewalk, they are above the law after all.

This overreaching police state sounds simply wonderful. Where does one sign up?
I'm surprised a great source of ideas hasn't been mentions: Google search suggestions. For example, try typing "build android apps" (don't hit Enter). Hundreds/thousands are looking for how to make apps with: no programming experience, or easily or with another language eg: python). Good market to be in!
This is incredible. Great thing you're doing! How about that hospitality. :)
Not quite open, but Linkshare and commission junction also have good APIs if you're an approved reseller. If you want to advertise products from a particular retailer you can usually get their catalogue.
Cedric, you are a fucking idiot and I expect this to never stop. Thanks for the endless giggles. Sincerely.
John Cleese on creativity and the tortoise brain
Dood, go to a hackerspace. lots of people having Thanksgiving at Noisebridge and Hacker Dojo, I am sure.

I know it sucks being alone on a holiday, but you know, yer only there by choice. Lots of friendly people here inviting you over.

If yer still depressed Saturday, come to the MADE (Oakland's videogame museum) and play your heart out. http://www.themade.org
>>>Don't be fooled, if the US didn't care their BFF Pahlavi murdered and tortured Iranians, you shouldn't expect they care about women rights or whatever in SA.

I always held a similar belief. I found it ironic to hear liberal women talking about a "war on women" by the GOP, but never seem to muster enough strength to do something about these incredible injustices women endure in Saudi Arabia.
> Now, keeping all that in mind, what do you think the local population will think of the US telling them which parts of the Qu'ran to not obey (according to their interpretation)?

Thank you for pointing this out.

Forcing countries to follow your views will likely provoke an opposite effect.
You sound very confident that immortality would be a good thing.

Maybe.

We've never experienced it, so how can you be sure?

To be clear, I THINK my own immortality would be nice, but I can't even be sure about that. Immortality for EVERYONE would fundamentally change our societies. Every human institution is affected by death. Removing it would change everything, unpredictably.

If you can find an English version (or read Spanish), the Immortal by Borges is a good partial exploration of this theme, for an individual.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_(short_story)
You've gotta bring swig me to NYC! I'd use it!
The privacy violation here is clearly of the second order. It is not the position of students which is private, but what can be inferred from their positions in aggregate. Your position data combined with data that you don't have can often say a lot about you.

Part of me is fascinated to see exactly what you can infer from the data. Can you detect drug usage? Sexual activity? Perhaps even some psychological problems like anti-social behavior?

Should parents want perfect information about what their kids do, even if just at school? Does the impersonal nature of this data's acquisition and inference erode the sense of connection and trust between a parent and child?

Although my own reaction to the news of the RFID policy was visceral and negative, I have to admit I sort of want to do the experiment and see what happens. I suspect that, as usual, the result will not be what anyone predicted.
>Beethoven's Great Fugue is not a miracle of the universe.

No, but our ability to enjoy it is.
That's right. Because the number of instances of "My life was ruined by the state who monitored my every move", or "My love life was ruined when my wife was able to bribe the CCTV operator to find out about my affair"... they don't happen do they.

If CCTV was a problem for people, we'd hear about it. But it's not, so we don't.

The fact I visited a certain shop is on record for 2 days on a crappy VHS tape.... why do I care?

Some tourist probably also took my photograph, but I'm not going to stress about that either.
This is analogous to downloading some thing after encrypting it. Or a zip file with a password.

Its a clever hack though. Because you can always argue, that File you downloaded has meaningless contents and that some algorithm at your end is re arranging it as a meaningful form.

But the copyright enforcers can always argue this is a clever way of stealing something. More like smuggling a big thing by dividing into pieces and transporting them in surrogate objects.
Yup, I've read this just after have posted the question. Thx ;)
I've been approached by a couple people like this for a technical co-founder position. I got scared off when i actually met them and discovered i had more product experience then them and they had no significant connections or marketing experience to bring to the table.
Twitter and libel law: a little bird told me
Front end engineering - Responsive Cat
Ok, let me get this straight.

School makes RFID solution for tracking/library/food stuffs.
Student objects based upon religious and privacy grounds.
Judge granted her a reprieve based upon Freedom of Speech and Religion grounds.

I do have a good deal of knowledge and understanding of different religions and beliefs. I know of none other that specifically mentions the "Mark of The Beast" and the full context mentioned in Revelations.

