skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No it isn't. The US accepted the Taliban as de facto rules of Afghanistan, notwithstanding their backwards approach to running the country, and negotiated with them on things like rights-of-way for trade and so on up to the summer of 2001, when the Taliban broke off negotiations. That was before the attack on the US took place and the Taliban turned out to have been giving Al Qaeda a a home for its terrorist activities.

There are lots and lots of things wrong with Western policy towards Central Asia, but the causal argument boils down to 'you made me do it', which is almost never true.
This is a great idea, but I have a few concerns.
First, you would want to make the stamp out of a material that is anti-bacterial, otherwise you're spreading grease and germs from people's faces to other people's faces via the stamp. I'm also curious as to what resolution a phone touch screen can detect the pattern. Might there be cases where someone has an older phone or a phone with a crappy touch screen where this stamp just wouldn't work? Also, do you have to be connected to the internet for this to work? What happens if the user has no signal?

Lastly (and not serious), your promo video of the girl buying the beer shows her using the stamp to activate a coupon, but she doesn't pay for her beers.
Original story:
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2012/nov/15/san-diego...

Full FOIA Request:
https://www.muckrock.com/foi/san-diego-county-55/san-diego-c...
Why is Google Analytics needed? I've found it superseded a long time ago.
> It would be better if the application could work without an internet connection...is your system immune to "replay" attacks?

How would you reply to the observation that an app that prints out one-time use QR codes would: 1) have much the same functionality, 2) require no extra hardware for most shop owners, 3) be quite workable for customers with no smartphone, and 4) be immune to replay attacks?
Reading the entire post by Paul Graham about startup ideas (http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html) I summarize his thoughts more as pointing to problems that many people have, where the problems of the founder should act just as the starting point! for ideation (to get to a startup idea) - not being the end goal of a startup.

Here are some quotes from Paul Graham:
"When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they're making—not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently."

"When you have an idea for a startup, ask yourself: who wants this right now [besides yourself]? Who wants this [besides yourself] so much that they'll use it even when it's a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they've never heard of? If you can't answer that, the idea is probably bad."

"When you find the right sort of problem, you should probably be able to describe it as obvious (...) Which means, strangely enough, that coming up with startup ideas is a question of seeing the obvious."

"If Mark Zuckerberg had built something that could only ever have appealed to Harvard students, it would not have been a good startup idea."

Paul Graham wrote even more in this direction in another post that was titled:

"Startup = Growth"
http://paulgraham.com/growth.html

Here are some quotes:

"The growth of a successful startup usually has three phases: 1) There's an initial period of slow or no growth while the startup tries to figure out what it's doing. 2) As the startup figures out how to make something lots of people want and how to reach those people, there's a period of rapid growth. (...)" "During Y Combinator we measure growth rate per week (...) A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week. If you can hit 10% a week you're doing exceptionally well. If you can only manage 1%, it's a sign you haven't yet figured out what you're doing." "The best thing to measure the growth rate of is revenue. The next best, for startups that aren't charging initially, is active users."

"The fascinating thing about optimizing for growth is that it can actually discover startup ideas. You can use the need for growth as a form of evolutionary pressure. If you start out with some initial plan [solving your own problem] and modify it as necessary to keep hitting, say, 10% weekly growth, you may end up with a quite different company than you meant to start [that only solved your own problem]. But anything that grows consistently at 10% a week is almost certainly a better idea than you started with." "You'll generally do best to follow that constraint wherever it leads [solving a problem that some users really have] rather than being influenced by some initial vision [like solving only your own problem], just as a scientist is better off following the truth wherever it leads rather than being influenced by what he wishes were the case."
Exactly that? Consent isn't what enables the search, but it's still good that the TSA can't raid your house. What enables the search is (i) no investigative intent and (ii) no discretion on the part of the searchers as to who to search.
Timer.js
Not everyone has the expertise or the time to run their own extensive, comprehensive benchmark suite. It could be dangerous to do so for the uninitiated who may come to the wrong conclusions.
Don't miss the link to Greg Kroah-Hartman's G+ page [1], it's pretty funny.

[1] https://plus.google.com/111049168280159033135/posts/R387kQb1...
Long-distance rail travel is politically unpalatable in the US. For reasons I don't really understand, government subsidies are almost impossible, even though every other form of transportation gets them.

High-speed rail in the Boston-DC corridor would be pretty pricey, too. Amtrak tries it, but their idea of "high speed" is sad compared to what the rest of the world thinks it means. While the Acela is somewhat similar to the TGV, it peaks at only 150MPH, and the average speed is far lower because the track doesn't support high speeds in a lot of places, and because it makes about three times more stops than it should.

