skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe this is a silly question but why doesn't SpaceX or Tesla use some form of crowd-funding scheme for their projects in addition to all their other sources of funding?

I really want both companies to succeed and I'd be happy to contribute to either cause (yes, I see both primarily as a cause and philosophy, not just a company). Judging from response around the internet there are many people like me who are just as excited. I can't buy a Model S car because I don't have that money, but I'd be happy to throw some money at Tesla or SpaceX for a little badge and a warm feeling.
"In most parts of the world, when a bridge is needed it is built from wood, steel or concrete. But in Cherrapunji in northeastern India, the locals are much more patient. They simply coax nearby trees to grow into natural bridges. The process takes many years, but the result is completely natural, surprisingly strong, and looks like something out of a wonderful fantasy world..."

From: http://webecoist.momtastic.com/2009/10/21/bridge-to-nature-a...
The success of the US education system is measured by the highly squishy terms of "perception."
To be fair any code base with the age and size of Office is a massive thing to manage. Completely rethinking the UI is hard enough, but then implementing it? It would be miraculous if they managed that the first time out of the gate.
100% Yes. I know of 3 ways to get a Fake:

1) Online "Novelty IDs"
2) local "ID Trucks" Philly has a few.
3) An older friend that you may look like.

It's almost a right of passage in the US depending on your social circle.
Haha, no need for fake ids in Europe :) :)
"Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled." (Howard Stevenson)

'Course, cut out man in the link isn't pursuing opportunity, he's whining about not having them.
Online- and Software-centric startups are way overhyped right now. I believe that the commoditization of personal computing, smartphones and websites and the emergence of giants like Google, Apple, Facebook has made these much less interesting than people might think so the best long-term startup opportunities lie elsewhere (robotics/AI, biotechnology, sustainable living ... ). But internet startups are still good for a quick buck due to crazy valuations and low entry barriers, so VC will still pour down on them (sadly...).

At the end of the day, there's still things we need (food, medicine, health, production of goods) and things we don't (yet another website or SaaS/PaaS startup or electronic gadgetry).

Then again, right here, we're all biased ...
i wnet to hack facbook
That's the case wherever trust is involved, though. Your ideal is also unattainable.
I think the thing that annoys me the most about this, is the money. We constantly hear from politicians and their constituents that we should spend more on education, that our students don't compete well with the rest of the industrialized world and more money will solve that problem, despite the fact that we spend more per student than anyone else -- and then this is what they turn around and spend it on. And they are spending it on things like this without showing us any need for it. And will they ask for money to improve education in schools in the next elections? Yes they will.
All I can really say (not being on the Google side of things) is: iframes
> seasoned programmer with experience with functional programming

Then you aren't his target market, are you?

The ratio of people with experience doing FP to people who are neither seasoned programmers, nor have experience with FP is pretty low.
I'd comment further on this, bu-- OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space
> People always say they want more police on the street, so if each of these cameras was replaced with a uniformed policeman watching the street would this be better or worse?

Better, unequivocally. Why wouldn't it be?
It didn't use cards, but paper tape (as seen in the BBC clip). So I guess, in theory, it could have gone on forever if you just glued a fresh tape to the end of the old one.

>"It was, of course, slow, not much faster than hand calculation on single operations, but fully automatic, extremely reliable and utterly relentless. It took little power and could be left unattended for long periods; I think the record was over one Christmas-New Year holiday when it was all by itself, with miles of input data on punched tape to keep it happy, for at least ten days and was still ticking away when we came back."

http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acl/literature/reports/p...
Not sure where in Europe you're located, but in England (with a drinking age of 18) the usage of fake IDs by 16 and 17 year olds is pretty frequent.
+1, but I think you want to keep the column width shorter. Took me a bit to figure out why browsing was harder than on Slashdot, but I think that's what it is.
Religion is a very important motivating factor for a large portion of our society. If the pious want to join with the technorati against this for religious reasons, I would welcome them. Religion may not be as influential today as it was in the past, but God-fearing Americans are still a very large and powerful constituency.

Besides, if I'm reading your comment correctly, you're in favor of separation of church and state in public schools -- which is exactly the position taken by the religious protagonist of the article.
Electree+, the electric bonsaï tree for your home or office
It's also interesting to note once you consider decline of the largest and most successful Chinese dynasties are associated with re-introduction of government positions being hereditary and/or being for sale. (The less successful ones simply lose in wars, to natural disasters or through economic mismanagement)

The Sui dynasty you referred to was an exception, but the next one Tang (618-907), succumbed to military (whose positions were inherited)'s influence on the civil government (by civil government I also mean the part of the government that is selected by meritocracy).

