skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've no desire to discourage people from showing their care or regard for me. But I would strongly for them to do it directly, by engaging in activites that center on care and regard for each other. Spending time together, perhaps.

Material goods are a poor proxy for that in my case, because they have the effect of actually reducing my quality of life. I've already got a cluttered house and more possessions than I know what to do with. It's actually pretty hard for me to think of objects that I genuinely want - so hard that when people give me gift cards, they generally go unused. I've got more than enough stuff, I'm actively working on having less stuff, and so I'd rather let it go to waste than acquire an object I don't want and will just go unused until I eventually discard it during the next round of decluttering.

So in any case I feel bad - either because of guilt over not appreciating an object that I simply can't because it brings me negative utility, or guilt over the money or effort people put into trying to give me an object that brings me negative utility, or for actively involving myself in the acquisition of an object that brings me negative utility, or for the sense of being wasteful that comes with the inevitable disposal of an object that brings me negative utility. And I would greatly prefer for people to show they care in a way that doesn't make me feel bad. I just wish I could understand why in this one situation I'm generally considered to be a bad person for wanting my loved ones to not make me feel bad. Isn't it supposed to be a time of year when we're supposed to gather together and try to make each other feel good?

Sadly the ritual just isn't really structured in a way that makes it workable for folks like us. The material gifts are inextricably placed at the core of the social construct, to the extent that there's really no way to extract them for the sake of respecting the feelings someone who doesn't desire a material gift. So inextricably that we can't just not give an object to someone who would rather not take part in the exchange of objects because we care about them and understand that would make them happier. Instead we have to make them out to be some sort of Scrooge.
Kim Dotcom Shows Off MEGA Rack
My biggest problem with the scanners is that they are a waste of taxpayer money, so I'm not particularly thrilled by spending more taxpayer money to determine exactly how much a waste of taxpayer money they are.
Software industry braces for new phone apps rules
Ars Technica had a few good articles a couple of years back discussing how the wired telco/cable networks developed. Cable companies all started as co-op type entities that eventually gobbled up the smaller players.

IMO, ISPs and Telcos are natural monopolies that need to either be periodically broken up by the government, or be fully regulated like a public utility. The cost of monopoly should be external control of pricing and operating parameters.
"50% is just a number, and without reference to what is received in return has no meaning."

Paying more than 50% of the money I earn to the government is theft. It doesn't matter what I get in return because I really have no choice in the matter.

"$500,000 for a car could be considered theft, until you see it is an italian supercar"

You aren't forced to purchase that sports car, so I would hardly call it theft.
This happens to me a lot. I don't think Facebook are even interested in enforcing real names though, my middle name is currently "Hashtag", it is obvious that it is not a real name yet it was accepted.
The minutes of flight are there because they're a fundamental part of travel and are unavoidable if you choose to travel by air. An x-ray machine is there only for the purpose of additional security. If the risk undergone for the machine outweighs the security benefit then the machine can and should be removed. In my mind, there is no equivalence between the unavoidable risk and the completely avoidable risk.
Life is engaged in a war against entropy which it is destined to lose.
However the driver lives in New Jersey, where only 10% of the power comes from coal (as of 2005). There, I find that it is only 0.713 lbs of CO2 per kwh, so he'd only be releasing about 1.5 tons of CO2.

CO2 data from here: http://www.miloslick.com/EnergyLogger_files/State_Electricit...
Go and the Zen of Python
I just signed up for the AnnotateMyPDF website but i see nothing regarding the course in there. is it only available to CMU students?
Chromium Blog: Dart's Web UI library is ready for testing
Tiny Reconfigurable Robots at MIT
Actually, according to Wikipedia, they are written in several languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Nabataean.
If you keep all 1000 photos from a single session without deleting 90+% of them -- you would not be able to convince your grandchildren to look at these photos (because it would be too boring).
Mixing deployment-time configuration with your app, including checking the root password for your deployment machines into source code, seems to violate best practices pretty violently. Heroku is great specifically because it separates out deployment configuration from runtime configuration.
Sleek Chrome Dev Tools Skin
Screenshot: http://imgur.com/mbrqt