Proper high-speed trains in that corridor would require new tracks built for much of it, and with level crossings pretty much impossible for high-speed trains, it would need a ton of bridges or tunnels and a huge expense. A lot of politicians will only support such a thing if they can bring service to their hometown, or where their constituents live, or whatever, so you end up spending way too much time stopped at irrelevant stations instead of going fast. The Acela makes seven stops between DC and New York alone, not even counting DC or New York themselves. It makes six more stops after NYC before getting to Boston. Covering a similar distance in a rational high speed system would involve maybe one intermediate stop. As it stands, when I take the train from DC to NYC, I don't even bother trying to get a place on the Acela unless it's the cheapest option, because it only saves about half an hour out of a four-hour journey.

I think it's ultimately a self-fulfilling prophesy. People don't think it can work, which allows politicians to screw it up, which means that it either never happens or happens poorly. So it doesn't work, and people don't think it can work, so....
> "The main issue here is that it's legislation covering cases not covered by the 4th amendment"

The cases are only uncovered by the fourth if we accept a narrow reading which somehow determines that "your papers" only applies to physical pieces of paper and that "be secure" only applies if the citizen would be deprived of access in the course of the search.

Those distinctions make no sense and, if applied, make the fourth amendment wholly technologically obsoleted in the very near future.

Is it a remotely logical position to argue that the founders were really concerned about government searches, seizures and surveillance, but only inasmuch as people were inconvenienced by those searches, seizures and surveillance?

That provided the English could have searched, seized and surveilled quickly, efficiently and entirely-on-the-sly the Revolutionaries wouldn't have been so hot about the issue?
The issue is not the time it takes to clear security. The issue is whether it makes you feel like shit to clear it.

If it doesn't make you feel like shit given how airport security works right now, I respectfully submit your shit-meter is calibrated wrong.

But also, two points:

1) Your flying experience would be quite different with kids.

2) The flying experience varies very widely by airport. Often by terminal within airport. Flying Virgin America out of BOS is a very different proposition from flying Virgin America out of SFO, and also quite different from flying United out of BOS.
Using Xcode OpenGL ES Frame Capture
Between the firms fighting its zero-sum. Everyone spends a lot of money acquiring a large patent portfolio for defense. No one wins or loses. But overall it is a misallocation of capital. All that money and human resources could be spent on further innovation.
T-Mobile to acquire MetroPCS
I could see people salivating when they saw that a RoR developer was looking for work, only to have their hopes dashed when you wrote remote.

BTW, GIT is not an acronym.
Every IT person I know of who had to deal with administering it has hated "Bloated Goats", as some of them call it.
I don't know, it's kind of fun to use as a programmer too. I can redesign my personal email view to anything I want.
Small Business Owners Urge End Of Bush Tax Cuts
For anyone else who doesn't read the article: Notes isn't going away. The "Lotus" part of "Lotus Notes" is going away.
Just an expression for transition, nothing more... why ironic?
Setup was free when transferring from Rogers cable, I just had to buy a cable modem which I bought from Canada Computers.

Teksavvy has never been to my house, it was just a phone call to set up the cable modem.
Colégios e Escolas Marista em Porto Alegre
I agree. But you would hope so for their very expensive pricing model.
This doesn't make great sense - why is this particular kind of complexity a bad thing?

Most Python frameworks, regardless, seem to score quite well-Flask, Turbogears, Bottle-in contrast to Django, which is to be expected as it doesn't try to be simple (it is, however, well documented and easy to learn).
The essentially left out the two largest/still thriving pixel art communities:

- http://www.pixeljoint.com/

- http://www.wayofthepixel.net/

Relevant plug:
If you use safari, I wrote a small extension that detects if you are on pixeljoint and changes the image smoothing to nearest neighbor so the pixels look 'crispy'. Any other sites you can toggle this on and off from the toolbar.

https://github.com/dylan/Crispy
How competition deadlines whipped FTL into shape
Odd tone to the blog post.

That being said, I'm always a bit surprised that SQL Server doesn't get the recognition that (IMO) it deserves. It is a pretty solid product. I was in a position to use it for years and saw it mature such that it eventually replaced legacy DB2/Adabas environments. It performed admirably and for a fraction of the price.

If the powers that be hadn't decided Oracle at all costs (and literally at all costs) against my counsel, they would have saved a lot of $$ and I might still be working there.
Ah brilliant. Sounds like pretty much exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of.
Wow, it must be really scary to be a kid of someone with that kind of violent fantasies.

Now, as a mental exercise, I suggest you replace "animal" with a racial slur of choice. Because, seriously, 100 years ago people said that about all kinds of other people. They actually still do. Having a slightly higher amount of common DNA is not a justification of whatever-the-hell.

And at the point where you say "however sentient they may be", you just go into downright I-don't-want-to-meet-that-person-in-a-dark-alley territory.
I have seen that several have responded already, but for a column-length (i.e. digestable but still long enough to present the case) explanation, this is one of my key and first writeups:

http://torrentfreak.com/do-you-prefer-copyright-or-the-right...

