skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
...it's time we step in in our role as governments (both national and international) to create the regulatory environments that protect us...

Or putting on other imaginary hats:

...it's time we step in in our role as technology corporations to circumvent and mitigate broken government regulations which harm our customers...

...it's time we step in in our role as malevolent crackers to cease-and-desist thieving things which do not belong to us...

...it's time we as terrorists, child pornographers, and film pirates stop doing naughty things, so that people stop asking for digital surveillance...

How is the counterfactual, "we the governments", any more sensible than the "we the corporations", or the sillier ones? Schneier isn't a government. Inference along the aligns of "If I were the government I would...", in a democracy where you and everyone who kind-of agrees with you are an insignificant fringe, is barely more rational than pretending to be any other third party.

The main effect of this reasoning flaw is to accede more powers to the biggest digital-rights threat of all, national governments, out of the fatal illusion that they will be used to protect you, as imagined in your "If I were government" fantasy. The evidence strongly suggests that the government--which you are not--would much rather use new powers against you, to the benefit of established, paying clients (MPAA).

...we, as private citizens, should oppose regulation of our networks, because governments have been very bad at it, and we do not control them well enough to expect better.
I wanna be a writer
I wanna be a writer!
Esp. like the call transcribe to text! Very easy to implement and useful in many applications.
The latest generation of iPhones (iPhone 5)
The Apple company have recently released the new generation of iPhones, it’s iPhone 5, the sixth generation after the original iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4,
TL;DR - internet traffic is paid for by users, but high-bandwidth use like video costs the ISPs more, and they'd like to double-dip by also charging sites like Netflix.
You're reading to much into my usage of the word 'blogs', and too little into my usage of the word 'opinionated'. Newspapers have blogs. They make great stuff. There are many great blogs out there that have nothing to do with newspapers and produce fantastic content.

However, a lot of self-produced writing out there seems to lean towards being heavily opinionated, with no attempt at objectivity or journalistic integrity. This is what concerns me- not the presentation method. It just so happens that blogging is the most popular medium for this kind of output.
Not if you encrypt it with your own key.
If you really want you can always host from your own colo box at a datacenter or in your own home.

Datacenter providers tend to care less about what you are doing (unless it's hurting their network).
How To Find Out Who Facebook Thinks Your Best Friends Are
I don't want this question to sound loaded and threaded with negative connotations for/against apple but why would you label the computer as "one of the best I have ever used" if one of the primary interfaces to the user is repeatedly faulty?

I'm not a Mac user. My work and personal desires drive me towards Windows/Linux and I would have foregone any manufacturer that pulled that type of behavior on me (as I have with numerous retailers already). Sort of a "fool me once" type scenario as I see it.
as it's spelled
The Thinkpad X1 Carbon has a nice touchpad with 2-finger scroll as well. The only (minor) quibble I have with it is that it only lets you go one direction with the 2-finger scroll (you have to swipe down for down--you can't reverse it like you can on a Mac.) Otherwise, it's very comparable.
SEC Charges China Affiliates of Big Four Accounting Firms
You really think the only thing different in those two logos is that there's a child's head inside right? How would you draw a real red apple fruit? If I was good in drawing, this is the closest I'd get to a real apple. It's definitely saying no one can use the fruit anymore, since a company chose to keep it's own name by that. She filed for a trademark application, but there must be someone insane sitting in Cupertino who thought they'd milk her on that.
It's not entirely clear from the text what these guys mean by "threaded replies", so I must assume from their screenshot they mean replies which come in in threaded order. And this is, I think, a terrible idea. I understand the need: you can't tell who's replying to what. But the fix is wrong.

Unlike, say, HN or reddit, chats are real-time things. Like most real-time things we perceive and digest them as streams which dribble in one message at a time. As humans we're designed to perceive and understand real-time things as streams: video, audio, events, timelines. We can sit right at the point of "now" and watch every single one of the messages come in, and respond to the ones we need to.

Threaded replies don't come in in a stream order. They get scattered throughout the space of all messages from all points of time. They're buried under heaps of hierarchies or lost off-page. Even if you're cued into the fact that they've arrived, you have to go hunt for them, a cognitively challenging task which takes away from following the stream of time. It's as if late books to a library didn't come in through the late book slot but rather magically appeared all over the library, back on their respective shelves, where you had to go manually find each one of them and stamp it returned.
readme was a book.. great read tho.
What I tried to say is: we need the government to regulate the internet in terms of providing the right laws so users actually can take action against providers misusing their data. Just turning away from the provider is not the solution (from my point of view).
To be honest that bit confused me a little because it's licensed under CC (albeit one of their less 'copyleft' licences).

Does CC BY-NC-ND 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/deed.en_...) allow for people to 'pirate' and the eBook (et al) charges are more 'good will gestures' to the author? Or are unofficial downloads still against the licence and he was basically saying "I can't stop you from grabbing this for nothing, but if you do then at least spread the message in case others might choose to pay"?