So are they preparing a non-Christian tracking service?
HootSuite Exploded from 80 to 230 Employees This Year
I don't see why we're so uptight about children's safety anyway. Sure, some get kidnapped and murdered, or molested or beat up or whatever, but 99.999999% of kids seem to do okay. Sure, it sucks if your kid is one of the .0000001%, but there's a lot of things that suck in this world if they happen to you, but they are so uncommon that we don't (and shouldn't) waste any time worrying about them.
I wish I had done this for our Thanksgiving.
Pretty surprised the site looks so terrible on my phone.
Note that the US and Canada governments, despite their posturing about the Taliban's abuse of women, are very friendly with Saudi Arabia.
Keep in mind, as soon as someone notices enough people are choosing trains instead of air travel, "stupid security checks" will start showing up at train stations as well…

My personal transport-of-choice is a motorcycle. I can get anywhere within ~400km of home in less time by bike than by plane. I reasonably regularly choose to ride Sydney<->Port Macquarie or Sydney<->Canberra for work, mostly because I enjoy the ride, only partly 'cause it takes me less time than cab-to-airport/checkin/fly/cab-at-other-end.
I really like the point that is made about co-founders being ying-yang of each other. Hacker-hacker co-founder duos are destined to fail in the same way husler-husler startups are. Bridging the gap between husler and hacker is difficult though. Far too many hackers are hesitant to hire a husler, and far too many hustlers are hesitant to hire a hacker. Actually, I don't think 'hesitant to hire' is the right phrase... maybe 'unable to recognize'
The problem is that this system doesn't work. If a kid wants to skip school, she'll just give her friend the her tag to scan.
Am I the only one who was expecting an article on electronic implants?
Hey Matt-

I just shot you an email- I'm staying near Height and Clayton, and this is my first Thanksgiving alone- How far is it to North Beach ?
A good examination of radical life extension and its repercussions on society, life, and memory is examined in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.
Ask HN: Review my startup partnerpulse.co
PartnerPulse is a way for people to find, and discuss, Microsoft partner companies. Be they CRM consultants, or Office 365 experts. PartnerPulse wants to host a conversation about these companies using profiles pages and what we are calling Pulses (profile activity walls).

Thanks in advance for all feedback
Nobody, as I read it, is suggesting that the current CCTV installations, or even the imagined CCTV installations, present a threat themselves.

The damage being done, in my opinion, is a shifting of the Overton window. It changes our perception of normal so that other hypothetical, actually dangerous or sinister, developments will not seem as unusual or outside the norm.

There is not a massive tracking network of CCTV cameras today, but people seem to have the idea that such a thing exists.. and they don't care. Give it a few more years and you could probably actually install such a system and the only people who said anything would be considered weirdos for caring, just like you find it weird that people are bothered by the current system.

I should emphasis that I do not think the UK is going to turn into East Germany in any foreseeable future.
Funding usually goes to either administrators pockets or to making the system look more impressive with devices that no one knows how to use.

Education (looked at as a whole) in the US is pretty well funded, simply throwing money at the problem isn't solving anything.
Wow. Some web designer didn't try resizing their browser when they designed this.
debug CSS and JS, then post a GreaseMonkey script to fix it. #freeandopen
> Maybe you misread what I wrote, 1 kilowatt/m^2 is the power of direct sunlight. The power per square meter to power a jumbojet realistically needs to be 10s to 100s of times higher than that.

Indeed I did. However, I was primarily thinking about the waste heat, which would only be about 1 or two kilowatt/m^2.

> For example, the risk of eye damage from reflections would be a significant concern

I doubt this would be a concern for microwaves.

> but realistically at those power levels you could risk melting plastics and so forth.

That's only if all the power went towards melting those plastics. If the transmission and conversion is efficient enough, then this isn't necessarily the case. Also, just don't use plastics.

Shielding passengers inside a metal hull from 10 kilowatts/m^2 isn't that big a deal. Nor would dissipating 1.5 kilowatts/m^2 of waste heat.
I want to read his book now. Must find that book somehow.
Artists need to come up with alternative distribution themselves if it's important to them.
> It is very interesting that Sinofsky was unable to get Office "Metroified"

It's quite amazing because office seems to be the only reason the desktop mode exists in RT. So it means that it was apparently easier to port all of the Windows desktop to ARM so as to run Office (subobtimally) in desktop mode than it was to put a touch-based UI on Office. It's hard to think this was an optimal choice of direction, they must have been forced to do this as a least worst option ... the only way to ship office in time. But what does that say about Office? How bad must the internal code be, or the team managing it, or the process they have, if re-skinning it is more effort than porting all of the Windows desktop?
What you describe is the privatisation of CCTV. Yes it is owned by the likes of shopkeepers, but all of it is accessible by the state on demand. So I'm afraid its not bullshit at all. Its just not owned by the government. That should be nice and safe, right? When you get don to it, its rather clever.
Since I find the kill list/drone strikes/unaccountable assassination of civilians issue particularly troubling I can see where you are coming from.

I'm just not convinced that this is a shift in terms of the "US government have been doing whatever the hell they want lately, civil liberties and public opinions be damned" statement. The specifics are different now and the tools for manufacturing consent or controversy are always shifting but the lack of concern for civil liberties or public opinion (beyond what's necessary for horse-race politics) seems like a "new boss, same as the old boss" type thing to me.
:) reason #1,230 of why not to write a blog post at 1AM on saturday night.
"He asked if I’d have done it had they simply asked nicely.

no probably not."

Beautiful.