skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Other than the reasons already pointed out, money plays a huge role in elections in the U.S.A. Without large influx of money, a politician can not run an effective campaign - hence corporations have a huge leverage. To put it bluntly: corruption is rife in the U.S. but it is "hidden" as money does not (always) go directly to a politician's pocket, but it is diverted to his/her campaign. What the U.S.A. needs is to revamp its law and limit contributions to small amounts per person - including corporate persons - and reverse the Citizens United ruling through a constitutional amendment.
"Data mining" strikes again. Find a meaningless correlation, one having nothing to do with anything, then publish it, along with a bogus explanation that pretends the random, chance correlation represents a cause-effect relationship.

The article pays lip service to the very high probability that the correlation means precisely nothing, but this has no effect on the impression the article creates by its very existence.

In the Forbes account of this same study (http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryhusten/2012/10/10/chocolate...), the first line of the article -- "You don’t have to be a genius to like chocolate, but geniuses are more likely to eat lots of chocolate" -- is not at all supported by the study itself, which measures the chocolate-eating behavior of nations, not individuals.

This is another example of irresponsible, sensationalist science journalism. The irony is that the study's presumably scientifically trained author (Franz Messerli of Columbia University), seems dead serious.
+1. Reminds me of Urinal Game Theory:

http://people.scs.carleton.ca/~kranakis/Papers/urinal.pdf

NB: Haven't actually read that paper, only the abstract, I've just discussed the concept in a class...I think I might read it later today!
Show HN: Retractable earbuds in a protective iphone case!
Hey guys, my name is Dan Fischer and I have started Ear-Gear with the intention of making a low cost, protective phone case with great sounding retractable ear buds. After many prototypes and minor corrections to the design the final product is ready for orders! The ear buds used are mimics of the ever-so-popular Beats by Dre! I started this company out of Salisbury, MD with intention to spread it all over the world.

check out this promo video!http://ear-gears.com/

and add us on Facebook! http://www.facebook.com/eargears?ref=notif&notif_t=page_new_likes
This is a reflection of the growing influence of younger generations within the GOP and their attempts to rectify much of the old-fashioned GOP hypocrisy regarding "small government" and copyright reform, military spending, surveillance, the war on drugs, etc.

Ars Technica had a bit of a profile on the "tech-savvy" Derek Khanna who authored the memo: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/influential-gop-g...
Just fantasizing here about potential fodder for the next decade of science fiction, but what would be even cooler than finding complex organics would be finding complex artificial materials (plastics, refined metals, glass, etc.).
I wish they implemented OSX Lion style scroll bars already.
And still doesn't support the Retina Display, disappointing.
It's just too bad that in certain instances, the people who follow up are powerless to do anything, and the people who do have the power to do things and who need to be hearing from disgruntled customers like me may or may not be getting a filtered message or even paying what they do hear any heed.
this is hilarious (read ridiculous)

would all the pro-equality people tell me how you suggest to fix the inequality of XY chromosomes between males and females? or inequality of melanin in people's skins? or inequality of hair on our heads?

demanding to have 50% male/female or black/white speakers reminds me of a joke: "- what is the chance that dinosaur will cross this road this very moment? - 50%. it will either cross or will not."

rather than whine and cry about not having enough women in tech go and tell your employer to hire your female friend because she's good.
It's not an AT&T-specific problem. Lots of carriers in other countries do this too. That's why unlockit.co.nz exists in the first place.
HN, Reddit, Google News, Daily Kos, 538, and BoingBoing. Also Facebook and Twitter to a lesser extent.
I don't really think that the idea that something must be perfect to be useful is correct. Trying to find a perfectly accurate model is impossible, so you must qualify your meaning of the phrase. Mathematics has a whole subject named statistics which spends quite a lot of its time dealing with the proportional incorrectness of models. If you look at the graphs or figures in the report (not just the headline of +4 degrees celcius), you will notice that almost all of them have a degree of uncertainty; figures without uncertainty values are as good as useless.