Gist: https://gist.github.com/4316646

Looks great with the Monokai color scheme, however, it will probably work well with most dark schemes. The skin was inspired by the visual style of codepen.io and some usability enhancements I've been imagining for a while.
The rendering on the original article doesn't convey it well, but it is compact. It's about as wide as a football player's shoulders. The enclosure makes it look a lot wider than a person on a normal bicycle, but it really isn't much different.

So this is actually an advantage: one of the problems with bicycles is that car drivers underestimate just how wide a person on a bicycle really is and how much room they need. The wheels might be skinny, but add a body and handlebars, and it becomes much wider.
Screenshot: http://imgur.com/mbrqt
Gist: http://gist.github.com/4316646
Some people attribute part of their success to the opportunities a society has offered them, and feel an obligation to share and give back what they received in the first place.
aside from hormone imbalances, why do you care at all about water retention?
A Misguided Focus on Mental Illness
I hear that Flickr is owned by Google, another company which monetizes their users in much the same way that Facebook does. Although Flickr is on record, for now, for saying that they'd /never/ do that to their users, it seems to me that migrating to Flickr is just trading a set of current privacy problems for a set of future privacy problems.
I work in high-performance and scientific computing. Mostly I'm a sysadmin and cluster builder, but I also do a bit of related software development, and I often have to help debug issues with user code running on my clusters.

In terms of background, I started off in physics and gradually drifted into HPC. From the number of ex-physicists I meet, this does not seem to have been a unique experience...
It's nice to see "Uses BCrypt for password storage" instead of hand-wavy "industry standard" or "strong encryption" or something like that.
Judge OKs Warrantless Cell-Site Data in Landmark Privacy Case
How I Created an Automated Twitter News Stream
The fact that the article uses a crappy Instagrammed photo for the picture is baffling
many might be surprised that instagram only keep 612x612 images, so if you were hoping to download full resolution images,. you're out of luck...

that, however, also makes the whole issue moot since the images are so small to be of little/no use in any commercial sense.

flickr's iOS app, by comparison, stores on their server the full resolution image.

#nofilter FTW
Sunk costs are just that... sunk. Spending X money now to (hopefully) prevent spending X + Y money in the future is ideal.
I've recently switched to having all of my energy come from renewable resources, it isn't all that difficult to do at this point.
I see you're point with govt regulated utilities but some governments have de-regulated such as Texas with electricity. I'm thinking there might be a good hybrid solution.
The Digital World Needs a Switzerland
tl;dr:

Use this to download your Instagram photos http://instaport.me

Then use this to delete your account http://help.instagram.com/customer/portal/articles/95760
why? seems on-topic and relevant to me. Maybe you missed the irony.
Great post, would be interesting to see what you have done on the server side to tune performance...
Show HN: Release Cycles - a game that won the Github Game off 2012
Yup. Electric cars are one half of the puzzle. Moving away from coal and towards other sources are the other half.

It's good that one half of the puzzle is mostly complete, as the electric car seems to be here for good. I think moving energy sources away from coal will be the more difficult and time consuming task.
This is a nitpick, and I don't mean to diminish the job you guys have done, but I loathe projects that use metaphorical class/object/script names. I'm the guy responsible for infrastructure in our organization, so naturally, I started digging in to see what's going on under the hood.

So I drill down:

lib...

badger...

core...

Claws and teeth? WTF are these? How do they relate to each other?

When I start reading the code, I constantly have to maintain a mental map between the metaphorical basis of these claws and teeth. It strikes me as useless mental baggage when I'm trying to understand how something works.

