skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook is the greatest, most powerful weapon ever created. If there was a god of attention, it's name would be Facebook.

Twitter, Google+, WoW, TV, radio, magazines, whatever. They all pale in comparison to the amount of time and effort =wasted= on Facebook. Discussing meaningless things, liking meaningless posts or comments, or pages about meaningless things, photos of meaningless things.

It doesn't matter how many people or pages you subscribe, like or friend who _might_ talk or be about something important in the world, your "feed" will be chock full of rubbish by the thousands of other posts about NOTHING.

Forgive the brutality here, but why do you need to read on Facebook how someone is feeling? If they're important enough to you to care how they feel, shouldn't they be around you? Within arms reach? Why do you need to see what someone had for lunch? Why do you need to share pictures of you and your friends drunk? Why do you need to see scenic photos of places your friends or family have been? Why do you need to know about everyone's birthday?

Why do you care? Really?

For all the time you spend absorbing this information, what good does it do you or anyone else? Is it creating homes or jobs for those with nothing? Is it curing cancer? Is it feeding starving children? Is it teaching anyone anything useful that could improve their life? How about the planet? Is it fixing the ozone? Is it cleaning the air we breathe? Or even you, specifically? Is it putting food on your table? Is it putting clothes on your back? Is it paying your bills? Is it quenching your thirst? Is it?

No.

It's flooded with useless information that everyone wastes copious quantities of time and energy consuming that could be spent on any number of better activities.

You know what I'm talking about.

/rant. waits for the hellban
I like the idea here, and would love something like Wolfram Alpha with this kind of practical materials information. And questions about packaging and shipping. "How do I ship canned soda?".
Top Ten Stellar Mysteries. Intriguing...
He could always sell his software via his own store, as Kindles are not restricted to Amazon App Store sold software (which is one difference between the Kindle/Android ecosystem and an iOS one).
Mining. It doesn't make sense to me that there are so many spots that are larger than Sydney or Melbourne (sprawling cities of 4M people). I wouldn't be surprised to see some lights there, but I highly doubt that the miners are setting up lighting grids that rival the street lights of cities 70km by 70km in size.

(edit: for comparison, Greater Melbourne and Greater London are roughly the same size)
Who is Galt?
That's just representative of the "slice of life" genre, not anime as a whole. I'd say try Cowboy Bebop, it's the same director, same composer, but this time it's a bounty hunter space opera with a jazz score. It often gets compared to Firefly. It doesn't seem to be on Crunchyroll but it's widely available.
I've been out of the Eclipse world for about two years but that was always something that confused me. With Eclipse it was also so hard to find the right version to download. You couldn't download Eclipse, you downloaded the Something pack or the Other Thing pack.

Then there were plugins you might want but they were only distributed as Eclipse installs so you either had to install that version or download it and steal the plugins you wanted out of the directories after you unzipped it.

Once you got it running it wasn't much of a problem, but it was one of those things that I hated dealing with the few times it was necessary.
Nope, that's one way to look at it (especially if you're sticking with data frames).

The nice thing about that outlook is that you can essentially automate tasks you would normally perform on a spreadsheet.
I would rather hire a CS grad who couldn't answer the question, "What's your favorite programming language?" than someone who could. A decent CS grad wouldn't have a preference, there are different languages for different purposes depending on what you are trying to accomplish. There is no one language fits all language. I'd prefer a CS grad who has a vested interest and appreciation of multiple languages, wouldn't you? Why hire someone with a raging hard on for Java when you can hire someone with an appreciation for Java, Python and C++?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Galt
I'm not sure Google would be interested in T-Mobile when they already partnered with Dish Network to create a Cellular Network sometime next year http://9to5google.com/2012/11/16/google-dish-wireless-servic...
"John Galt is a fictional character in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged (1957)."