Maybe I'm just over thinking things, but that 'piracy' comment of his did confuse me.
I think that's pretty much the gist of it. Only solving real problems can bring in real revenue.
Thank you for stating the obvious. This is why I said "…don't necessarily get…".

I knew it would vary from country to country and carrier to carrier. The original article suggested that China was different because the phones were bought without subsidy. In reality, it's not that different because a phone subsidy isn't guaranteed in European mobile markets. All I was doing here is calling out the laziness of the so-called journalist.
This may just be a difference in attitude. For myself, I would count having multiple iPhones and MacBook Pros replaced or repaired as a terrible experience. Good service is better than bad service, and occasional defects are unavoidable, but the iPhone is only 5 years old; multiple replacements within that span would give me doubts about a company (unless you're buying lots of them, e.g. if your at a company that supplies employees with phones).
There is still a difference between what Apple Records did to Apple Inc. and what Apple Inc. is doing to these small shop owners for something not even remotely same. That coffee house logo is a "pure, unadulterated picture" of the fruit apple, in a natural red color - and a child's head inside. Everyone who thinks it's infringement should be declared insane.
Tumblr Worm affects thousands blogs, spam offensive articles
What is avg? And howz it calculated?
I said it looks solid, I had a T-series laptop, and I replaced it with an MBP, so I know a bit about their respective constructions. The cage and everything didn't help the T being in worse shape (loose hinges, cracks in plastic, failed display close sensor) in half the time I've used the MBP (which is still going strong). So yeah, my personal case was very different.

And as for the flex test mentioned just above, it's not really an interesting test. It doesn't matter if anything flexes, it matters whether and when it breaks, and that's a test I'm not going to make. This is what I mean by making a product look solid, not be solid.

FWIW, I tend to carry two different MBPs from different ages holding them by the display regularly, and they're still alive and well after, respectively, years and months of abuse. And the first thing I did after buying the first one was dropping it off the table, which is twice the height that killed the T completely (after it wasting its battery completely after a year, that is, another feat that MBP didn't replicate).

Also, what the sibling said: stop acting like a child. Thank you.
> You and I basically disagree about the assumed purpose of Bret's site.

Fair enough :) I think we should wait for Bret's comment on this, only he will be able to tell us what he really intended to achieve with his site.

> Caring about "product" and UX doesn't mean you'll get burned out or go into management ;) I know you weren't generalizing,

I wasn't generalizing, but I certainly was exaggerating... a bit. Sure I like my code to be used, and that it feels nice to have users that are happy to work with something I created. It's just that my focus is primarily in code and I feel a bit frustrated here, because it seems like I'm in minority. There are many people here commenting on cool, clever, technical hacks, but I feel that there is more of those who only `itertools.cycle(["product", "business value", "product", "customers", "product", "shipping", "product"])`... I don't think it's wrong, just that I don't feel that way and would like to be recognized as someone of value (not necessarily business value) too :)
VC Panel: Mobile Payments and Mobile Commerce
> That's nonsensical.

Wow, I chime in with a on anecdote supporting your position, coupled with a universal truism, and you say I'm promulgating nonsense. Take a chill pill.
UN Telecoms Head Says Internet Freedom Won't Be Controlled
Take a shot at the service. Would love your feedback.
Don't forget the old adage that reality is 90% perception. If your customers "think" they have a problem, that in itself is an issue that needs to be dealt with. My customers don't care if their system issues are actually a problem in my software or not. "Not a problem" doesn't work if you want to keep paying customers around.
Huh. Usually I've heard "state schools" to mean schools a tier lower than the UC schools. Like San Jose State would be a state school - both the prestige and the tuition are rather lower, though than a UC school like UCLA, or UC Berkeley, even though all are run by the same state.

Hm. Perhaps this is a California thing?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California
"Shampoo is bettah."

"No, conditioner is bettah."

C'mon people.... they all implement INotebook.
I have a theory that perception of anonymity is directly related to long-term enjoyability; as social networks become larger and more people you know join, you feel less anonymous, and less likely to post original content or espouse the controversial views that lead to interesting discussion.

On the other hand, you have much more anonymous (remember, I'm talking about how anonymous users feel) venues like reddit, 4chan, or IRC, which have a rather large niche that is relatively stable and full of engaged users.
Came here to say this. Also if you could use the requests to put pressure on companies to make specific changes, I'd assume they would be receptive to you helping them get feedback.
I bought a macbook pro late '11 from almost the same reasons: apple's good, shiny etc...sorry was. Even if some will call me a traitor, I am thinking to switch my iPhone for a Lumia :)
Yes.

