skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The name itself doesn't describe to me what the app does, but that's not necessarily an issue if all your other brand attributes make it a clear proposition.

Have you thought about playing around with 'Vox Pop'? Latin for something like 'voice of the people', we used to do vox pops when I worked in advertising - grabbing a camera and harnessing the opinion of people on the street.
you somehow missed the main point, which was they should mind their own business not "do something to fix a place they are not entitled to fix, a place they don't even understand", especially when modern history shows they don't even mind manslaughter at all as long as the oil/cash/whatever is flowing.
To be fair, skimming is and likely always will be an issue with RFID as well, unless there are low power microprocessors in the card that generate unique keys that are somehow syncronized with an external database...maybe someone with more experience can weigh in on this?
Eventually you need abstraction. Python is fast enough, as is Django, that the abstraction costs us less than the value it provides us.

That said, we do manage our partitions (currently) using an ORM layer (at the application level). We do want to break this out into a proxy middleware at some point though.
I don't think that we can say these people are trying to create a non-Christian tracking service. I doubt they are acting with (that extreme a degree of) malice.

That doesn't change the fact that the effect, regardless of intent, is approximately the same.

I think a sensible way of handling religious exemptions, to prevent giving special privilege to those with more restrictive religions (or those with religions more open to loose interpretations, or simply those with religions), is to permit anybody of any religion or lack of religion to claim religious exemptions that anybody else could.

If a Christian student is allowed to opt-out of the RFID system, then a Buddhist student or an atheist student should similarly be allowed to opt-out, even though they lack the "mark of the beast" stuff in their belief system.
Why do these comments get downvoted? Granted that they add no value except to the author, that is still a valuable thing.
The software: http://www.openvdb.org/
GPLv3 does not forbid the presence of DRM. Section 3 of GPLv3 reads:
"3. Protecting Users' Legal Rights From Anti-Circumvention Law.

No covered work shall be deemed part of an effective technological measure under any applicable law fulfilling obligations under article 11 of the WIPO copyright treaty adopted on 20 December 1996, or similar laws prohibiting or restricting circumvention of such measures.

When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures."

There is also a relevent piece of section 6, saying:
"If you convey an object code work under this section in, or with, or specifically for use in, a User Product, and the conveying occurs as part of a transaction in which the right of possession and use of the User Product is transferred to the recipient in perpetuity or for a fixed term (regardless of how the transaction is characterized), the Corresponding Source conveyed under this section must be accompanied by the Installation Information. But this requirement does not apply if neither you nor any third party retains the ability to install modified object code on the User Product (for example, the work has been installed in ROM)."
RFID chips are fragile in different ways (try holding three in front of a reader at once).

Mind sharing what exactly happens, before I have to explain why me and two co-workers suddenly need new ID cards?
No, the source of the problem is the local rulers. Sorry, they don't get to be absolved of responsibility for their actions. They make their own choices.
How is this different from FlightFox (YC S12)?
nitpick. "SA" is usually the initialism for South Africa (RSA). For Saudi Arabia it's KSA, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
It's even simpler than that. All this card can offer is a system for tracking when and where it's scanned. Being a very short range technology, unless they make all doors/exits RFID only, they can still simply leave and noone would be the wiser.
The real "what if" to me: what if getting things done in Microsoft simply requires an assertive asshole? Perhaps the main reason Sinofsky has succeeded where so many others stubmled inside Microsoft is because he is like that? Worse, maybe the cause and effect goes the other way, perhaps he was like that because it was necessary, and Microsoft is in denial?

So they fire the assertive asshole and fix none of the other problems that required him to be that way in the first place.... what happens next?
I took part in a "create a game in a day" event recently. Some of the compositions sounded like they would have been perfect for the game, which leads to the strange question: what is the copyright on music composed by the algorithm?
And the UK, whose arms sales to KSA are not exactly negligible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Yamamah_arms_deal
Well, what were the prices of coffee?
It was real small. The first two posts I emailed everyone I knew to let them I was starting to blog. It also pressured me to keep it up (no one wants to look like the idiot that says they are going to do something and don't keep it up). But once that faded- it was maybe 0-10 unique visitors a day for a bit. It kept growing and now I see a minimum of 100+ unique visitors a day (days I post).
I'd recommend experimenting with the titles. Titles make a difference in this age.
If you are saying that 0.01% is insignificant but 0.03% is not, then you might have gone off a little bit too far on the fan boy scale.
wonder if a surveillance society could work if everyone was allowed access to the information.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG0KrT6pBPk

tl;dw -- it does.
Bandcamp is glorious. I end up buying loads of music there because it's easy, high-quality and I feel like I'm supporting the artists directly, not just lining someone else's pockets.