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand
And what about them new-fangled Intel random number generating instructions?
This could be a great idea - or not. The Kickstarter pitch lost me in the first section (I did skim the rest), and the video lost me at "Plato".

I would have thought that Kickstarter respondents would be likely to embrace the idea of a movie depicting what a hacker really is, but along with that we need a great story, a great plot. Perhaps that was in the video.
John McAfee Arrested in Guatemala for Entering Country Illegally
For those unfamiliar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_salts_(drug)

(Basically "the informal "street name" for a family of designer drugs often containing substituted cathinones, which have effects similar to amphetamine and cocaine.")
How about a browser extension?
MS didn't have a monopoly (i.e., exclusive right to sell something granted by the government); they were operating in a free market.

People were always free to use a different OS, and many have.

You haven't offered a counterargument to this obvious fact.

You haven't explained why you think MS was cheating by selling software configured in a particular way (nor why countless analogous examples in other industries don't constitute cheating).

I find your bald assertion that my views are not philosophically defensible to be below the belt. I can (and often do) rigorously defend my views, and can point to further information. I take claims contrary to my views seriously. People who aren't interested in what I have to say can easily avoid me.

strange Randian views

By the way, hasn't it been said that good, novel solutions will often appear strange, and not to discount ideas for that reason? Isn't that a reason to investigte? Especially since philosophers have not engaged with or been able to offer counter-arguments to Rand, and since there is a growing persence of Objectivist philosophers in university philosophy departments?
I don't think that phrase means what you think it means. Fleeing countries for possibly being responsible for other peoples' deaths isn't quite the same thing as stopping work to avoid being leeched dry. Regardless of whether you think the latter action is silly, they're hardly similar.
Edit is old - you could do that a while back
tednaleid, you seem to be dead. Perhaps posting a link to wikipedia with no other content auto-triggered something.
What I meant was:
Who is John Galt?
And then there's sound. One of the really quick ways you can tell a low-budget film from a major studio film, other than the logo, is by the sound. We've decided that we're only going to be recording the voice on set. What that means is that all of the other sounds, from footsteps to car engines, from smart-phones buzzing to a fist slapping against skin, all that has to be recorded and synched after the fact.

Sound guy for over a decade here [1], and I am off to shoot another feature starting Saturday. This is emphatically not true. You record as much as humanly possible on set. Even if you layer and resync it afterwards, doing all that in post is crazy expensive. On your limited budget it's self-defeating. Engineering the room response of the real location in post is very time consuming compared to capturing your raw material on location.

I'm open to helping with this project (EDIT: but won't be in the Bay area or online much until after 12/18); it pains me to see someone tying their hands unnecessarily.

1. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1961377/
On the "inconvenient/risks" point - yeah, security is pretty much always a trade-off between convenience and risk. I've already chosen two factor auth for gmail (and Amazon and Dropbox, and I'll add any other important service I can to that list when available), so I pretty much need access to one of my two phones or my iPad to run the TOPT token generator - and if I have any of those devices there's clearly no need to me to trust a borrowed device.

(Though in the complete disaster scenario, I have stored in my wallet, as suggested by Bruce Schenier, the app-password my phones use and the list of backup verification codes - unlabelled so a casual thief _probably_ won't know what to do with them... I've also got irregular exports of everything and the 1Password passphrase and phone PIN printed out and stored in an envelope in the office safe. I _think_ I'm sufficiently paranoid about all that...)
Ya early in startups culture & skill are soo important.
For anyone unfamiliar with bath salts, here is a fairly comprehensive article describing the drug: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/multimedia/bath-salts/

Also, here's a quick summary of what the drug does in GIF format: http://i.imgur.com/P4csH.gif
Ok, it was really annoying to track down the source of the bath salt thing -- amazing how some journalists never link back to the original source.

But here's the gizmodo piece that mentions it: http://gizmodo.com/5959812/john-mcafee-wanted-for-murder
You can absolutely page in data from Flash memory as needed, it's just non-trivial (and not handled by the "OS"). On devices with flash memory as an extension of RAM (TI 83+, 89, and 89 titanium), this could help for read-only level data that isn't needed all of the time.