It's important to note just how much video content has grown compared to revenues though. If you click through to the link on the Deck, you'll see a bunch of stats about video utilization compared to revenue. The numbers are pretty mindblowing.

Costs for consumers haven't really gone up, but utilization has increased considerably. Any idea about what the answer should look like? (Note: you can't say Google Fiber).
Actually, Google considers everyone "users", not "customers", and "focus on the user" is one of company's core beliefs:

http://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/

The tough part is balancing the needs of all users: content creators, advertisers, and viewers.
Maybe if the focus shifted to low cost-low yield start-ups we would see more successes. We don't have to all create Taj-Mahal's you know,a few ant-hills will do it too.
I tend to up-vote a good deal of comments, but -- like you -- I do it more the first time I read a post's comments. So, any comments written before I read it are more likely to get upvotes than any that are written later and which I see on later visits. (This is compounded by the fact that I'm trying to cut down my lurking on HN, since it's so easy to keep reading all the good stuff that other people write.)
>"Strong cryptography can resist an unlimited application of violence. No amount of coercive force will ever solve a math problem."

No, but most average citizens' crypto is still ridiculously vulnerable to the three Bs: Burglary, Blackmail, and Blunt force trauma.
Seriously? You are looking for a full time hacer for that website? To do what?
Introducing Price-Gouging's Uglier Side: Time-Gouging
> And vector spaces have bases. One basis for the vector space of functions is the collection of sin and cos functions. Thus we can see that finding the Fourier Transform is just finding how much of each basis vector we need to make the function.

You have indicated quite explicitly that you're being informal (by using non-technical terms like 'non-pathological functions'), but I think it's worth making the small observation here that sine and cosine functions do not form a basis (implicitly: "a Hamel basis") for, say, the space of continuous functions on R/Z in the usual sense of linear algebra, since not every function can be written as a finite linear combination of them.

Rather, they are a topological basis, in the sense that every function can be written as an infinite linear combination of them. Why is it worth making this point, which probably seemed too obvious to say? The reason is that, unlike finite sums, which are unambiguous algebraic constructs, infinite sums require topology to compute; and being a topological basis in, say, the L^2 topology is quite different to being a topological basis in, say, the topology of pointwise convergence. The study of the different kinds of summability of Fourier series is the subject of some very, very deep work.
24/7 Man and Van London - Business Center
I don't know about that. Russia and Singapore have roughly the same number of police (~750) per 100,000 inh. One is way safer than the other. (The US is middling with 233 per 100k.)

Also, as a city, Caracas comes to mind. A city with heavy police presence but intolerable crime statistics.
I wish I could upvote this post a dozen times.
Doesn't how many times a person has had faulty components/hardware from a supplier affect a person's feeling about that supplier?
Glad I am not living in one of those countries :))
Now my own opinion: double-dipping like this is a stupid, stupid concept.

If an ISP were to charge Netflix for consuming its bandwidth, it would be like a taxi service slapping fees on an airport for generating so many rides.

"DARN those selfish airports, they're driving my taxi business under with their huge demand for rides!"

If ISPs can't figure out how to make more money from providing more service, they should hand in their business licenses.
Inside the Raspberry Pi Factory
So can we expect lower rents in SF and less congestion on the 101/280? The last stat I saw indicated that Northern California's unemployment rate is shrinking fast; it doesn't seem like this is the same situation we saw back in the dot.com bubble from that perspective. Or is it? Can somebody explain the discrepancy?
How to hire the right developer for your startup
If this makes you think it's not a premium product, or the best out there, go get a different product. What's so wrong with that? I want a pony, but dammit Apple doesn't offer ponies. Saying "I WANT A PONY FROM APPLE NOW" isn't going to make it so. Quit bitching and take your business elsewhere. If you happen to think the iPhone is still the best even with this problem, then get a case or hold the phone differently.
While Apple may tend to cut corners in reliability, they generally aren't doing it to out of laziness or to save money but rather to make their products smaller, lighter, and smoother. It takes a lot of effort on the part of designers to squeeze functionality into a size and weight budget, just as much as to make something reliable, and I think that saying that "no engineering was applied past appearance" is horribly unfair.

Now, not everybody is OK with trading off reliability for those things. My friend who worked on an Apple product in some capacity[1] was horrified at what they were doing and warned me never to get the Apple product they worked on for this reason. But I did anyways because of the shiny, and despite the fact that it did end up breaking down in the way they warned about I don't actually regret it.

[1] I'm being paranoidly vague here since they broke an NDA telling me this and Apple is renowned for being litigious about these things.
What rock, paper, and scissors can teach you about startup strategy
I don't understand what's so hard about qualifying one's advice. I've given people advice more than a few times in the past, but I usually stress that I may have just gotten lucky, it might not be applicable to their present situation, whatever I've achieved was also thanks to others, etc. As long as I'm open with people about that, I feel very comfortable offering my opinion.