I'm probably a little bit oversensitive to this because of an experience I had with a Ruby IRC bot library called Autumn [1]. It's a very neat little library, but I got stuck in a very frustrating pattern. I would get Autumn set up the way I like it, then not touch it for a long time. Every time I circled back to it, I had to re-learn what Seasons and Leaves were. They could just as easily have been named Contexts and Bots.

Sorry for the negativity, because I'm otherwise liking the project. I'm going to give it a shot on our test-build infrastructure!

1: https://github.com/RISCfuture/autumn
argh

> The source code was licensed from another company. If you want the source code, you have to go ask them.

Twice this mystery company is referenced, but never a name is mentioned.
Hand-wavy terms are preferred if the text is end-user facing (and when end-users tend to not be too technical). Of course, a tooltip or "more details" link explaining the real technologies should then be used.
I think his version of spirituality is measuring how well one is interacting and absorbing everything in reality - and reacting to make those interactions better for themselves and everyone else.

I like it, sounds like Alan Watts/absurdism/I shouldn't have slept in philosophy class.
Both would be liable, but:

1) Usually it does not make sense to sue amateur photographer.

2) It may make sense to sue Instagram and their clients, especially when serious money are involved.

IANAL
I read somewhere that all the phone SoCs are under $30 (besides Apple, which is another discussion). I'm sure Tegra 4 would cost more than Tegra 3, but making the Ouya (let's say) 30% more expensive (for now) and 6x faster seems like the right tradeoff.
Does deleting your account actually remove your photos? I've seen some people claim that you can still load the images if you know the URL. Not sure if it's just a CDN that hasn't expired the content yet or if Instagram really keeps your photos after you "delete" them.
They handle large-dimensional spaces fairly well, which is one of their strengths. They are not all that interpretable, though.
check out www.instabyebye.com
built today
Google scans and matches 20,000 tracks for free in the US
Not necessarily. Someone took that photo and posted it to their Instagram filter, spreading the word to all of their Instagram followers. Seems like the author of the photo could have been trying to get the message to Instagram users.
So, how's instaport making money?
I think the interesting question here is "how many folks will simply ignore all of this and keep on using Instagram?" -- if privacy scandals were going to hurt user bases, Facebook would long since be gone. I suspect that any loss of users Instagram has suffered are more likely to have been through the dumbing-down of their iOS app than privacy concerns.
for those who don't live in USA

12k miles -> 19312.1 kms
26 gallons -> 98.4207 liters
It does because instead of directly burning said fossil fuel, you are indirectly burning it. This abstraction if you will allows change or improvement to the source of the electricity in a way that you cannot do with gasoline.
> essentially shuffling expenses around

I think that's a good start. I'm willing to bet low-level disruption could be realized using the existing infrastructure. A one cost, low-monthly rate for ISP and VoIP such as Sonic.net?
> The nature of successful Kickstarter projects is that they are are solving hard problems.

Not sure I agree with that.
Fay looks neat! I'll have to play with it.

Since the whole rules language is custom, we're not using any off-the-shelf projects presently, and to be honest, we've only scratched the surface of what's possible.

Most of what we have in place right now is at the level of type-checking and other expression-correctness checks (we're intentionally more strict about a number of things than JavaScript).

But given the nature of the rules we can do a lot of cooler analysis, like detect redundant or conflicting rules. We should also be able to do interesting analysis for the developer like answer questions like "What parts of my Firebase data can an unauthenticated client read or write?", "What parts can a user authenticated as 'joe' read or write?"

This sort of analysis should help developers reason about their rules and verify their correctness. Honestly, I'm pretty excited about the possibilities. :-)
Google to the rescue!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Tilt!_Pinball
Actually not too long ago Elon Musk mentionned this point, the fact that ultimately electricity does come from fossil fuels in many cases. And of course this is not good.

However, he made some good points:
* Fossile fuel electricity generators (utilities power plants) are often times more efficient than burning the same amount in your car

* Also, all the electric infrastructure needed to distribute electricity is much 'greener' than the system needed to distribute fossile fuels to your local gas station.