The Ming dynasty (1368–1644), succumbed to overt influence on the civil government by corrupt eunuchs (who were forbidden from learning to write/going into politics, and therefore did not achieve their status through examinations). "any senior official who wanted to discuss state matters had to persuade powerful eunuchs with a bribe simply to have his demands or message relayed to the emperor." (wikipedia)

The Qing again here is an "exception". It's decline was due to its "Banner Army" soldiers being ineffective; They were the elite fighting force of China at the time, but during times of peace, the soldiers escaped training for their own profit; This decline was (IMO) due to recruiting soldiers not because people would be good soldiers, but because they were biologically related. The armies weren't even effective at putting down internal rebellions (requiring the assistance of european troops, the same factions that have bullied china into unequal treaties - how humiliating.)

All these dynasties have fallen either because the influence of the meritocracy part of the government (civil or military) was greatly reduced; This was also correlated with increased levels of corruption (I don't know which caused what).

I can see similarities between historical dynasties and the present day PRC government. They first rebelled and eliminated corruption in the KMT government, and have now succumbed to corruption itself.
Even more ironic given that the Taliban's treatment of women is frequently used to justify the war in Afghanistan.
<paranoid>Within a surveillance society, however, most of the effort involved with the loss of liberty is taken care of by the loss of privacy. Once you can track someone's whereabouts constantly, in realtime, and gain access their communications, know where they've been, where they plan to be, what assets they have, and who their friends are, ending their liberty becomes a minor exercise in telling the black vans where to be and when.</paranoid>
Is there not any other ways to stop violence than with threats of violence (like more police and cctv who will make sure the cops gets you if you do crimes)? A better, but harder way, is to design society so that crime is low because it's not as necessary as it is today.
Capitalised on the confusion? They have hundreds of domains pointing to their main site. On2.com or whatever it is showed an acquisition notice because that was the company purchased. It's definitely possible that enquiring about the domain reminded them that they had it and should forward like the rest they owned.
Fake ID's are extremely prevalent in US colleges for getting into bars and clubs. People usually acquire them from older friends who look similar, or order them from fake ID sites similar to idchief.com (a Chinese company that was recently closed after scrutiny from a group of U.S. senators).
And you're doing this utilizing Django's urlconf machinery?! With all it's support for deeply nested hierarchies of urls, passing keyword and other arguments extracted from url (and/or just supplied), supplying views as strings instead of function objects etc, not to mention setting settings.py up?

Look, I know that bare-bones Django looks simple, but in reality it isn't. You don't even have "bare-bones" unless you manually disable quite some functionality in settings.py. It's still good if you plan to grow your app. You can always turn the features back on and plug reusable apps with ease.

But for something as simple as getting JSON requests, hitting db and returning response I'd choose something else, some microframework and simplified ORM, for example Bottle and Storm[1]. I had a great success with using CorePost[2] on top of Twisted, but that's only if you can live without an ORM and like Twisted's brand of async.

Long story short: there is no need to employ Django for every little webservice. You can, of course, but you should think about why your using full-stack framework when something simpler, faster and smaller would do just as well.

[1] https://storm.canonical.com/
[2] https://github.com/jacek99/corepost
Where do you live?

edit: down votes? Seriously? He's making an implicit comparison between the US and wherever he lives, and saying that the US comes up short in the comparison. It is quite legitimate and reasonable to ask where he lives so that we can reasonably evaluate this comparison and perhaps discuss it.
I mean specifically from a "civil liberties" point of view, i.e your are being watched either way but CCTV happens to be cheaper (though less effective).
> there were concerns that these cards could be skimmed from hundreds [of] metres away

Why is that no longer a concern?

I would certainly be concerned about it.

Even if the cards can't be cloned from a distance, couldn't they still be tracked from a distance? Could the school actually be helping stalkers follow students unobtrusively?
We had swipe cards at university which did this sort of tracking and this was in the early 90s.

It was not uncommon to take 3-4 people's with you to swipe and register. When they worked this out, it was scrapped instantly.

Stuff like this doesn't work, unless you're selling it...
Yap, there is a bunch of papers, but no publicly available prototype to try. Imagine having a python module:

from imaginary_music_module import piano_performer as p

p.play("chopin.ly", style="Pogorelich")

That would be nice :)
I like the steganographic approach, and it could also work with a repository. Consider the following:

-Let Pc be a copyrighted package in the repository

-Let Pd be a public domain package in the repository

-Let Kc be the "key" of Pc

-Let Kd be the "key" of Pd

The keys are stored in the metadata of the packages, so we don't need to break any copyright laws to get them.

Suppose we have the following operations:

-E(Pc,Pd,Kc,Kd) = X

-D(X, Kc) = Pc

-D(X, Kd) = Pd

With this infrastructure, if we want to get Pc or Pd, we simply ask for X and then decode our desired file. This also gives plausible deniability, but I'm not sure how this will hold up in court.
Have you considered buying stock?
Why don't they just track the mobile phones?