Cheers,
Rick
It is crazy how many add-ons you need to buy from Oracle. I'm not the biggest fan of Microsoft, but they score a pretty telling point on this issue.
That was the improvement I imagined as well, but the product presented is not that and shouldn't be described as any more secure than a static QR code.
The wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclomatic_complexity notes 10 as a module threshold.

This is a bit like comparing apples and oranges, usually you'd use 10 as a rough number for your method/function whatever, not for a whole framework. The whole point of modularization/refactoring is to have small parts, I've never heard of any mention regarding to cyclomatic complexity that you cannot use a multitude of small modules.

So to sum it up, it's nice that someone tried to compare python web frameworks, but the method of comparison is misleading at best and wrong at worst.
But there are people that believe REST suits every API problem, even when accumulated wisdom says it doesn't suit the problem (cough Roy Fielding).
It's not clear to me whether this "excessive complexity" has an actual performance impact or is just a subjective measure of complexity.

Django, one of the worst offenders according to your chart, also happens to be a mature project in wide use that works really well and handles most edge cases where, perhaps, some "less complex" frameworks would fall down.

So what does this measurement mean in practical terms? How should I balance this score against the benefit of the framework?
But, as I understand it, the draft language came from Leahy. There was immediate backlash so now he's distancing himself from it.
Which programming language is the most female friendly?
Err - take a day to improve your SEO?

You should be putting those blocks in place now. Good SEO takes time, and day-before-launch is not the time.

Seriously, start executing your strategy now.
I don't think their security model relies on the pattern being secret.

The worst case scenario is company B steals company A's number. This results in company A getting additional payments.

Or perhaps company C, seeking to ruin the reputation of company A, sets up a fake 'A' storefront with customer service that doesn't shower.
The only problem I have with your comment is that REST is not specified, it's a style:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_state_transfer
They've pulled this headline baiting before. Remember the 'upcoming announcement with big implications for extraterrestrial life' that turned out to be a methane-breathing lifeform that then ended up maybe not breathing methane? It's hard not to let some hope and excitement in when reading these, but their PR strategy has made a daily bread of raising expectations.
People who give a shit will always get my business
Will crowd dating be the next big thing?
Microsoft Hires Jeannette Wing as New V.P. of Microsoft Research Int'l.
Although I'm not a huge fan of Windows, Exchange, and the like, I am a huge supporter (although not current a user - was a SQL Server DBA for a few years) of SQL Server. It is probably Microsoft's finest engineering product. Not only is it a super reliable and scalable system T-SQL is actually a user-friendly SQL dialect, and SQL Server Enterprise Manager (or whatever it's called today) is very user-friendly, too.

Although I'm a true-blue PostgreSQL believer, I give major props to the SQL Server team. In comparison, Oracle is a disaster (I was reluctant/forced Oracle 8i/9i DBA, too).
A friend of mine used to think he was the best debater around. His primary technique? Declaring his argument proven without even making any claims.
> I always feel that there's a racial subtext to this kind of defense of US statistics (which I often hear in terms of education, crime, and health outcomes.)

There is, and that is a characteristic of the United States in general of which most who live there are keenly aware. This is why they speak quickly against comparisons of the United States as a whole against Scandinavian countries or Japan. Those countries do not have the ethnic heterogeneity or deep-seated institutional racism that the United States has experienced and still experiences.

For example, my state sterilized violent criminals and the mentally disabled until the 1980s, most of them being ethnic minorities. This would be unthinkable in Sweden, for example.

We also have easy access to guns and a destabilized internal culture in ethnically-heterogeneous areas, where community respect is a factor of how much crime you have committed or how many people you have killed.

You are exactly right, however, in that living in an upper-class neighborhood in Chicago would skew your perspective of crime in America.
This is an idea I really wanted to hack on in my next hackaton. I'm happy to see mixpanel implementing it so I can use it asap!
http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
I am going to go with: no.
But that would bring them out of the 90s. Unacceptable bloat in an otherwise MVP
The fact that the code is very neat and is well documented bothers me.

Also the fact that javascript is a lot more readable when you put a blank line between every two lines bothers me (a lot!).

And that it works perfectly and looks great, man that bothers me.
in my view: 1-because it is key for each store to have a unique stamp 2- I don' think so,what about stores in the same building or stores very near each other? 3-no two officially produced "snowshoes" though, anyway yes no one would keep you from 3d printing the stamp of another store so that you can have your customers pay that store instead of yours, but I don't see any clear advantage in it, and, as i said before, the app would probably show you the store name before proceeding
A javascript date picker? Is HN being very expertly trolled?
It sounds like you've picked an idea that will be very, very tough to make a sustainable business out of.
That exact sort of patent pool exists for the Linux community - its called the Open Invention Network.

http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/
Then Leahy is directly lying in his statement, which says he never supported that language.

