skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm surprised at the number of people here who say that email is a more effective form of communication.

To me I've seen way too many email chains deteriorate to the point where someone finally steps up and says let's have a call to hash this out.

Conversely I've never once been on a call where someone has said, you know what? This would be solved quicker and better via email.

If I need something done quickly then I always call. Email can be put off way too easily.
I don't see that anywhere in the post. All I saw was "GET"s shouldn't modify state and should be cacheable. That seems perfectly in line with the spec.
The article and the Oatmeal comic seem to apply to people you don't like much - people you don't really want to talk with by any means.

I also bristle at business calls, or calls from anyone I don't adore.

But because I'm an introvert, I love the phone for some real good undistracted one-on-one conversation with dear friends.

I prefer phone to hanging out in-person. I have a social window of about an hour where I'm into it, then my tolerance fades fast. When you're on the phone, an hour is a good long conversation. But in-person, an hour is so short, it rarely feels worth the travel time.

My best friends are in London, Minnesota, Singapore, LA, SF, Portland, NYC, Texas, Taiwan, and New Zealand. (I move around a lot. And many of my friends are touring musicians.) Phone is the only way we keep in touch. The best, deepest, most life-changing conversations I've had are by phone.

I think it's because I'm an introvert, and like low-stimulation environments, that the phone keeps everything focused on the conversation itself.
Couldn't agree more. I learned a lot about this issue thanks to excellent, insightful and well-researched comments in this thread (thanks _djo_ and many others). If it weren't for the high vote-count, perhaps some of those wouldn't have bothered commenting in this thread.

Perhaps all it needs it changing one's own meaning behind an upvote from 'i full endorse the link' to 'this is a thread worthy of discussion'
I'll be downvoted to hell for this but he has a point! We do need to let the new get a chance to work. Technology has changed everything and patent law just wasn't written to account for what's happening now. That's indisputable but it doesn't mean the whole system is broken.

I don't think anyone can say "yes the patent system is broken" or "the patent system works fine" definitively because it's not a cut and dry issue. You may argue that patents are a disincentive to innovation while others feels differently. It's really an ideological issue. It's subjective and not objective like people want to make it.

Furthermore, everyone out there yelling about how we need to rebuild the whole patent system from the ground up again or abolish it altogether are really the ones who need to give it a rest. We can't just rewrite all patent law or get rid of patents. That's like saying the US needs a new constitution. So much has been built on top of and around patent law that making such drastic changes would have ripple effects that would be worse than the original problem.

That said, I can't stand behind Kaposs' statement that pace of innovation is evidence of the patent system working. Did he even hear himself say that? What's his definition of innovation? Sure, we have lots of touch screen devices with different names coming out every single day but is that innovation? But really that's neither here nor there. The pace of innovation and the patent system working are wholly unrelated.

I also have an honest question. Why does everyone really want to reform/abolish our patent system? I mean, really. The real reason. Again, I swear its an honest question and I have an honest observation. To me, because no one has explained it to me yet, it seems like there are a few trendy startups and companies out there who got burned by the patent system. So then they threw a fit about patent reform. The HNers and Silicon Valley types picked up on this and now its the hip new cause to support. It reminds me of when being anti-copyright and pro-piracy became cool. They seem to have this really nice sounding ideology behind them that's very easy to adopt and so people do. But to me, these ideas, which in a perfect world would work out great, seem divorced from reality. In the case of startups/companies lobbying for this, don't you think that when they get to such a size where keeping the status quo would help them more than reforming patent law would that they'd drop their ideology and start throwing patent suits around like everybody else? I do. Because I would.
The point is that clearing a couple of mines is not useful and is even harmful.

A patch of land is unusable while mined; useful when cleared, but if it's 50% cleared (or 80% cleared) then it is murderous, because then it gets used, resulting in dead and crippled locals.
What’s That Database Worth?
Spending on Core Network Services Increased in 2012
Your post implies a pseudo-free-for-all and defeats the purpose of having a conversation about a standard exchange format.

You basically have said "I want to make it work the way I want it and I don't care if it's non-standard and unintuitive.". You're welcome to do that, but everyone who needs to work with it will hate you. And when you've been working on it for 2 months, or take a two month break, you'll come back and hate yourself too...
Woisio glued your tv, radio and magazines together
Two things.

First, you're responding to a factual argument with an argument about my attitude. It is not "my attitude" that people "shouldn't" be entitled to test applications. It is a fact that they are not allowed to do that. Unauthorized access to computer systems, which has a broad but actually very straightforward definition, is unlawful. If you cause damages when you do it, you're liable for civil damages. If you attempt in any way to profit from having done it, you're liable for a felony charge.