Agree discovery is a problem. I rely on blogs for that but it's pretty niche.
In his defence, he's not a native English speaker.
Wow! I wish I was in SF. Hopefully someone as friendly as you will be doing this in London (UK) next year.
That makes a huge difference though. You have to go out and talk to people and ask for tapes. That ownership structure makes many automations very hard which is a good thing. Routinely scanning for suspicious activity? Nope. Automatically follow a single person from one camera to the next? Nope.
I'm not even sure what this thread is about anymore, sorry. Passive CCTV is one thing. Massive spying on unrelated civilians is another. Bugging criminals' phones if you have a warrant is yet another. I don't believe any reasonable discussion can take place if you throw every possible reason and means of recording anything into one bucket.

There are different uses and different situations. People can have different opinions about them too. I believe for example that CCTV is exactly as legal as anyone taking a photos / movies of the police for example (and the other way around), while bugging phones by law enforcement needs to be very tightly regulated. But those scenarios should have very little in common.
So, from a story about tracking kids in a US school to tracking women in Saudi. See where this leads?
Actually this would likely be very effective. It's like the traffic-ticket lawyers. Even if you committed the crime, they normally severely reduce the penalty if not let you walk.

Cash piles mean nothing, going to court is extremely costly. The defence lawyers would be very good at their jobs. I know here in Canada, the Carter defence (using an expert, arguing that given bodyweight and the times of, and amount of alcohol consumption, that the machine was calibrated wrong) against DUI was made inadmissible - which is currently being fought on constitutional grounds - as it was 90% effective at giving a judge reasonable doubt when a person blew under a 0.14 (legal limit is 0.08, but suspension above 0.05). Now the lawyers are experts on breathalyzers, will get a court order providing them with all maintenance on the machines so they can argue directly that the machines are calibrated wrong. They're apparently getting the success rates up above 60% now.
Police need to be convinced that your oppresive dictatorship is a good thing. Cameras wont revolt.
Sublime Text Setup
A simple document that enables you to setup & connfigure Sublime Text 2 more quickly & efficiently.

Please let me know if you find errors or think that I've missed something.
At best I think you can infer who eats lunch in the cafeteria or who enjoys going to the library.... personal behaviors like drug use and sexual activity couldn't really be inferred without other sources of data.
ah, great. We are stil cooking, not ready for about 2 more hours I think.
By that logic it is OK to donate money to terrorist groups, because they make their own choices and are solely to blame for their actions. Correct?
Karachi's Brutal Violence: An Ambulance Driver's View
Religious extremism can be very convincing when you are into it. The problem is very similar to the editor religion. Unless you are shown the other part of the world you may never realize the futility of your ideology and actions.

Saudi Arabia is a Monarchy, frankly speaking the monarchy should/would have collapsed long time back if not the for the systematic information control and low ball offers made by the royal family to the citizens. The Saudi Regime survives on creating a useless welfare state, fueling religious passion and creating things like the religious police, and then of course providing some good facilities at the Islamic holy sites.

What they provide to the their citizens is actually nothing in front of what they steal. The current king abdullah's father had some tens of wives, from which he had tens of kids. The family's strength is well placed at some 15,000 members currently. They are almost growing at a near exponential rate. The problem is each member of the family sort of demands a share of the pie, and its quite well known that much of wealth of the nation is shared among the members of the Saud Family. With so many thousands of them being present, to prevent a break down and rebellion among family members, most government high posts, money making job positions, contracts and anything of financial significance always goes to the saud family members.

The family also has very close ties to a religious family called Al-Sheik. And they often marry among each other to preserve their trust and dependency on each other. Apart from that it is believed, the saud family members also marry among other clans and tribes to keep them in picture too.

The common masses, are well made to believe they are living under a generous king whose duties extend beyond that of state matters and also include doing the holy work of god.
Thank you so much for being an awesome human being. People like you are my motivation.
Just wondering could these people make a single tracking device of their own.
Perception is Reality, Stop Whinging …
Therefore it is key that the legitimate vs questionable content ratio is not getting too much out of balance.

I am sure it helped a lot for Megaupload's public perception that regular people actually used the service for sending files and were screaming about the government stealing their holiday videos. The narrative of the Torrentfreak story is awesome as it humanizes the subject and creates sympathy for the cause.

