skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice.

Simple. Consistent. Transparent.

These should be the guidelinses of every goverment agecny.

That why I am for things like the flat tax, NGDP targeting (monetary policy), open data goverment ...
Democrats push to redeploy Obama’s voter database
Uhh pretty sure owning it through your retirement plan is still illegal. Last a checked even blinded managed trading is not allowed. Of course this could be dependent on your firm.

Not sure I completely understand why Oracle would want to be in the Hardware business, then again Google joined it via Motorola.
Keep CALM and Query On (RICON2012 Keynote)
>The point is that clearing a couple of mines is not useful and is even harmful. //

A field that you must use to avoid starving has 100 mines in it, you can remove [on average] 55 of those mines using a locally made and affordable device. The field will be used anyway. Would you deploy the device?

You're leading a demining team. A village have asked you to clear a field that they rely on for crops (other areas are too rocky or haven't enough good soil). You can send out some locally produced cheap demining devices first that will remove about 50% of the mines reducing the risk to your team. Would you deploy the device?

"is not useful" you say?

Your position appears to be a counterpoint to a statement that these devices will clear all mines effectively from all areas in all conditions. I've not seen anyone make such a claim. Your position is only tenable when a mined area is not needed by the locals.

The devices, and the beautifully made film, have another purpose which is far from useless too - attracting attention and thence funding for demining projects.
Hey cool, talking to an employee! I do really like your concept.

2) I guess I don't like the concept that posting to a social network gives one more punch than not doing so. I don't have an aversion to twitter or facebook etc, I use them all the time. What I don't like seeing is auto-generated posts from my friends flooding my news feed. I'll admit I have no better solution than you've devised, and I completely understand the decision. Some others might have more of a backlash against it though. You may have seen some vitrol on here whenever someone sees a "login with Facebook" link on a startup's page.

3) That makes sense. It's kind of disappointing from a technical limitation standpoint, though. The reason I called it out as possibly being a barrier to entry is because 4.0+ still isn't terribly common. While iOS is very common, I was sad to see Windows Phone, Blackberry, and other touchscreen smartphone platforms not included. Like I mentioned in my footnotes, we're used to it, but I still like to call it out.

1) Not a problem. My criticisms were posted just because I like to give positive and negatives to interesting startups I see and like. There are some things people might not see from the inside out. This is a very non-traditional checkout method, and I could see non-traditional businesses loving it. Good to know you're willing to work with them to meet their needs. When I wrote that I was thinking more along the lines of alternative use-cases other than POS terminals. The ideas you have are just the beginning of where this technology can go.
With Scriptkit, Code Simple iPad Apps In The Time It Takes To Read This Post
Have you thought of mounting the pad to a wall or a stand, so visitors or customers could stamp their phones as they passed?

Maybe it could be used for building entry controls, like a keycard? (The app could authenticate with a server in the building, then the server could tell that specific door to unlock) Maybe this could be done with Zipcars?
What maths A-level doesn’t necessarily give you
It's too radical. Chance to lose everything paralyzes you and clouds your judgement.

In reality it's like 50%, nothing happens; 25%, climate becomes slightly better (why won't it?); 25%, climate becomes slightly worse. So why bother a lot now? We could be dead in dozens of fun ways even without climate change.
Very clever, and a nice website too! I hope this works out well for you :)
The US Navy teaches you how to program a computer, circa 1962
>It's a pattern that comes with a lot of really useful benefits.

Sure, but people can implement that pattern without buying into the whole clumsy REST edifice.

For example, a strict reading of REST (and RESTers support such readings!) would tell me that if I have an API that takes two cities and returns the distance between them, then I must expose a URI pointing to every combination of cities.

See here: http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hyperte...

>>A REST API should be entered with no prior knowledge beyond the initial URI (bookmark) ... From that point on, all application state transitions must be driven by client selection of server-provided choices that are present in the received representations or implied by the user’s manipulation of those representations. ... [Failure here implies that out-of-band information is driving interaction instead of hypertext.] [emphasis mine]

So, 1000 cities, you must send a million links over the network rather than 1000 possible parameters plus the formatting.

Now, some RESTers assure me that, no, you can somehow communicate to the user that [prefix] / [first city] / [second city] will get you that answer; that a server can "instruct clients on how to construct appropriate URIs".

Fine, but then we're right back to custom, author-documented APIs and RPCs: "to do that, format the call this way". Right back where we were before trying to force-fit everything into a CRUD mold with increasingly bizarre tables just to make all the calls work.

Or maybe a REST purist would tell me that I'm supposed to link a URI for the starting city: [root]/distances/[start city]/, and then from there link them to possible choices of the second city: [root]/distances/[start city]/[end city]/ .