Second, arguing about this stuff by analogy is perilous. You can see that here, because it's immediately obvious that observing your child's caretaker eating lunch is not comparable to breaking into a web application to steal a database over the span of several days. To attempt to equalize the analogy, imagine that instead of simply observing your child's caretaker, you instead break into that caretaker's residence or place of work. You've now committed a felony.

I am for many obvious reasons pro- security testing, and I'm happy to speak glowingly of the companies that have set up policies to make it safer for researchers to test their sites. In advice I've provided on HN and to startups, I've consistently told companies to create pages to thank security researchers.

Having said all that: if you don't have permission to test someone's web app, don't do it. The law very reasonably says that if a company doesn't want to submit itself to unauthorized intrusive testing by strangers, it is entitled to treat its applications, its servers, and the data it holds as private property. Not every case in which a stranger pokes for flaws in someone's app will be open- and- shut, and that's for the best too. But the rule of thumb is very simple: leave other people's apps alone.
Why do you assume that all terrorists live in places with caves and goats? The CIRA, RIRA, Irrintzi, and many other such organizations are still active.

Assuming the big risk of terrorism is Islamic extremism (and originating from the Middle East) is a naïve, American-centric view: plenty of us live our lives more threatened by local separatist groups than by Islamic extremism. The big risk in the UK today is still Irish separatist groups, likewise in the Basque country.

Ignoring all that: I still don't think attacking terrorists relentlessly is ever beneficial. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, as the saying goes: they are driven not to destroy, but to get their aims. The IRA were never going to be defeated by force: by killing the nationalist freedom fighters you inherently radicalized more, and the same is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq to an even bigger degree. To many, it's not a case of evil infidels attacking, but rather the evil foreign aggressor killing their friends and family — if a foreign country attacked yours, claiming to rid you of evil and imposing their morals on you, would you stand by as they killed people you knew, under the promise of a better land? This is how the coalition forces are seen by many, especially in Iraq.

Defeating terrorism by force is like defeating the Hydra by force: everyone you kill radicalizes two more.
I believe the answer is related to the simplicity of the parser.
Useless statistic for what we're measuring.

What percentage of flights actually have the US as part of their journey would be a better measurement.
> If you actually disagree with someone say it with your main or don't say it at all

No.
The short answer: absolutely

The relatively strong property rights and privacy laws that the US has enjoyed are being obliterated at warp speed (or more specifically, they're using the leap to digital as a means to bypass all the existing physical protections on the books, pretending none of it applies).
Supercomputing Increments Towards the Exaflop Era
http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/ has notes off to the side whenever there's a * in the main text, which I like a lot. The fixed width can be annoying, though.
You can not walk up to the security checkpoint at the airport. To see why this matters, imagine that the TSA could, as soon you bought a ticket, search you in your home. The police can actually do that, if they have a warrant.
Show HN: Stemmings.com - The revival of thoughtful analysis and editorial
"I showed up early and saw something really bad" is hardly the same category as "I decided to test the security of someone else's webapp." If weev did nothing and randomly got someone else's private data sent to him (and people have reported similar incidents here on HN), that would be similar.

Is the list of questions in your 4th paragraph meant to say that weev had no hope to get this fixed besides writing a tool that pulled down the information of thousands of users and then taking it to the press?

We get branded a "criminal hacker" and find ourselves off to jail.

It's not that hard to avoid landing in jail for computer crimes.
Just something to keep in mind when comparing statistics between countries... The United States is approximately the size/population of Europe, and its individual states are approximately the size/population of European countries. It's always hard for the US to beat every state-sized country, just as there will always be US states with numbers above and below the overall average. The overall European average of 3.5 per 100,000 is somewhat less impressive.
Often, banning whole ISPs is necessary to actually get rid of offenders. Hackers and griefers have known how to get new addresses from their DHCP pool for at least 10 years, and now that they'll get access to an entire /64, many will be sure to exploit it.

In fact, I'll bet the malware-infested utility to automate this into a one-click process already exists.
> How many companies are in the current YC round again?

The grandparent post was talking about 'small players' in the 'building a smartphone' market. Unless a significant portion of the current YC round are building smartphones, I'm not sure how this is relevant.
Data science, Gangnam style
PG tweeted about the awesome data usage during the election, and how a book should be written about it. If anyone else has anything interesting about the role of big data in the election, I'd love to see it!
This is all pretty comical. The hardware company we all praised when they released the iPhone sans carrier bloatware has apparently become the single most clever practitioner of carrier-prescribed device limitations.