So even though the power is from coal, it's production/transport/consumption makes it more efficient than simply using your 'gasoline' powered car.

As much as these are interesting points, I have not broken down the real impacts Elon mentionned, but I thought they made a lot of sense.
Sure, but my statement sort of has an implied time scale (e.g. a human time scale), and your implied time scale is cosmological. Maintaining the rational economic system that we live under requires immense energy inputs, and while it obviously can't be sustained for the next trillion years, it also can't be sustained for the next hundred.
Power-grid energy is tremendously cleaner than a car's combustion engine.
Another thought (as I edit a document that a co-author wrote): if you could mimic tcilatex.tex (which Scientific Workplace throws into any document it touches) in a minimal, nonintrusive way, that would be fantastic. (tcilatex seems to be changing the 'gather' environment so that individual equations can no longer be numbered, for example.)
This reminds me of Virtual Pets, that small electronic toy most kids had in 90's.[1] Interesting to see it an app today.

[1] http://malcolmxpark.org/?p=522
Why Did Government Santa Tracker, NORAD, Ditch Google For Microsoft?
Why don't online businesses start offering privacy-conscious customers the option to pay for their services? This seems like a pretty obvious alternative to paying with privacy. I doubt they would even have to charge much for it to be profitable.

Also: "axiom"? How about "fact"?
Great post, great explanations and my quote of the day:

"Well Matz, I’m a “threading guy” and I have some ideas ;)"
Tesla has a cute map of electricity generation by state:
http://www.teslamotors.com/goelectric#electricity

It looks like there isn't any state where driving an electric actually produces more CO2 than driving a gas car. And that's before you include the CO2 generated from refining oil (which requires a fair amount of electricity).
Maybe it doesn't matter in the ecology department but it very much makes a difference in the geopolitics one.
> Oh Jesus, UI Design has turned into fashion.

Yes. It's been obvious since at least the Web 2.0 push. Rounded corners where everywhere, gradients, 3-D effects, shadows, etc.

IMO, it was like the industry realized that they had the technology to appear less simple and the one message they wanted to shove down everyone's throat was "OMG we're not simple looking!" Then everyone grew up a bit and realized that's a silly approach to take and now we have UIs that are more oriented at being clear and usable.
DSLR-touting photographers are a minority audience compared to Instagram's audience though, surely.
Who has the most plastic surgery?
I had the pleasure of studying under Prof Xindong Wu at UVM as an undergraduate and have some slides from, and maybe even a video of a talk he gave to the UVM Computer Science Student Association. If there's interest I'd be happy to track them down.
Has this been pentested or audited by a security firm?

I think this is awesome and I am glad you have it working. I'll be seriously considering Firebase for future projects.
The other question is why does Instagram (Or Facebook, etc) have the power to retroactively and unilaterally change the terms of this contract?

Why do they alone have that power?
'donate' and 'Ads via Adsie' banners on the right?
No, Instagram can't sell your photos
Can you further explain? Maybe I misunderstood you but if the power plant generating the electricity is equal to the automobiles burning the fuel, in the end, isn't it a wash?

Similar to hybrid cars. They are better for the environment but that isn't that offset by the production of the batteries needed for the hybrid engine?
> many might be surprised that instagram only keep 612x612 images

How do we know that for sure?

They could easily have the full res versions stored elsewhere. They own them, after all.
Zuck’s Sis Doesn’t Seem To Like The Instagram Changes Either
> All numbers shamelessly cribbed from whatever google result supported my thesis.

FTFY
I love it. I like the flat look, and I like simplicity in UIs. I was afraid that flat and simplicity was going to die with Web 2.0, but now with Google and Microsoft pushing simpler, largely flat UIs, that seems to be less worrisome.