Fine, but why jump through two pointless hoops, when I know what I want, and I prefer to just send one request rather than pointlessly spend bandwidth navigating a path I don't care for?
Comparison between the USA and Canada is probably more meaningful. In recent times, Canadian gun laws have been stricter, but that was not always the case. There's something else behind the numbers. Universal healthcare? Cold weather? Who knows?
An interesting point about the tangential consequences of the rise of Big Data in campaigns:

-------------------------------------

Chris Soghoian, an ACLU analyst and former FTC technologist, said voters should worry that the interests of politicians and commercial data brokers have aligned, making legal restrictions of data collection less likely.

“They’re going to be loath to regulate those companies if they are relying on them to target voters,” he said.
I don't know that the homicide rate is because of gun control. I don't think it is possible to directly come to that conclusion given the other societal factors.

But it's an interesting data point.

This article tries to dissuade that control gun is responsible for the low homicide rate in it's summary.

http://www.guncite.com/journals/dkjgc.html

"The idea that Japanese gun laws should serve as model for other nations is not uncommon. Some Americans propose laws even more severe than Japan's.[124] Often, the suggestion comes as an offhand remark in an newspaper editorial, but even when the suggestion is advanced by scholars, the reasoning is often superficial and unpersuasive.

L Craig Parker, an American expert on the Japanese police, proposes that the United States adopt Japanese gun control and also other Japanese strategies, such as a National Police Agency. Parker's brief discussion of guns, however, simply recites statistics showing that Japan has less guns and less gun crime. His only evidence that gun control would actually reduce crime in America is a study by Dr Leonard Berkowitz arguing that guns cause aggression. Actually, what the studies by Berkowitz and others showed was that people acted more aggressively towards other people if the other person was associated with weapons; for example, motorists reacted more aggressively to other vehicles slow to accelerate when a red light turned green if the slow car had a rude bumper sticker and a rifle in a gun rack.[125]

Summing up the perspective of many gun prohibitionists, one Japanese newspaper reporter writes, 'It strikes me as clear that there is a distinct correlation between gun control laws and the rate of violent crime. The fewer the guns, the less the violence'.[126] But the claim that fewer guns correlates with less violence is plainly wrong. America experienced falling crime and homicide rates in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1980s, all periods during which per capita gun (p.40)ownership, especially handgun ownership, rose.[127] And Japan, with its severe gun control, suffers no less murder than Switzerland, one of the most gun-intensive societies on earth.[128]

Japan's gun control does play an important role in the low Japanese crime rate, but not because of some simple relation between gun density and crime. Japan's gun control is one inseparable part of a vast mosaic of social control. Gun control underscores the pervasive cultural theme that the individual is subordinate to society and to the Government. The same theme is reflected in the absence of protection against Government searches and prosecutions. The police are the most powerful on earth, partly because of the lack of legal constraints and particularly because of their social authority."

I found that article from this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/a-l...
A few things that would get me excited:

A geological proof that earth and Mars was the same body x million years ago.

High concentration of oxygen or water in the soil.

Fertile soil?

I guess anything that would make human's visit to Mars less hostile would be a big story.
He might be a good guy who has chosen to work within the system, and he might be defending the system to strengthen his influence over others that are also in the system.

But there's no reason software patent critics should believe that he's solving the problems, given the history of patents in the US and the contents of this article. What he should say: "'Amazon one-click' is a low-quality patent", "we judge XX% of software patents to be low-quality", and "our reforms will reduce this to Y%". Until then, keep making noise.
Isn't Oracle already in the Hardware business, via the Sun purchase?
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers/overview/index.htm...
Because patents are the only thing holding back flying cars.
I don't see why all those presumptions shouldn't be true for accessing unencrypted email. But maybe you're right that more traditional ways of storing files would lead to more traditional interpretations of the law.
This data is crucial to determining who is using your product, how they're using, and where users are bailing out. A very simple use case is when you're tracking users that hit your landing page, then hit your pricing page, then leave. If that's too big a percentage of your users, then it might signal that your pricing is off. If it's in response to a certain campaign, then it might be a signal that ad campaign isn't level-setting correctly.

This data tends to be uber-private, and would never be shared outside of the company, but it's also information that could be pieced together from server logs natively anyway (though with significantly more effort). Basically speaking, almost every company collects this data already, this just makes it more actionable.

It's also perhaps worth noting that following an individual user around the site is low value -- what you want to see are aggregates and percentages. Of all the users that make it to a funnel, how many complete? Of those that do complete, what's different about them vs. the others.