Also, if you are going to use "No one challenged me and I got several upvotes and follow-on posts in agreement" as a pseudo appeal to authority, I don't think that the readership of a Hacker News comments section really qualifies as authority on this particular issue.

Edit: Oh, apparently models have already predicted temperatures since 1900 correctly via hindcasting, along with changes in climates after significant events such as the eruption of Mount Pinatubo. And so far, they seem to be on-track with empirical data: http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/SLR_models_obs.gif, though I fully understand if you want to discard that graph due to it's source; the risk of selection bias is very high when taking a shallow look at a large and deep subject.
Stag/hen do's coming into Newcastle and the school holidays are a nightmare for rail commuting, invariably leading to stress and headaches all round.
Improvised explosive devices can be designed cleverly to resemble common items such as smart phones or wrist watches, or even the sole of a shoe. The triggers for these devices can sometimes be very elaborate. I believe that the TSA has every right to investigate suspicious devices, and a watch with fuses and wires protruding from it warrants further inspection.

A true explosive device trigger is likely to have wires on it . Explosive devices will also have resistors and perhaps a fuse (can't see why exactly) but to an average TSA employee any device which looks out of the norm with wires is immediately suspicious.

And honestly, if you're going to go to the airport, don't be an idiot. Everyone knows the TSA is hypersensitive and quite ignorant of engineering concepts or art in this case, don't push the limits when you know that this is likely to happen.
I actually tried these guys out earlier this year when the main product was a full email-client, but just couldn't make myself move away from gmail. But so far, I am finding myself really liking the new gmail plugin/toolbar. It's recognized about maybe two dozen brands. Will definitely give it a whirl for a few more days.

But I do agree that it would be great if it also worked for personal email contacts + some form of analytics/gamification. And I also wish it allowed me to group brands together (e.g., so that I can read the various sales newsletters I get once a week in a fire-and-forget kind of way as opposed to having them crowd out my inbox).

I do think that there's a ton of room for innovation in the email client. It makes me sad how slow gmail has gotten over time, and I do think there's a ton of room for more automation, assistance, auto-categorization, etc.
$7m, apparently:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/19/sources-apple-paid-7-millio...
I was trying to think of the big name companies where you can directly email the CEO and actually expect a valid response back. I can't name more than a handful.
What Exactly Happened at Autonomy?
"At the moment, Internet users enjoy more privacy rights if they store data on their hard drives or under their mattresses, a legal hiccup that the companies fear could slow the shift to cloud-based services unless the law is changed to be more privacy-protective."

It's not really a legal hiccup. Let's rewrite it without the editorializing:

"At the moment, Internet users enjoy more privacy rights if they keep their data private than if they share their data with non-governmental third parties..."

If you tell me you're planning to kill someone, the FBI doesn't need a search warrant to get me to testify about what you said. A subpoena will do. Why should it be different if you tell Google you're planning on killing someone, by storing "Killing Someone Plans.doc" on their servers in plain text?
Also in Houston here, also had AT&T 3G service. I doubt they were throttling your old phone - their local 3G network is just that bad. Using AT&T's LTE network in the same town is rather like using a different carrier. Even the HSPA they built on top of their old 3G is remarkably better. And it's considerably faster than Verizon's current LTE offerings, which have been degrading in speed/quality since mid-April. (Though that might improve in time, and MaBell's service quality might go back down as more people upgrade to it.)
My first though: "They're still open?"
Visa and MC are, as mentioned, an effective duopoly over card payments in the EU.

This means that Visa and MC are in a position to govern the flow of money. Since they have started acting as a governing body by unilaterally cutting off access for political reasons, they have exposed themselves to political control over their behavior, also for political reasons.

Only the government gets to be the government. That's why it works.
Is anyone surprised by this, in the wake of PATRIOT and NDAA?