In an ideal case an approach would fill a minor existing need in a way that is impossible to separate from "other" content. I was trying to do this in the comment above by suggesting some form of torrent driven YouTube alternative (i.e. video embedding witin a browser), but contravert's encryption idea could really make this even more awesome.
The title does seem sensationalist, but it's probably due to his anger at politicians: They wanted to raise taxes and inflate the yen. If the BMW crowd is worried about the future, imagine what the other classes will have to endure and how worse things will get when they raise taxes and inflate the yen. At least that's how I interrupted the article.
Related news on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4819832 (94 comments)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4819877 (12 comments)
Please refrain from making strawman arguments. We're discussing the source of the problem. The source is in fact the local rulers. They make the choices.

The US sells arms to the rulers, as does the UK. Europe buys oil from them, as does China, in large amounts. But none of these nations force the KSA government to be oppressive. That's a choice the government there makes.
For a few dollars extra ups and fedex wil verify that the recipient of the shipment is 21 years or older.
Maybe. Plus waves so strange that we haven't invented a word for them yet. Space is big and weird; we'll never be bored!
Show HN: OLImageView, Animated GIFs implemented the right way (iOS Class)
Ask HN: Freelancers - how do you find clients you trust?
I'm new to working as a freelancer, and I've been applying for jobs on oDesk and Elance. I've managed to find what looks like a decent job, but I'm not sure whether I can trust the client.

I don't know much about him, and googling his name turns up nothing. He has a LinkedIn profile, but not much information on it. Also, the work is for an e-commerce type site that has little traffic.

This client has offered to pay me well to do some design work. He also said he's going to send me the access info to his server. I'm wondering if this sounds a little odd, and what my liabilities/risks are. How should I handle this, as a freelancer? I'm not sure whether I can trust my client, and I'm also not sure if I feel comfortable just logging onto his server with respect to liabilities.
Given that technology is supposed to increase efficiency (meaning fewer can do the work of more) I'm not sure that jobs are a great measure of educational success, or even the ideal goal of education.

We've seen the transition from almost all of society being involved in primary production to a small minority working in "big agriculture". Broad swathes of industry (construction, manufacturing, transport & logistics) being replaced by machines. Why do we assume there will even be a demand for labour which meets the needs of 90%+ of the population in 10 years time?

Often the counter-argument raised to this point is that "other jobs" will replace those which become defunct through new technology - instead of someone picking the crops by hand, they will maintain the harvesting machine. It seems to me there is a natural ceiling on the amount of productive work available before people simply end up rent-seeking/extracting value without creating anything in return - ie. trading futures on those crops, suing one another for selling dubious financial products which benefit no-one, and acting as social media liaison officers for the agro-business, financial services firm and law firm in question.

In my view optimising the education system to produce these outcomes (and then congratulating ourselves when everyone is gainfully "employed") misses the point by a fair margin.
I think when you make such a damning post as this, you're required to make sure all opinions are current and factual. I mostly talk about what seems to be a clearly outdated opinion of Firefox for Android (Mobile) which is widely regarded as one of the best mobile browsing experiences around. Though each to their own.

The Firefox versioning change was naive. It was rushed and a lot of work that should've taken place prior to the change was done afterwards and it remains to be seen just whether or not they'll ever truly pick up all the pieces from that. The negative word of mouth about extensions breaking is out there.

There is no excuse for the demise of Thunderbird. It remains to be a short sighted decision. But in that regard, Mozilla never really had the same ambitions as Opera. Mozilla should've been approaching the likes of HTC and Samsung and offering to provide the browser and mail experience rather than Google.

As for Firefox OS/B2G, I'd say it's highly probable that it'll fall by the wayside. Despite the resources thrown behind it. It's just not going to be a viable competitor. When you think about the sheer amount of money and effort thrown behind the likes of Android, iOS and Windows Phone, what exactly are Mozilla hoping for? It's only served to slow down development of features and other products that could serve the greater Mozilla community.
I find it a little hilarious that the Amazon product page doesn't even explain the LSAT acronym. (Had to look it up)

Then again I'm from Germany and couldn't be less interested in Law Schools - but is that really such common knowledge in countries where it applies?
What were the prices of the coffee???
Just checked it out, very interesting concept. But from what I heard the music doesn't seem to be evolving much!
As far as I understand, the article misrepresents most of what happened with Windows. Writing about what happened after XP, the cause of problems is apparently:

"The Windows product at this point had ballooned to about 50 million lines of “spaghetti code,”"

and then in gives credit to Sinofsky for everything good in Windows that follows whereas Wikipedia has completely another story:

"In December 2003, Allchin enlisted the help of two other senior executives, Brian Valentine and Amitabh Srivastava, the former being experienced with shipping software at Microsoft, most notably Windows Server 2003,[13] and the latter having spent his career at Microsoft researching and developing methods of producing high-quality testing systems.[14] Srivastava employed a team of core architects to visually map out the entirety of the Windows operating system, and to proactively work towards a development process that would enforce high levels of code quality"

What's the truth?
No one forces terrorists to terrorize. Therefore donating no-strings-attached monetary aid to terrorists is not to blame for acts of terrorism, correct?