The language CNet reported on is also out of character for Leahy, and Leahy has ECPA amendment language ready that kills the 180-day rule for email. It doesn't add up.
The first two are obviously Scala only which is of no help to those with existing Java code bases. And for templates Japid is much, much faster than the Scala equivalent.

It does seem that real time data management is a good use case for Play2 but curious to know for typical web apps what benefits there would be.
l33t h4xx0r. Server down. Sorry, guys. I'll go investigate what's wrong. Update: Server back up and running. Sorry for the momentary inconvenience.
Man steals identities of 2/3rds of Greek population
It's true that the new law needs a chance. And it's true that all or the vast majority of politicians and bureaucrats have good intentions and want things to work. And it's unfortunately a reality that someone who is part of the system (head of the PTO!) has to protect and defend the system.

The problem is that software patents are in fact fundamentally broken. Think about it this way: does it make sense that the patent rules should be the same in fields as different as software/web/internet and pharmaceuticals/biotech -- where the innovation cycle, product lifecycle, and R&D costs are so dramatically different? If we had to design the patent system from scratch, would we put in place the same rules?

The reforms may help a little on the margins. But more fundamental change is needed in the software arena.
This is fun: http://twitter.com/mjg59/status/270323838468890624
No. DatePickers, along with Forms, are the bane of my existence. More choices that are brought to light, the better.
Freiburg to switch back to MS office
Chrome Pepper Flash bug affecting microphone input on OS X
Great work. This is a perfect application of Scala macros.
I'm pretty sure his objection was that you were being a dick.
Oh damn thanks for sharing! I'm the author of the article and I did try my best to include all the communities & resources I knew about. I have never heard of either but excellent references and that's a nifty extension as well.
Open Source Misfeasance
I agree that a lot of python web frameworks are excessively complex. However, sometimes complexity is warranted.

I use web.py, flask and bottlepy depending on the required complexity of a project. They intuitively feel less complex. If I need a step up from web.py, I'd be inclined to go with Pyramid (reddit is built on Pylons, which is a precursor to Pyramid and before that, they used web.py)

To me it's a tradeoff between coding speed and project size/speed/performance. For example, if you use Bottlepy to write a typical webapp, you'd have to write your own session handlers (or use Beaker), and you'd have to write your own utils to transform and sanitize data etc.

However, using Bottle.py for a cookie dropping service? 30 lines of code and you have a very robust and scalable cookie dropping service. Ditto to using bottle for adserving and ad decisioning off redis.

Flask however, in my opinion works well for public API endpoints, while web.py works very very well for web frontends
Metric X is high, therefore disputed policy Y is boosting metric X.

Not what was actually claimed. Non-inhibition is not the same as a boost, now is it?

The head of the USPTO isn't even willing to have an intellectually honest debate on the subject. It's pretty clear that change is not going to come from within.

The USPTO doesn't make patent law. It's an administrative agency. The guy's main concern is servicing the ever-increasing number of patent filings, which are what finances his agency. If you want change, ask for the PTO to be funded by taxes instead of filing fees.
False dichotomy much?

How about we don't murder any sheep or children, and instead spend the money that we would've spent on sheep torture on better fences, signs, education and mine clearance? While you're at it, you can lobby your elected representative to spend more than the currently pitiful amount that they do on mine clearance.

ps. A million-to-one? You have a very interesting idea of "ethics". Also of "definitely".
No, he makes it quite clear that it's a solution designed for a particular problem space. You're debating a straw man.
Weev is different. That's for sure. But what's at stake here is bigger than him. Anyone can be sued for going to a damn URL. That's the real problem here (as well as a myriad of others).
I think the thing that is being overlooked with Twitter and celebrities, is that it's yet another case of cutting out the middle-man that the internet does so well.

Delivery of celebrity gossip, information, photos to fans is big business. It was also gate-kept by an industry who decided who was cool and who was not.

Celebrities quickly worked out they could by-pass this channel and go direct to their fans. The broadcast and print media no longer were the gatekeepers, and the celebrities could build their own direct channel to their fans.

Now celebrities make money just by having a direct link to their fans and have an incredibly effective marketing channel. And now they often accept money for posting something on twitter.

I think it's one of those examples where the media-replacement is coming in along an axis that nobody expected.

The future of media is less in the masthead but more in the individually branded producer. To achieve this requires a lightweight direct channel. Which twitter has achieved without really setting out to.
Absolutely. My mistake.
Link to the actual paper here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168952512...

I'm curious as to what HN thinks about this.
Sprint to begin selling customer's usage data
Probably the best explanation of the situation (found on reddit)

http://www.reddit.com/r/fossdrama/comments/13il1o/gentoodev_...
Yes, the "excessive complexity" is a measure I've not heard of before. Surely summing up functions over 10 doesn't make sense.