For a company the size of AirBNB to track each user individually is prohibitive, but being able to isolate those metrics down into measurable factors is huge.

If your startup wants to do something like this, it's worth noting that you could very easily semi-anonymize the data by attaching tokens to the users instead of tracking by username or email address. You'd still get the same traceability, but perhaps be slightly more able to be comfortable with doing it.
Check out Canada's hilariously-named "human rights commissions."

I'm not saying that the US is strictly better than Canada in the rights department. However, it's definitely not strictly worse.
I read your comment and smiled. Thank you for this. Have an upvote.
Why You Waited In Line To Vote
Could you explain your logic?
Even on my personal account it's pretty obvious that certain people don't see some of my posts unless there's some threshold of likes/comments. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing, because my news feed would be an uncontrollable firehose if I saw everything.

If I post something, it seems that friends within the network of the place I currently live are the first to see or respond (despite the time I post it) and once it has enough "likes" or comments, I start seeing feedback from college friends or hometown friends.
I don't get this. How is viewing individual customer activity supposed to be useful? Outside of a very few companies, any reasonable level of success is going bring far too many customers to make this practical. It seems like a feature that makes for great marketing copy but is practically useless in real life.
> Things were dramatically improved with [X release]

I've been hearing this argument with every single Android release to date. Like your comment's parent, I try out another Android device every 18 months or so, and I still have yet to be impressed.

I haven't tried Jelly Bean though. Maybe it is really the release that makes everything better.
Yeah, it actually took me a few minutes to find this. The only place it seems to come up is if you're adding an Event to a contact, like someone's birthday I suppose. Honestly, who would be manually doing that on their phone?
This is a good idea. I see some avenues for improvement though.

1. It would be better if the application could work without an internet connection. What's stopping you from caching the stamp data and then syncing when the user has an internet connection? This would make the product more attractive to both merchants and users. Merchants wont have to provide free wifi to ensure the stamping process is fast and smooth, and users will not have to bother with connecting to a wifi network. The technologies you are competing with (QR codes and NFC) can both work without internet connections.

2. Security. I did not see this mentioned on the FAQ and this is probably something that merchants will want to know. For example, is your system immune to "replay" attacks? If a user managed to record the capacitive stamp, what's stopping them from re-sending it to the servers to get more stamps?

3. Customers may not always want to share their email address directly with a merchant. Why not provide merchants a way to send deals to customers through an API i.e allow them to send deals to customers without exposing the customer's email address?
And new release of Android 4.2 added some more "little things" http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/11/19/android-4-2-gate-her.... I find it amusing that major tech news sites are very quit about it while they were beating drums about same issues happening in Windows Phone 8 devices just two days ago.
I'm not sure that invalidates anything I said.

It's true that the buck stops with the CEO. It was after all, his decision to make the deal.

My point was what are you going to sue him for? He did the right thing. He made up his mind, ran it past the board for approval, ran it past finance for approval, got an outside auditor to do due diligence.

All approved. The deal went through.

It turned out to be a stupendously bad business decision.

Should twitter be able to sue the developer who made the incredibly bad design decision to use ruby on rails and architect their system as a blog rather than than a message queue?

Bad decisions happen, people loose their jobs over them. it's much harder to sue someone when they've done the due diligence and had the decision signed off by many other people.
Slavoj Žižek: The politics of Batman
Sadly, greylisting is an absolute nightmare for server-admins on the sending end. We sent out time-sensitive emails to our clients and Yahoo's Greylisting could sometimes delay accepting the mail for upto an hour. This causes extreme frustration for our customers and some even leave as a result. Its even worse because customers are never aware of Greylisting and even if they do, Yahoo wouldn't let them have control of it. Asking someone to change their main mail provider doesn't end well either. This could also happen for confirmation emails when they first sign-up to your site. Spam does indeed cost a lot to businesses directly or indirectly.
It's pretty amazing as a support tool.
Oracle Surprised by the Present
No, this case I've cited specifically says that magnetometer wanding and a pat-down over a duration of 18 minutes in search of a suspected weapon is a constitutionally reasonable administrative search.

My beef is with mandatory -custody- searches, which are implemented as either electronic/radioactivity scans of the entire flesh and/or full physical inspections of the body. These were not in use prior to the TSA's inception and nobody has ruled on whether they are constitutionally reasonable or not.
I don't disagree with that, but please do some investigation before banning an entire subnet, or wait until you actually observe a user jumping around the subnet. And never ban an entire ISP if you haven't first given their abuse department a chance to do the right thing.

If you don't do this, you're harming innocent people.
Since you seam to have a intressted in this kind of thing I would recomond (if you dont know it) public choice theory.