The time to leave the US is now. You no longer have the basic rule of law. Collect your family and possessions and emigrate.

It's not easy[1], but it's the only way, now. We're never getting those rights back.

[1] I did it. It's tough, no foolin'.
It is sad that there isn't a "better" way to bet against (or for) a company. Per pg's startup ideas though it does seem to suggest a small opportunity. Sort of a variation on the sports book where you get to bet for or against company outcomes. The tricky bit would be to capture this sort of event (purchase then giant write down) as a wager.
Actually, I used reductio ad absurdum exactly to show it can work as a rhetorical device, but in politics you can easily construe "demonstrations" for both sides of an argument using it. So it is not a good argument.
Who said the money was all used up? Last I heard they had a lot of it in the bank ($25M or so) and since they sold off assets to Apple it's likely they were able to return a pretty decent chunk (in the neighborhood of 70%).

http://www.fastcompany.com/3002341/color-failed-what-happens...
> FIXED Page scrolling on sites with fixed headers https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=780345

Praise God, that has been a pet peeve of mine for years.
Haven't -- yet, though I may end up caving before too long -- but I don't really like the idea of having to use such a hack, for the reasons I already listed at http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=16267233#post16...

1) It may be cheap relatively-speaking, but why should I have to spend anything above and beyond what I already spent on this unlocked phone just to make it work the way it should? (I know, I know...this is one of those "it's the principle of the thing" arguments.)

2) It's another glitch, much like the one I used to rely on in iOS 5. And like that glitch, it will surely be fixed by Apple in the future. I need something that is reliable and that I can count on.

3) Speaking of reliable, the jury still seems to be out on how reliable it is. It does seem to stick around for a number of people, but I have read a handful of anecdotes where the APNs were mysteriously reset somehow, and the person would have to re-do the trick. I don't like the idea of having something like that randomly flake-out on me. Plus it would mean that because I'd never know when it might stop working, I'd have to carry that darned T-Mobile SIM card with me wherever I go, "just in case."

I'd rather Apple just fix the issue the right way. A quick software workaround like the one I used in iOS 5 is one thing, but if I'm going to have to resort to jury-rigging something in meatspace, then I might as well drop Apple and switch to a different phone at that point. I'm already considering it.
1) No one in this thread has mentioned even anything approaching "catastrophic climate change"--you're attributing a position to others that they, especially me, do not hold. It's a matter of mitigation, prevention, and adaption, and the correct balance of those.

2) Having read a bunch of blog posts does not mean knowing about climate change. Herbal supplement and alternative medicine believers also have a vibrant community of email newsletters and advertorial magazines.
Quick question- as a T-Mobile user, why would I want to enable IPv6? The list of bugs look huge, and I'm really not sure what the benefit is.
Firefox 18b1 comes out tonight or tomorrow so I am going to wait and see what happens with that.
Sure, i'm perfectly happy to agree to that.
Would love to see this, i.e. some open source box, that just handles OpenVPN and TrueCrypt for the local network. As an idea it sounds not that overtly complex to realize - just hoping somebody will take something like this one day on Kickstarter.
Which brings us full circle to Copyright reform.

Copyright (as opposed to patents, pushed by Intellectual Ventures et al) is pushed by Hollywood. Hollywood, composed of television and radio media, which heavily cross-hires with film and music. In other words: the same people who own a radio station might use their knowledge of acoustics, their installations, their relationship with relevant engineers, bring in appropriate celebrities, and so forth, so that this form of horizontal expansion is an effective, and therefore common one. Film and TV, radio and music, and all four, are frequently in the same hands. So we have the voice and the asset: entertainment being the asset, news coverage being the opinion-forming political capital.

Hollywood's greatest political asset is not, as many believe, its lobbying. Certainly it engages in lobbying; most industries do. But the true, cocky power of Hollywood is its influence over its viewers.