Edit: Of course, Joltima targets the TI-83 (different from the 83+), which doesn't have any flash memory. Bravo, Justin Karneges.
Not surprising the Democrats do not want to hand over power from the federal government. While the Republicans (myself included) do not trust the federal government to oversee the internet, but they certainly do not trust the U.N. to do it either.
Wow super cool - i wonder if it works with ruby motion? I don't know why it wouldn't.
I commented in an earlier thread explaining that there is little proven connection between Mephedrone/MPV and erratic behaviour. Plus surveys show its less addictive than cocaine.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4861611

Just like any crazy drug story, its rarely the drug that makes someone crazy, it just amplifies existing mental health issues.
Yep, always the user's fault.

Never mind that it's still easy as ever to phish by email since the protocol doesn't give any guarantees of anything, not even that the "From" field can be trusted; or that SMS sucks in a similar way; or that their PCs and Android/RIM phones still allow to install untrusted apps by default.

It's quite sophisticated indeed. The prompt to install the PC app happens when the user visits the bank's site. They manage to get the user phone number and send an SMS as if they are the bank. Everything appears legit from the user's point of view. It's shortsighted to blame it on the user.
Yes, but we can pretend. Life is more exciting that way.
It would probably physically kill me to run for office, actually, heh. I wish I could do it. I hate that I'm a complete hypocrite on this, but my actual goal is to make career politicians obsolete, and that's not something a single person can do anyways.

But to answer your questions, you don't. You lose the first round. The first round is about becoming a credible threat as a nobody. You spend that first round, however, building up relationships: it's about no longer being a political nobody. Then you maintain those relationships for the next few years until it's time to campaign again, and then you leverage them into money and votes.

Besides, I don't actually want people like me in office. I'm a philosopher who doesn't like Plato; why would I endorse a philosopher king.
Word. I've added an update to the blog post with a link to Stripe Connect. :)
SmartThings Closes $3M Seed Round
It's definitely a tool if you want "a" data point "really fast". I won't argue against that. However, I would use it for "just" that and nothing more. I wouldn't use it to drive the entire decision.

Per your point of disagreement, and depending entirely on the type of app, I stand by my point. You're anchoring the disagreement "quality". A down and dirty "test the waters" app is a lot less expensive than a "quality" app (ignoring apps that can't really have a down and dirty, like complex video games or something).

I would agree, that on average, a "quality" app would take longer then a down and dirty "test the water" app. However, so long as you can get a down and dirty out the door so easily, we will see crap in the app stores.
Because this is the kind of things soap operas are made from?
What makes you think that this is a modern issue, or has worsened over time?
Balancing a Team
Stat 133 is great. I took it with Spector and he was phenomenal.
IntelliJ IDEA 12 is Available for Download
Are you using Pandas? If so, your comment would be ironic because pandas borrows heavily from R ;)
Can you give an example where the confusion between a scalar and a length one vector is important? I'm trying to figure out how to better teach R to people familiar with other languages and understanding your stumbling blocks would be v. helpful.
Instagram kills it's own pics on Twitter
Ask HN: Why don't links posted on HN open in a new tab?
Would love to hear what you find most painful about data munging/wrangling and unit testing. It's something that I've been trying to improve in R (e.g. http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.html and http://journal.r-project.org/archive/2011-1/RJournal_2011-1_...)
The original source there isn't Gizmodo; it's McAfee's own posts on the Bluelight drug forum. He has admitted these are his posts, though he now says it was a hoax: http://www.whoismcafee.com/stuffmonger-and-bluelight/
This was published over at PandoDaily the other day with the title: "Hiring old people: The dangerous but necessary steroids of the startup world." http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/04/hiring-old-people-the-dange... .. got me thinking back to the rather hectic HN thread the other day :-) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838215
This is what HN is about - expertise, pointing out an area of improvement, and offer of help. Kudos.
Yeah, for sure - like I said, it's somewhere where I care about my reputation now. Back in '08 or '09 when the Perl Monks password got exposed, not so much (at least not for me...)
Ragic, a Database/Excel hybrid. I just posted Show HN above.
It's a product where you can build online databases just like creating a Web Excel spreadsheet.