Well played, Apple.
I think this brings up a good point. I think most people just skim emails, they copy/paste stuff in, forward forwarded messages w/out any clarifications, etc and don't pay much attention at all to details. But I don't think the majority of these people are incompetent at all, they're just busy doing their jobs, and too many assume you as a programmer just know what's going on on both ends.

To help both sides, I've found that by expressing my desire to exactly meet what they want and asking that they always provide as much detail as possible things improve a lot. Also always providing good descriptive subjects and clearly formatted emails on my end, helps as well.
Why would it be lawful for the TSA to search through your underwear, but not lawful for them to feel you up? Where would the Constitution be drawing that line?

The fact of the matter is that it's SCOTUS that sets the standards here, not the Constitution.
Finland is 5.3 million people.

Norway is 5 million people.

Sweden is 9.5 million people.

Michigan is 9.8 million people.

California is 37.6 million people.

New York is 19.4 million people

Germany is 81.7 million people.

Please keep scale in mind.
I didn't downvote you, but it's very obviously this part: "And I want the terrorists to be attacked relentlessly where they live"

This implies enthusiastic support of constant US intervention in foreign lands. Maybe that's not what you meant, but I'm guessing it's what people are reacting to.
Awesome. I always tell myself I'm going to make something like this when reading pg's essays (I specifically remember re-thinking it during the last one) and then never do. Now I don't have to--thanks! :)
It's always good to hear straight from people who aren't a continent or more removed from the subject. Where's a good place to look if I want to find out more about the real estate situation around China?
Exactly. It means the pretense evaporates, and that the sheep wake up.

I mean, if some government agent rifles through their stuff in the cloud, the sheep don't care. But if they knock on the sheep's door and do it, then the sheep is going to get angry, if he's innocent.
You seem to be arguing against something I neither said nor implied.

I am not claiming that my opinion is proven. The data does not exist to have that level of certainty either way.

I merely have a strong belief, and do not outright reject the notion that Mr Kappos could be right.

To do so would make my arguments as intellectually dishonest as his, and I believe that to be unacceptable no matter which side you're on.
Find something you want to do so badly that you forget facebook.

An underrated point, IMHO. When I find myself constantly surfing or otherwise distracting myself, there is invariably a good reason for it: I'm not that into what I'm doing at work. I wouldn't be any good at it if I did force myself to do it.

Excessive self-distraction is not a problem: it is a symptom of another problem.
In no way I am encouraging to calm down, wait or try to ignore the bill. Poor choice of words on my side. I was trying to say that your right to own your email is definitely something you can try to defend. See those guys around asking for whom they may contact regarding this issue? I'm totally with them. They are doing something about another something they don't like. "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." (Edmund Burke)

Fleeing is also an option, but I am 100% sure Sneak had more reasons to move abroad than just PATRIOT and NDAA.
I couldn't get Apple's configuration tool to work for me. I tried the Tmo swap trick too, but that didn't work either.

What I learned DID work was just popping the SIM out, going to the settings screen, popping it back in, doing the app change trick, and then changing the settings as needed.

Basically, follow http://wiki.howardforums.com/index.php/Straight_Talk_iPhone#... but don't use a T-Mobile sim card, just pop the ST one back in.
Canada is an an interesting choice, until you read some history and realize that every fascist state eventually turns its wars of aggression toward its closest neighbors. The odds that America will turn fascist on its own people, act on continuous wars of aggression globally, but never attack Canada - is roughly zero. It's a matter of time, unless the fascist state creep is rolled back and quickly.
iTunes U, that's very interesting. I've never really used iTunes so I had no idea they offered tutorials.

I have tried open source projects a little on github but the files were too long. I'll look more into open source but I need to dig around to find smaller projects. If there are any small projects you can recommend that would be great.

Thanks for the help, I will start digging into the resources you gave after I take a look at Udacity.
I wonder if part of the dislike of the phone is related to the proliferation of the notion that cell phones work as well as land lines. I find the half duplex way a cell phone works very annoying and it often causes the awkwardness when both parties think they should start talking.
The Europeans don't have a 4th amendment.
"Sorta". It's more appropriate to compare it to the EU than to, say, Germany. The EU will still come out ahead in terms of murder rate, but it more accurately reflects the US in terms of both governmental structure and diversity of people (Louisiana is as different from Washington as Italy is from Finland)
Where Is Cisco Vulnerable?
PG's blog posts would be somewhat more navigable if the footnote number at the bottom was linked back to the original citation / reference.
The Back button works for links within a page, incidentally.
Fine, they can talk to whoever answers the pay phone at the bus station, just like anyone else who asks for my phone number.
I am not using an "appeal to authority" argument, but I figure the HN readership would have pointed out my errors. (It's certainly happened before :-) )

We do not understand even the basics. For instance, we do not fully understand how the Gulf Stream works.