I worry about the religious thing. Maybe she really is just that religious. On the other hand maybe claiming religious conflicts is much easier and likely to succeed than trying to argue rationally. And that would be a worrying trend.
Best title, in my opinion: Owner.
Please don't peddle the "UK CCTV" bullshit. It's simply not true.

CCTV in the UK is widespread in large cities, but operated by individual shop owners, and has been since the 80s when cameras became cheap enough. There is no big government CCTV operation. Closest thing is probably the London congestion charge cameras, or individual towns who decide to install their own to cut down on crime.

And if you go out of the cities, you can go forever without seeing a CCTV camera.
"many of them"

Oh the irony...
The problem with CCTV cameras is camera footage can be processed automatically to track people's movements. This gives the state more power than it reasonably needs.
You'd be very surprised to notice how often locals give less of a crap about stuff that enrages the western blogger crowd, or how many non-Americans don't share the feeling US needs to stick their nose into every other country's internal affairs.

Don't be fooled, if the US didn't care their BFF Pahlavi murdered and tortured Iranians, you shouldn't expect they care about women rights or whatever in SA.
They were wrong because they were ahistorical. It's like saying 2+2=1 because the equation equals "1, plus some other numbers."
Quantum Information Theory
> I think this is more likely to be successfully combatted as a privacy issue instead of a religious one.

The stereotyped view of the US is of a nation gripped by religious fervour with crazies at all levels and branches of legislature and executive and judicial and etc government.

I've seen many things which would have been unthinkable in the US before 9/11 become normal afterwards. I've seen many privacies and freedoms become restricted.

While you fight this on privacy grounds it's useful to have other people fighting this on grounds of religious freedom. It leaves you free to make the arguments that you're comfortable making; that you really believe in, and it provides more people to apply pressure.
Garageband! It's a pretty crappy sequencer, but the synth sounds are fine. I imported the midi tracks saved by the algorithm and then mostly just chose from the preset synth sounds.

One problem I noticed sometimes was a limit to Garageband's polyphony in the pianos. I think it only allows 8 or 10 notes at a time in some cases (not sure exactly how it works) and my software has a habit of playing a lot more than that.
Once had someone give me an id that was simply a second id with the face cut out and his id taped in behind it. Worked too until they separated handing it back to him.
The Future of Automated Malware Generation
That's very nice of you, Matt. Wish I was near San Fran!
Have a great time nevertheless.
If only I am in San Francisco..... Have a great thanksgiving!
>Sticking my foot out - Panopticons are not a bad thing.

East Germany is a historic example of why surveillance states aren't a positive thing.

>If CCTV is Big Brother, isn't neighborhood watch something like Little Brother?

Neighbourhood watches aren't centralized and funded to the degree that state surveillance is.
It's only ridiculous if you are a literal-minded pedant without a shred of poetry in your soul.
Despite plenty of attention and funding, test scores continue to get worse. It's pretty clear that we have no idea what the solution to the education problem is. So it makes the most sense to try as many different things as possible until we stumble on a solution by accident.

So let every school try their own thing. Publish long-term metrics. Let parents choose where to send their children.

Standardization and centralization of school funding are part of the problem at this point. Tests are great at measuring -- until they become standardized and high-stakes, at which point the pressure causes teachers to start spending all their time "teaching to the test."

Also, many people have an incorrect assumption that every child has the same destiny. The very name of Bush's education masterpiece, "No Child Left Behind," implies that you'll dumb things down to the level of the worst student in the class. High school career counseling often pushes college on students who simply aren't cut out for it, while perfectly honorable but less prestigious life destinations, like the military or skilled trades, are starving for new recruits.
Great gesture dude. Thanks for giving back.
Pond Or, how to better organise a discreet relationship with the CIA Director
I like the way the ITU handshaking graphic is casting a shadow over top of the world.
The Hacker News effect
Really? You think the US government cares about Saudi Arabian women? I don't think they're that benevolent.

And since when did the US send aid money to the Saudis? Last time I check their oil pumps were working.
It is, and the cards still can be cloned. You just need a big enough antenna.

See: http://hackaday.com/2012/05/27/reading-rfid-cards-from-afar-...

+ I recall someone else building a big antenna that allowed to read cards from range of meters.
Good point. But OTOH what if some private organisation (cough google) decided to pay private property owners to put street facing cameras on their buildings, record everything and upload it to some server?

This could then be used for all kinds of purposes but AFAIK they wouldn't be breaking any laws in doing so, so in this case it doesn't give the state any extra rights than a private company has.
It seems you don't get security from cameras.

http://www.aclunc.org/issues/technology/blog/san_francisco_s...
> Based on my discussions over the years, a majority of people want to be dead - just not right now.