There's free trial that you can try out first with online tutorial. The lite license is $5/user/month
The 6th Annual Crunchies Awards
Tip: you are not thinking like a criminal.
Thanks for the detailed response - first of all, I don't see all uses of crypto as problematic by any means - and I'm very glad that good police work and investigation can, and does, track down malicious behaviour even when enabled by the latest technology. Ultimately all these things are about human networks at the end of the day, and we're all fallible, and I generally trust that there's more sunlight than darkness.

I also completely agree that pretty much every technological innovation throughout history - weapons, communication mediums, etc - are used by both 'police and thieves', or whichever actors fit in the white/black boxes in the given situation.

The problem in my mind is more general - it's that crypto and concealment are just an evolution of the status quo - the arms race continues, with more 'secrets whispered in the woods', yet average people are already losing their day-to-day privacy, in vast numbers, and crimes still occur of course.

Opening everything is clearly radical and/or impossible, and it's a long-term idea/concept rather than anything feasible in the near future. Despite my ramblings, I'm a realist, and I've worked on migrating many, many legacy systems, so I'm familiar with the challenges, but this is the only process I've reasoned about so far regarding disruption of the arms race itself, as opposed to just evolution of arms, so I'm hunting for counter-arguments and these are good ones.

Enabling dissidence is a very good point, and I think it highlights the problems with hierarchy/power itself and information disparity. If neither party was able to operate without the knowledge of the other, then dissidence could take place openly without fear of hidden/unknown retribution. Trusting that the system is really 'open' and that you can see all the communications is definitely a challenge though (unsolvable?)

Regarding your final point, I'd say that although crime is part of a darker aspect of human nature (which can be encouraged, manipulated or instilled), we have been controlling our own education and evolution for generations through society and religion and choice of partners - so why can't we see this as an optimization problem, and try to guide ourselves towards a less criminal and violent nature?

(PS: the final point is a bit rhetorical - I think we have been for a long time already - cannibalism isn't hugely popular for example)
I think there is an option to make bitlbee extract the handle from some other field, like "full name", then 05327fykex6h5yvd457 becomes JohnConner or whatever. Have a look at a recent version of the docs.
What a mean trick that headline is. Everyone reading that thinks its going to be an awesome augmented reality enabling HUD, and instead we find out its only a "display" for everyone BUT the wearer.
ICANN, ITU, etc., on the other hand...
You should trust that your OS will use them when it makes sense to use them. :)

(I'm being glib.)
This guy seems incredibly unprofessional. His writing style and grammar are totally off. I don't think I would trust his attention to detail for a movie on hacking.
That's a shame.. Vice produces some interesting content. Hopefully this won't cause too much damage to their reputation.
Honestly, there's a lot of potential for a great story within that theme. The video was entertaining even if the reference to plato was a little cliched. I'm backing it.
Staffing the Network Team
Love how I'm in 2012 and my computer still chokes to open a 8MB JPEG. Wonderful images though.
Winner and Loser have personal traits attached to them. Loser almost implies that the individual had some problems personally and not in the way he executed the task.

Success and Failure imply that the individual did task X, Y , Z to achieve a result S or not achieve result S. It has more to do with an individuals execution at the instance.

Loser almost implies that the person is doomed and some how naturally incapable.
I find Eclipse's Scala support to be somewhat lacking. Don't get me wrong, it's usable. Apparently it has come a very long way...before I began doing Scala dev, I guess it was really rough. Still, there are enough annoyances that I typically find working in vim more productive.