Here are some awsome podcasts on the subject:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/public_choice/

There are also podcasts about Mises and many other intressting things on there.
The overhead comes from the government, otherwise air flights would be like taking a greyhound bus, and in the past, they used to be like that. Now the TSA is leaking to Amtrak and so on, so you might see similar delays in the future with rail!

High speed rail has a lot of land acquisition problems for the most part, air flight doesn't.
Cold fusion doesn't actually exist. There might be evidence that there's some reaction with the materials used, but there's no reason to suspect its fusion at all. I think the CF crowd keeps redefining itself. Now this is all an interesting chemical reaction that's difficult to reproduce or requires some really specific parameters.
As a note, this is arguing from a position of power. Some people appear to be generally incapable of textual communication; if they don't get to call you or meeting you face to face, they aren't interested in dealing with you.

edit: I'd rather use textual communication; I feel its more precise, more document-able, and you have chance to really think about what you're saying. Of course I can deal with other communication modalities, but... eh. Not as optimal IMO. :-)
Curiosity's Mars discovery called 'one for history books'
Can you send me a quick email so we can take this off the board? I'd be happy to either help or point you in the right direction. ana@buildrx.com

We do work for retailers such as True Religion Brand Jeans, Joie Clothing, Tart Collections.. (all Magento based).
Pharmaceuticals are an area where patents seem most justified. Companies need to spend years of R&D to find a specific compound that helps cure disease, and then need to recoup the costs over years. I definitely feel software patents hinder innovation more than help it, but I would be worried about less investment put into drug discovery if the patent system were completely abolished.
"So, yeah, if a peaceful process of information flow could bring Afghanistan into the Twenty-First Century, I'm all for that."

I'm constantly surprised that when it comes to regime change that there isn't an effort to set up some satellites and air-drop some mobile smartphones with data plans designed with the same principals as one-laptop-per-child.

Look at what Facebook and Twitter did for the Arab Spring.
typesafety+compiled brings a robustness and sureness (and sometimes performance) that dynamic languages can't really provide. Dynamic languages are interesting in some domains also... I must admit I'm a big fan of static typed language since the beginning so I'm not really objective ;)
We think our tool that tracks contact forms is unique, is anything similar?
Ask HN: Is it cheap to use clipart for a 100k VC funded alpha?
Hi there!

We’re building a social content recommendation service – LikeHack.com. And yep, we get email.

A couple of those letters included some kind of complaints about the pictures of folks on our main page pointing out that “they are not a developer, designer or young mummy” and that “this is just pathetic to use clipart”.

First of all, we’d love to ask you guys about whether or not it’s really this bad for a startup to go for some clipart usage. Seems like a natural way.

Second, we’d love to work on this issue (100k VC funding woah! 8) and ask you – real developers and designers (and mb even young mummies) to send us your pictures (preferably high def ones).

And third, we’d love to give out some Amazon Gift Cards to those who’d be so kind to send us their pictures together with some feedback on our product. Tell us about anything you like and don’t like (except the fact that we’re using clipart of course).

Email for your feedback:
Dmitry Yanin <dima@freshle.com>

Thank you for your time HN.
Those are strawman arguments. Meeting uninformed Americans is not evidence that the entirety of the American populace is ignorant of their failings as a developed nation.

For example, we are taught about slavery and the genocide of Native Americans in primary school. We dedicate an entire month to Black History because we are acutely aware of our status as one of the most institutionally racist countries on the planet. We have impasses at the highest levels of government over dealing with our failure to control healthcare costs, and that is something that many Americans are cognizant of. We are repeatedly informed of our failure to create a stable market economy. I can go on.

Please leave your preconceptions at the door when having a serious discussion.
I was absolutely in the same boat as you: everything was better, but still not able to match iOS. I was happily surprised when I tried out Jelly Bean. The Holo theme is taking hold, Project Butter did really well (although I hear rumblings of regressions in 4.2).
Hackathons are a terrible way to get new users. Why we’re doing them anyway.
Making stronger apps?

Let's take the Play 1 vs Play 2 example:

How many times I got a 500 pages in the face due to a basic NullPointerException in Play 1 groovy templates...

In new play 2 templates, because they are type-safe, they guarantee that you will not have those basic errors.

Of-course, it doesn't guarantee everything, but it's way less error-prone. You actually CANNOT make this kind of NPE errors with type-safe scala code.

where in java you do something like:

user.address.town // oops I forgot to test if user.address is not null

in scala:

// user.address.town wouldn't work, because address is represented as an Option[Address]

user.address.map(_.town).getOrElse("")
Why is that not the default way to access preferences? It just seems so much nicer than a dialog box. Death to all dialog boxes.