I forget most of the numbers, but I remember that in Peru, during the Fuji Mori (dictatorship) years, the government paid bribes to members within and without it. Within it: judges, and many others. Without it: television station owners! Yes sir, the largest bribes, far and away, were paid to television station owners; bribes in the millions, in a country where nobody had millions. The moral of the story? Media has a lot of political capital.

So what we're left with is, Hollywood would have a strong, even gravitational, influence over Congress even without lobbying, merely because of the millions of people it influences into voting one way or another.

In other words, it molds the consent of the governed.
I'll take a stab at this. Many times "A or B" are used when they are different in some way, but both have something in common. For example, an alternative to driving to work is to bike or walk. It's cold out side, so I need a jacket or sweater. Can you call or email me when you get the results. In all these cases, the A or B construct is used to tie together items that share something (alternatives to driving, cold-weather add on clothing, and methods of communication, in these three cases).
This has been my approach to internal service design as well. It's far easier to make sure people integrate properly by providing a rich, well-documented API client library than it is to rely solely on the REST-based one. REST APIs are hard to document, and require a lot of orthogonal boilerplate to even make the requests properly.

Making a client library is also a great way to "dogfood" your REST API - you know a developer will write code, not HTTP calls, to interact with your service. The client API allows you to test out that code and make sure your API is well designed.
Ec2dns, a tool to make ssh with ec2 easier
They have a best in breed, magic quadrant, CMS. If you're in content management, they're the best. Outside of that, no one has a reason to know them.
T-Mo (and probably all carriers) is going IPv6-by-default in the future, so they asked people to help beta test. As with most beta testing, there's no particular benefit to you to participate.
There are countries that, having their infrastructure completely devastated by the war (think Dresden or Minsk) managed to rebuild it more or less completely in less than a decade.

I guess that if there's no war and the infrastructure is intact (just inadequate), you can do that in even less time.
What prevents the OP from using an official firmware (one Google search away) in combination with TinyUmbrella and install it then via iTunes?

Or did i overlook something?
101 Early Stage Investors in NYC
For the gazillionth time, the iPhone Configuration Utility will not allow you to change the MMS APN, only the internet access APN.
The interesting thing is this can actually be reapplied to something even more important than getting a seat on the tube, pub queues.

Pub queues have similar social dynamics, as the queue is a lie and it works much the same way (unless the bar staff are very, very good at tracking punters) as the seat-acquision game. You're looking for the specific formations of people who've ordered or are just ordering, where the densest clusters are and so on, but you are not alone. There's another thirsty, strategy minded drinker taking the same tactics, game on.
This assumes that everything in life depends only on you. Luck plays a big role in business.
> Why should it be different if you tell Google you're planning on killing someone, by storing "Killing Someone Plans.doc" on their servers in plain text?

Because there's an expectation of privacy when you store information with password protection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy
Luckily enough, no one is predicting that all the ice will even come close to entirely melting.

Unfortunately enough, levels of melting that range from likely to possible will by themselves be very expensive and difficult to deal with.
I hate misleading headlines like that. To me that headline says "there was a bomb watch and this man was suspected for wearing it". But what really happened was "the man did in fact wear a watch, which had been suspected of being a bomb." In today's world, being labeled a "suspect" in some crime is pretty much all it takes to ruin your life. While it may not have been smart to wear that ugly watch in the airport, I'm not aware of any law he broke by doing it. He did shine some light on how stupid the TSA actually is though.
Firefox 17 now runs on Android on ARM v6
I don't know how much this factors in but Visa is a US multinational. How much interests do EU countries have in playing along with Visa?
They're well-known in Cambridge circles, though mostly as a place that hires graduates and offers a poor working environment until they leave a year later.
Show HN: My contribution for LeWeb conference contest to win a free ticket
I have this exact same problem. It's infuriating.

I bought an 'unlocked' iPhone at full price with the expectation that I would be able to use it with the carrier of my choice only to discover that I can't.