1) Inability to automatically import types within a project the way java projects can means I have to manually enter all my import statements. No productivity increase over a plain text editor there.

2) Autocomplete bugginess. Sometimes deleting text too quickly causes the autocomplete to have fits, and I end up watching a single character deleted every few seconds as it struggles to catch up. On a 2012 MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM under light load, this is terrible performance. Again, a plain text editor works better.

3) Hit-or-miss (mostly miss) ability to evaluate Scala expressions while debugging.

4) Occasional error-recognition bugs. Sometimes the IDE will insist something is an error. Compiling the code will work, and after I close and reopen Eclipse, it agrees that there are no errors.

5) Constantly fighting with out-of-sync issues with the file system. Roughly 50% of the time that I click a file to open a code-editing window, the code editor window will simply say, "Out of sync with the file system". I then have to hit f5, which sometimes works - sometimes I have to refresh the entire folder above that, or its parent, or...etc. This happens even when there are no external programs editing the file in question.

None of these things truly prevent me from getting my work done, but they slow me down and are irritating.
He also said the Exif data was a hoax. And that he was somewhere in Mexico. He says a lot of stuff. What does Occam suggest here?
Thanks for the reply! Would I be mis-representing things to say that you feel that the need for privacy/hidden communication is predicated by the fact that it has beneficial purposes as well?

The world might certainly be a very dull place if nothing was private - no more surprise birthday parties as you mention, for example - but perhaps there would be equal and opposite benefits to shared knowledge/information?

The situation regarding whistle-blowing itself requires that there is something worth reporting, which wouldn't be the case if the knowledge was already available (unless, perhaps, the knowledge was available but simply not highlighted well enough for people to spot any malicious behaviour).

Totally agree with your final point - it's a very strange dichotomy that as average people are finding less and less privacy, those with privilege or power are the ones who are afforded it.
A fictional character.
I wonder if your statement is equivalent to the famous, "existence is essence" claim? I think a good idea is a plan, and we certainly believe plans are worth something :-)
I agree 100%, which is why I doubled down on TSLA a couple of weeks ago. I've told a few people to buy, but they don't seem to want to listen. It seems obvious to me...
Websites used the native <button> and <input type="button"> so they got that native windows and mac button look. Square, beveled, 3d look, gray. Then to style them they would just use <a> links with images inside, now we're back to code with css.
I think "view source" is one of the best features in web browsers.

It's nice that anyone can peek behind the curtains and see that web pages aren't magic.
For a strong conceptual grasp of how the language work, I think it is fundamental that students learning R (especially those with a history in other programming languages) understand that there are no scalars in the language. The main argument that I would make for this is that nearly all R functions can operate on vectors with a length grater than one. By understanding that when you send a "scalar" to a function you are actually sending a vector, I believe it is much more conceptually clear that you can, and should, send larger vectors to functions and can receive the expected results. This is in comparison to most other programming languages where it would be necessary to iterate over a list or array in order to operate on each individual element.

For example, if you told somebody familiar with, say, PHP to add 2 to each element in a vector, they would likely break out the oh-so-familiar for loop to iterate over each element and apply the transform. This is completely suboptimal in R, as you could just do vector + 2 and receive the exact same thing.
Correct, never resort to threat/name calling etc- When you can achieve the same with courtesy.

If you keep calling every other guy who you dislike a loser, may be its time for you to check if you yourself are one.
DuckDuckGo Terminal Emulator
Tesla carries the banner for upper-scale electric vehicles. If you substitute the electric motor with a petrol engine, are they still so distinctive? If the big luxury/sporty brands entered the electric car market in full-force (several models, full advertising campaign) with cars of similar performance to Tesla, Tesla would struggle mightily to stand out.

BTW, I am rooting for Tesla. I would love a Model S.
Online sales tax to be added to defense authorization bill