There will always be trends, and I'm sure eventually we'll trend away from flat, but I'll enjoy it while it lasts.
Yup, this came up during the uproar when Google changed their privacy policy earlier this year. IIRC this language is needed to let them share your data across services. e.g. showing your profile photo as part of their social search results might quality as "publicly display".

Google's current privacy policy includes the statement:

"We believe personal information should not be held hostage and we are committed to building products that let users export their personal information to other services. We don’t sell users’ personal information."
I, unwittingly, nearly pulled the same scam with Dell about 10 years ago.

I had a new notebook shipped to my house. It cost about $1600 new. The tracking information said it was delivered, so I hurried home to get it as I didn't want it on my doorstep. I get there, and no box. I checked the deck out back (where the UPS guy would sometimes leave things), and nothing. Crap.

So I call Dell, and after working with them for 20 minutes, I have a new replacement on the way. I basically had to "super pinky promise" that the notebook never really made it to me.

10 minutes later, my neighbor comes by and says "Hey, got a package for you!". Holy moly... I just social engineered the poor Indian lady at Dell. After a quick call back, the replacement is canceled.

To this day, I'm both shocked and very happy that Dell made it so easy. I like that they trusted me (a return customer) and tried to do the right thing. However, that trust is so easy to exploit.

I'm not sure what the answer is here. In this case, I can't blame amzn. I mean, they are trying to be helpful. How do you setup a system that's truly helpful w/o leaving wide gaps for scammers? Things like 2-factor auth, sms codes, etc will annoy most non techies (IMO).
Ya, I have no clue either. Pascal was the first language I was originally taught (though I had been messing with QuickBasic for a few years before that). Pascal seemed to have died out in the late 90's.
“What the more realistic discussion is, ‘How do we target people with mental illness who use firearms?’ ”

-- This is not misguided. But criminals break laws, by definition.
The biggest barrier to competition is infrastructure. Both the cost of, and getting the permitting necessary to build it.

If the infrastructure is managed by a public/private entity, then any number of companies could provide service over it.
The degree of controversy is obviously diminished when someone has been successful. But I'll take a stab at the last question...

As for controversy with LEGO's founder:
1. Structuring the company around "doing good" instead of profitability and other more "corporate values". Google gets flack for this to this day, and LEGO almost went broke following this tenet until they revamped the corporate structure to follow profitability instead.
2. Use of plastics instead of wood, deviating from the company's original product base. Surely, that's what paved the way for LEGO, but I'm sure it was somewhat controversial switch in some circles, not least of which were carpenters and some employees.
3. LEGO's many legal battles and use of patents might be construed as controversial in some circles.

More to the point of the OP, it's hard to be a visionary if your view does not in any way shape or form deviate from the norm. Deviation from the norm is what sets the visionary apart, hence it's some times said that visionaries are controversial, because this deviation from the norm more often than not causes controversy in the areas in which they are deviating.
> if the power plant generating the electricity is equal to the automobiles burning the fuel, in the end, isn't it a wash?

No. By abstracting the source of the energy, we can make one change in the method of power generation and immediately make a large number of electric cars "clean". So if we replace a coal plant with a nuclear or hydroelectric or solar plant, then everyone charging their electric cars with energy from that plant will suddenly be using clean energy. This isn't possible with the millions of gas cars out there, because they are only capable of using gas.
Do you want Instagram to sell your photos? Let them know: 1 (888) 966-9371
if the power plant generating the electricity is equal to the automobiles burning the fuel

It's not. Even the worst, dirtiest coal plant is going to be more efficient than your car engine, since it converts much more of the energy (given of as heat) into electricity. Economies of scale definitely apply to power plants.
"...except Content not shared publicly ("private") will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services." from the TOS. Seems interesting to me.
Congrats guys! This is seriously impressive; I'm really excited to finally be able to put out some production code with Firebase.

As an aside, the model you guys ended up with is fairly similar to the one I proposed back in April: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3864430