I'm merely forming an analogous argument to yours: mine is in support of subsidizing terrorists, yours is in support of subsidizing systematic violators of human rights. If you can point out why the analogy is not valid, please do so.

Re: your edit: at issue is not that the US purchases goods from the Saudis (though it could be argued that we have a moral obligation to impose an embargo), but rather, as the parent of your post suggested, that the US subsidizes artificially low oil prices from the region.
Admittedly my experience is a good more than a 13 years ago, but I've never known anyone in London who used a fake id to drink. While the age at which one can buy alcohol is 18 (there's no prohibitions against drinking it, just buying it) it's so loosely enforced that it's generally just a matter of going to an off licence down the road if the first one asks for ID, so there's almost no point at all in getting a fake ID. Added to that is that there isn't any form of ID other than passports or driving licences which would have a data of birth on them, and an under 21 yr old not having either wouldn't be particularly unusual anyway.
I'm popping a comment in here without reading all the content (I guess there's irony in that, if not disrespect, but I'm due shortly for a dinner party). That said, my comment is that I don't mind the length of articles so much as the circumstance that nobody seems to write in the "traditional", top-down ("inverted pyramid", etc., etc.) "newspaper" style, anymore.

In that style, a summary and broad overview with the most salient points, is presented first. Then the article may delve into further detail. The reader can quickly get an overview and then decide whether and how much further they care to read into the details.

Instead, today everything seems to be written in a "narrative style". Often, the first some paragraphs set the scene -- they're "atmosphere" -- sometimes before the writer even deigns to tell you, the reader, what the story is actually about.

Facts are interspersed throughout the remainder of the story, and often don't even lead paragraphs but rather remain buried within them amidst a muddle of further descriptive language.

For the conveyance of news, it's actually quite crappy writing.

I hear/read that it's part and parcel of the push for everybody to have a byline and to establish a "name" for themselves. Which I can in part understand particularly in this day and age of contract work and zero job security -- or even a job (as opposed to endless freelancing) per se.

But, for the seeking and consuming of news, it sucks.
There is certainly not an EventMachine counterpart for every Ruby library available today. Furthermore, the EventMachine versions of most libraries are second class citizens compared to the synchronous versions of these libraries.

Goliath/em-synchrony make the situation even worse: now not only do you have to have an EventMachine version of a library (which is already probably less featureful and more poorly maintained than the synchronous version), you need a version of that EventMachine library which has been wrapped with Fibers. This means your pool of available libraries is even smaller and poorly maintained than what was available with EventMachine, let alone what's available with synchronous libraries. And all of this is to get you an API which resembles what the synchronous libraries would've given you in the first place.

Rails(-API) is designed to work with that rich ecosystem of well-maintained synchronous libraries. Due to its design, Goliath can't work with them.

So the question is: why would you forego the synchronous library ecosystem in Ruby to get "fake" synchronous libraries that only work with libraries that are 1) built from the ground up against EventMachine 2) have been wrapped to look like normal synchronous libraries em-synchrony style?
Privacy is not a legal right in general, beyond some particilar subclasses like searches and seizures.
Yes, you need a big screen to see them properly, although in a projector they look fine.

For the moment, we rely on the browser zoom. Adapting them for smaller screens is on our to-do list.
Who does? Tell me of the millions and millions of users out there waiting in anticipation of Firefox OS? Firefox decide to kill off around half of their Nightly (read most diehard users) and expect to carry that good faith over to what? Firefox OS? Are you going to convince the 30 million people that bought a Samsung Galaxy S3 that all of a sudden, the brand they bought into isn't actually important and that they should jump on the Firefox OS train? It's unrealistic.
That's a pretty strong stance you are taking. To suggest that policeman trump cameras unequivocally, well, you'd have to ignore history to make that case.

Just reading through various threads here and I see examples of cases where cameras solved problems better then people could have.
Why would you imagine it is VHS and not hard drive?
> not all security is crypto

Yes, but you started off talking about crypto so that's what I'm going to address...

Unless you're a cryptographer (and even then), any time you're using any type of crypto the risk model in your head is probably going to be completely wrong. I recently blogged about this:

http://tonyarcieri.com/all-the-crypto-code-youve-ever-writte...

Unless you plan on becoming a crypto expert your best bet is leaving cryptography to the experts.
Make no mistake, the source of the problem is the United States.

Yes, you're quite right. There was absolutely no oppression of women in the region before the United States came on the scene, or before oil was discovered there.

(sarcasm, in case it's not clear)