The problem is that we can't just sum or multiply the uncertainty values and try to arrive at a consensus.

Perhaps an analogy can be made to trying to model the US or Europe's financial system - clearly even the largest banks, spending large amounts of money on IT systems and modeling over the past number of years, have grossly mis-calculated things. And the financial world is arguably less dynamic than Earth's climate system.
Depends on what you are comparing it to. LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. I don't think that anyone would consider LDAP lightweight, but compared to X.509...
Negatory. Consent is not relevant in the case of airports, per the 3rd and 9th circuit courts.

http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1265662.html
The World Wide Web is 7777 days old today
That makes sense, but why is the patch taking so long?
I don't have the link handy, but there was a great article arguing that the airlines could actually save more money not charging for checked bags because less people will try to cram their oversized luggage into the overheads, speeding up boarding times. Thus allowing for a lower rate of delayed takeoffs, which, over a long enough timeline, allows for more flights in a day they can charge for (and the added bonus of better customer retention).
This is one of the biggest issues in Android phones to date, there are several names for every model phone based on market, carrier, and included feature set. This confuses the hell out of consumers. Compared to the iOS phones which go by a single name iPhone and a single capability moniker (3, 3G, 4, 4S, 5) with an intuitive versioning scheme (bigger numbers are better, number + letter is "better" than just "number") I noticed Google trying to do this with the Nexus brand (although they have Nexus + size rather than version/generation)
[Meteor dev here] This roadmap is a starting point for a discussion. I want SQL too -- the question is whether there's a 1.0 we could ship sooner that's useful for a class of applications based on Mongo.
America has a single federal government, yes. If you just want a ranking, you can go ahead and use the national average.

However, America is ridiculously diverse culturally, and just using the national average is useless for understanding anything about America.

Perhaps the Americans in the thread aren't trying to avoid an unfavorable comparison - it's not like Americans aren't aware of the pros and cons of their own country. Perhaps they're actually trying to teach you something about their country and point out that relying on averages can be misleading.
I read that article as explaining why a web application can't do crypto with javascript. As someone that knows almost nothing about browser extensions, can you elaborate on why one isn't a good idea for chrome?
If it was neccessary to save my child, I'd eagerly murder every sheep in the world in the most painful way possible with my hands.

Animal lives and welfare do matter, but when it comes to weighing human lives against animal lives, only a ratio of something like a million-to-one may be ethically justified. Definitely not one-to-one sheep to a kid. Definitely not even hundred-to-one. It could be reasonable to sacrifice a few humans to spare a species from extinction, but not to save some individual animals, however sentient they may be.

My fellow humans are important. Leaving a kid to die to spare a hundred sheep is disgraceful.
Rich Hickey (Clojure) has a presentation about the differences between simple and easy. If you have the time, it's worth it.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
http://boingboing.net/2006/10/27/fake-boarding-pass-g.html

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/337303

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Republican_National_Conven...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Sklyarov

There are tons of different forms of legal expression that directly lead to arrest in the USA.
Please make it completely removable.
> The companies were just tired of doing free R&D for the Chinese.

And thanks to software patents and copyright that's finally over.
I see, thank you. Too bad this wart is exposed, though.
Boarding an airplane probably isn't where 4th amendment rights are most needed...
Respectfully: the German government has created official blacklists of religions, promulgating to employers questionnaires intended to help them screen out members of those religions. Yes, the religion involved is Scientology. Yes, I think Scientology is a terrible religion. But a society that can create an official ban on a specific religion has a hard time claiming to be more free than the US.
Hi, we made an app called Tinygram (http://tiny.by) that I think is more Instagramm-y (uggh!) than this.

Its not done yet (missing a few big features) but it has a smaller canvas 10x10 and a unique way of choosing color shades and doing animation. It already has a sizeable community and sputtering of new content (pixel art is hard for most people we discovered.)

It is an interesting community building experience so far.

Anyhow in case you are curious on how closer it is to Insatgram, its free at http://bit.ly/tinygramming .
I guess you're mainly looking for python related stuff. But if you're open to alternatives and me being a c guy, I would suggest hacking through the linux man pages and libc, it will definately help your overall programming skills and understanding of cs.

Here's a link (posted elsewhere on HN) to intro c programming resouces online: http://www.mycplus.com/featured-articles/best-free-programmi...
It looks the same to me. If the "files comprising the entirety of evidence" are what's encrypted, then there is no case unless and until they decrypt them. What's to stop them from jailing anyone they want who can't/won't decrypt everything on their computer at demand? This is exactly how police states operate.

A police state doesn't require evil intent. On the contrary, each one starts out with the BEST of intentions.