I was without any mobile data for nearly a month because the unlockit.co.nz "solution" for modifying APN settings wasn't working for me. I tried it again (randomly) a week ago and data came back. Still no MMS.

I guess I should have bought an Android device, but I was so disappointed by my previous phone (Droid 2) that I'm hesitant to purchase another non-Nexus device. I also develop iOS apps and need something to test them on.
You are actually paying for a probability distribution of how much data you are using: if you were paying for the data you weren't using, then the plan would be much more expensive than it is; this is due to insistence from customers to not be billed per-kB combined with competition between carriers.

The result is that if you just let FaceTime be used by everyone with an existing plan, enough more data will be used to skew the probability distribution for all other users, including those that are not using FaceTime, which would force an increase in all their plans as well.

Now, maybe you'd prefer that scenario; part of me actually does (but then, I'm also for per-kB billing, as it will make costs transparent and remove all of these weird incentives carriers have to limit things), but you can't just claim this is some simple matter of "I already paid for it".

For more information, I gave a detailed talk about this at JailbreakCon (yes: arguably a weird talk, but the audience was insanely diverse, so I had to find a topic that would work across the board from users to developers to security researchers; I went for something akin to "pricing myths").

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_7ZW8fngXI
http://www.climateprediction.net/
8 IT Healthcare Trends for Tech Job Seekers in 2013
No, this is great. It will make version numbers not matter anymore. Either you use the latest version or you can't really complain about security, stability or feature issues.
Indian woman arrested on Monday over a comment on Facebook
He's no whistleblower; a criminal bum is all. He's a Freemason (wannabee or otherwise), enough said.
Yield-gotcha every Ruby developer should be aware of
One minor point I'd raise with the .co is a while ago I read (on HN I think) that one a particular startup had a lot of feedback from users saying "you're missing an 'm' in your logo/url". It might confuse some people that aren't familiar with how ccTLD/gTLD's work.

If you've come across this before, forgive the pestering, I just thought it was fair to point out before you've launched.
That sounds very hard. How does it know to encrypt my Google docs, but not my public tweets?
Money in politics is certainly an issue, but I think it pales in comparison to our lack of proportional representation in Congress. Many communities are now distributed across the country, which can effectively deprive them of representation unless they have a critical mass in at least one place (I assume Silicon Valley is a good example).
Meteor Platform Roadmap
I'm sad that E4X never took off on the web. If the DOM APIs had been E4X-ized, that would have perhaps made an impact.
Specifically encryption using your own key that you never transmit to a third party/your cloud provider.
> if Visa does not want to provide a service for any reason, why anyone should force them to?

Since Visa (and MasterCard) are such a big part of the flow of payments that leaving that decision to them is almost like letting organized crime charge protection money.

I guess you missed this part:

> banks in Sweden were caught in the act of arbitrarily
> discriminating against fully legal business owners that the
> banks claimed sold (according to the banks) “questionable
> products” like horror movies, movies with nudity, or sex toys;
> meanwhile, these same banks happily channeled stock in
> corporations under investigation of genocide. When pressed on
> the matter, the banks referred to vague rules from Visa and
> MasterCard

Imagine being a startup that competes with (say) Amazon in some fringe market (say porn, of which Amazon has plenty). You get shutdown (by Visa/MC proxied by your bank) for selling "questionable products" while Amazon happily can continue selling the same products, since they bring so much more profit to Visa/MasterCard. Is that fair?
as long as I can turn it off
Right, I understand that pain points and solutions are not the same thing. I didn't ask for you to describe the pain points. I really am asking what you're building. In a concrete way, what does it actually do?
I just glanced through the indictment linked above and the IRC log snippets are extremely damaging. Very hard to make the case that this is a purely innocent whistle blower. Maybe its just trash talking among friends on IRC, but it will sound very, very bad when read in court.
Autonomy used to be the shirt sponsor for Tottenham Hotspur.