WOW! This really struck me now... Imagine how your behaviour would change if you didn't have this expectation!
I don't think they are using attendance is a success metric. They are using it as a cost metric.
Team Banking Startup Holvi Adds Funding in Advance of 2013 European Launch
You're so nice Matt. Big hugs to you!

Sometimes I see random acts of kindness (like yours), and they still surprise me.

I bet every one of us did a few, and received a few.
Most shallow comment... but what's the font they're using for freeandopen ?
Croatia, funny thing I was in England few weeks ago..
I just can't imagine seeing a kid with a fake Id xD
People would make fun of him in Croatia
This is such a disappointing use of technology.
Sown, you should go! Matt, you rock!!!!
US sends military aid to SA as a mean of protecting their interests in the region. SA is not exactly a friend with Iran and the US makes sure their pumps don't change ownership.
I think you didn't finish your first sentence(?) I suspect I disagree with where it was headed but, that's an entirely different conversation and varies depending on how you're affected by it.

Again, I think people are treating me as anti-religious. I seriously just want "privacy" to be the forefront issue. It's much more universal, it's easier to make a brightline ruling on and it's not subject to the muddying of people saying "my religion prohibits me from, paying taxes, doing jury duty, etc, etc".
>It's simply a fact that children, left to their own devices, teach themselves to read and to count.

How would one go about teaching one's self to read?
'Open sans' apparently. http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Open+Sans
Insightful I'd say. There are quite a few individuals in startup space these days who are kind of innocently/ignorantly parasitic towards people who do actual work. And it's not a problem of parasites to say no.
Because cctv cameras are not (at present) armed and thus can't kill innocent people. Nor are they racist and thus they can't beat someone close to death thereby starting riots.

And that's real, trained, qualified, experienced, officers. Imagine what it's like if you have people like the UK "Special Constables" (PCSO, Police Community Support Officer) - volunteer police with limited powers (and training). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Community_Support_Offic...)

Police on the streets probably aren't much good at catching criminals; from the little I've read there needs to be more detectives but not more beat officers.
Acer Aspire S7 Review
I don't really see the point of this, given that women and non-adults can't cross a border anyway without a signed permit from their father or husband. I'm guessing this text message system works for children too.
We must negotiate with nosy, judgmental primates for food and shelter. "Liberty" to ruin my life is meaningless; I can't actually do or say anything sufficiently controversial without privacy.
Of course this means they just need to spend more money on more technology.

You have to start integrating the cameras with face recognition, RFID chips, and of course you have a system that knows when every student is SUPPOSED to leave. (Of course, this necessarily means both a permanent record and live feed of e.g. every student's medical appointments will be created.)

And then of course if there aren't enough officers to monitor the cameras continuously, that means you have to increase taxes to hire more officers. After all, they're American heroes, being strong and brave to protect the innocent -- we all need to do our bit to support them. And think of who they're protecting in this case -- the children! Everyone's concerned about the welfare of children...

HN, this is why I hate politics.
Participating in the secondary market (Stock market) doesn't give the company any money, you just have a stake of the company that varies in price according to the demands of others and the perceived value of the company.
As far as I know there aren't any firm plans for a SpaceX IPO
Virtual servers or bare metal? What do you use for herding them?
History is littered with designed societies.
You think it is only American bloggers who have a concern? That's nonsense. This is human rights, basic human rights. Women in Saudi are treated like pets, and it should be judged abhorrent by any (relatively) civilised society.
Great site (and I agree with the cause), but it's pretty light on the actual info and analysis side of things. You need a good, clear hook to get people invested enough to stick around the site, granted, but there should be a page on the site with a lot more information for people that want it. Otherwise it's (partly) reducing an attempt to educate the public to asking people to sign a petition that says "evil shadowy government conspiracies to censor the web are bad".

That's super, but it's pretty obvious (I hope...) to most people that there has to be more subtlety to the situation than that, which risks alienating potential supporters, or at least gets some people saying, "well I want to find out more before I sign" and then they never come back.

On the "what's at stake" page, at the very bottom, there is a link to this related site:

https://www.whatistheitu.org/

which seems good to my eyes and has a little more information, but, more importantly, offers a list of links to major publications that have covered the issue. With those, you can pick one you might trust and learn more, if you want to. I'm not sure how closely related that site is to Google, but one obvious thing that could be added to this site is a "What is the ITU" tab in the site navigation, which could consist of that exact page.

(I'm not saying the link should be replaced. It's notable on HN that google is doing this, I just wish google's site had more information, or at least more prominent sources for more information, for those who are curious)
>You're in favor of separation of church and state in public schools -- which is exactly the position taken by the religious protagonist of the article.

(Genuinely asking) Is it? I want to be excepted from state policies based on my religion is NOT a well defined right. Again, there are many state/federal laws that contradict many religious texts and supersede them.