If I passed myself off as an infallible guru, then I'd be a fraud, but there's absolutely no need for me (or anyone else) to do so.
Agreed. S3.
Show HN: Hackerwall - View Hacker News in images, on any device
Show HN : Flicksery - A Netflix Search Engine (my side project)
I built this simple Netflix Search Engine for myself but I think this could be useful to anyone who uses Netflix.

http://www.flicksery.com

Blog post : http://tmblr.co/ZemAIvYPpv2C

Please let me know your feedback.

Thanks
Alibaba reaches 1 trillion RMB to become the biggest ecommerce company in world
The world is full of weekend-hard Rails apps that can both contribute and make loads of money. The problem has nothing at all to do with engineering, and everything to do with echo-chamber marketing. The apps don't need to be harder to write; they just need to solve problems for nurses or attorneys or auto mechanics instead of early-adopter tech consumers and advertisers.

David Heinemeier Hansson put this as succinctly as anyone in the world could, and at YC startup school! - "build something useful and charge money for it; it's not rocket surgery." But despite that advice instantly getting pegged to the top of HN, a huge number of would-be entrepreneurs have ignored it for years.

Dan Lyons has correctly spotted the symptoms but wildly missed the mark on the diagnosis.
Excellent point and this is certainly a feature that we are tweaking the dials on. We've currently landed on a solution where a reply comes in as the latest item (in chronological order) with a reference back to the original message. That saves you from the tedious work of describing who you are replying to in a fast moving chatroom. That view persists throughout your active session. Later, when you return for reference, the chat lines organize themselves in the threaded view you see in the screenshot. It's starting to feel right but like all the features, we need to live with them a while to know for sure.
no they built a "startup" that is only viable for 17 days.
>> Costs for consumers haven't really gone up

Costs for consumers are whatever the ISPs decide they are. The answer should look like "if you cost us more, we charge you more," just like every other business on the planet.

It doesn't have to be X bits = Y dollars. It could factor in load; the meter runs faster at high-demand times and slower at off-peak times. That solves the "bandwidth is a renewable resource" argument and the "some people use more than their share" argument. They'd just have to ensure that the meter is highly visible to consumers.
Not according to the press release[1]:

"We have no definitive detection of Martian organics at this point, but we will keep looking in the diverse environments of Gale Crater," said SAM Principal Investigator Paul Mahaffy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Later in the release:

SAM tentatively identified the oxygen and chlorine compound perchlorate. This is a reactive chemical previously found in arctic Martian soil by NASA's Phoenix Lander. Reactions with other chemicals heated in SAM formed chlorinated methane compounds -- one-carbon organics that were detected by the instrument. The chlorine is of Martian origin, but it is possible the carbon may be of Earth origin, carried by Curiosity and detected by SAM's high sensitivity design.

So it seems that they've found martian chlorine and an undetermined source of carbon that when heated with other chemicals in the sample analysis on mars instrument form organics. That's not to say that these reactions occur or do not occur naturally on Mars.

[1] - http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/news/whatsnew/index.cfm?FuseAct...
Using Perl will not rot your brain any more than any other programming language - balance is key: Look at other languages and don't become a one-trick pony.

If you look at the popular scripting languages (Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Javascript), Perl is the only one that gets freaking variable declaration right, so I'd be pretty careful when casting stones.
my workplace uses Hipchat, and they appear XMPP based. You can access it using your IRC client with bitlbee as a bridge (I just set this up this past weekend - I don't know why I didn't do it sooner). Not as simple as direct IRC compatibility, but something I can live with.

I imagine it's easier for them to build custom features on XMPP (since the protocol supports custom messages/actions) rather than IRC (where you'll have to build your tool around IRC's paradigm of chat-rooms and text only chat).
For an orthonormal set, one also gets another answer to your question: how can you see how much such a set spans?

Theorem: If S is an orthonormal (or even orthogonal) set in a Hilbert space V (here, L^2 functions on R/Z), then put S^\perp = {v in V : v is orthogonal to every s in S}. Then the span of S is (S^\perp)^\perp. (The containment of the span in the double-orthocomplement is formal; the other direction requires a supplemental theorem on the geometry of Hilbert spaces.)

With this in mind, we see that S is a topological basis (spans everything) when S^\perp = 0; so, to show that the sine and cosine functions span, it suffices to show that nothing (non-0) is orthogonal to all of them. This still requires computation, but at least it's easier to imagine doing this than somehow finding a Fourier series for any L^2 function.
@smurph, definitely something I'd love to implement if brands really find the feedback useful. Here's a question: Do you think this tool would be most useful to brands--as a consumer research tool? Or to 3rd-party producers who are interested in seeing what market exists for new products/feature requests?
Count-min: How to Count Over Large Keyspaces When 'About Right' Is Good Enough