skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It was licensed from MAXIS; I don't think EA will release the source any time soon.
but as fellow app developers, shouldn't we also be siding with Instagram for their right to protect the interest of their product?

Huh?? How about this instead: as fellow app developers, shouldn't we stop producing shitty ad and 'free' apps and start monetizing them from the start? And how about we actually care about our customers and growing our business instead of the 'strike it rich' corporate acquisition? How about we actually have a solid business model in mind and not sucking on the angel/vc teets and doing the hard thing - self funding?

We all have choices. In an ever increasing world where you are the product, it's up to all of us to make something better. Ads and 'free' are a waste of fucking time. But everyone seems to want their 'free' investment money to launch the next Instagram.

Jesus, I feel like I just recruited for a Stallman seminar. :) Maybe he has a point after all..
it doesn't apply anymore. It will not make a difference.

The continuing difficulty the US military is having subduing militants in Afghanistan armed with relatively unsophisticated weapons suggests otherwise. A subtle, boiled-frog style slide in to totalitarianism is still possible, of course, but the direct approach would likely bring reasonably effective armed resistance.

A nuclear weapon, tank or drone is effective against an isolated base or compound, but when insurgents are mixed in with the population of a city, soldiers go after them with rifles. Very similar rifles are sold at Walmart[0].

That said, the self defense argument is more applicable to a modern society. Unfortunately, it turns out to be really difficult to evaluate its effectiveness. Comparisons to other countries are problematic due to the huge number of variables involved. Every study I've found purporting to offer a number of self defense incidents is severely and obviously flawed (studies with low numbers only count incidents where the police took a report of a crime; studies with high numbers include self-reported incidents of dubious veracity). The number of violent crimes in which a criminal was visibly armed falls between the high and low numbers for self defense, so it is not possible to say whether guns are used by civilians to stop crimes more often than to commit them.

One less-problematic correlation I've been able to find is that states enacting right-to-carry laws generally saw their murder rates fall faster than the national average afterward - often substantially faster, suggesting that the perception that any person might be armed provides a deterrent effect.

I can't even buy a fully automated machine gun.

The Supreme Court has not made an unambiguous ruling on whether or not you can have a machine gun. As the law is currently written, you cannot own a newly-manufactured machine gun as an ordinary civilian. DC v. Heller established a minimum level of protection - that guns in common use for lawful purposes cannot be banned - but not a maximum. US v. Miller suggests that guns suitable for militia purposes cannot be banned. Given that (selectively) fully-automatic rifles and light machine guns are the standard weapons for infantry soldiers, it is very likely that a legal challenge to this prohibition would succeed.

If Amendments can't be passed anymore (practically) then there is something broken about this country.

The last amendment was 20 years ago. That's not an unusually long time. I didn't mean that all amendments are impossibly difficult; I meant that a repeal of the Second Amendment would be impossibly difficult.

[0] http://www.walmart.com/ip/Sig-Sauer-M400-Enhanced-Carbine-OD...
Hawaii is too mainstream, more like the Mariana Islands:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/10/23/401675/-Meet-the-Ta...
Anti-virus software is locking users out of Windows 8
Does anybody know how much the Candle Plan is likely to cost once Firebase leaves beta? Assuming that plan will remain in place, that is.
"A preprocessor to give me Java 8 lambda syntax would probably solve all the issues I have with Java right now." Xtend seems to do this and more http://blog.efftinge.de/2012/12/java-8-vs-xtend.html
At least it's better than:

// set the variable x to 10
x = 12;
'Silicon Valley' on Bravo fizzling out
Sortof. They have similar clauses, but the YouTube TOS (similar to other services like Dropbox, Flicker, etc.) gives them a "worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free ... transferable license" to provide the service. Legally, you need a "license" for somebody's content in order to access it and generate a thumbnail.

This change in Instagram's TOS is different:

Some or all of the Service may be supported by advertising
revenue. To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored
content or promotions, you agree that a business or other
entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos
(along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take,
in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions,
without any compensation to you

Note, this is essentially what Facebook does when you "like" a company's page.
Eh, not quite. Private accounts can't have their photos used outside of Instagram.

>"except Content not shared publicly ("private") will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services.

That doesn't mean they won't be used inside Instagram as ads, however.
it removes the concept of private photos

Maybe I'm just old and cynical, but after seeing how most online services work, I just refuse to upload/share any photograph that I wouldn't be happy seeing splashed on the front page of the newspaper.
Instagram's new TOS[1] state:

To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.

In other words, they're trying to monetize Instagram a similar way Facebook is - Sponsored Posts - your photos and associated data can be promoted by companies without having to notify you about it.

Furthermore under Section 106: Exclusive rights in copyrighted works aka. 17 U.S.C. § 106[2] Instagram cannot sell your photos and it cannot use your photos and alter them in any meaningful way.

Having said that Instagram could have communicated this better as this hasn't helped the situation either.

[1] http://instagram.com/about/legal/terms/updated/

[2] http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html

====

NOTE: Also posted this at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4939663
IOS 6.0.2 for iPhone 5, iPad mini to fix annoying WiFi connectivity bug
Windows unicode support predates the existence of UTF-8 -- so that's great API design for Windows if you possess a time machine.

The ANSI functions merely map to the unicode functions.

In addition, the Windows Kernel is probably similar in API size to the Linux kernel. Of course, that's not nearly enough API for a complete Windowing operating system in either case.
Java 8 vs. Xtend
You can just visit this link and close your account
https://instagram.com/accounts/login/?next=/accounts/remove/...
That's not my point. It's the fact his name was emphasized in the title.
Instagram Will Be Just Fine
From my reading, it sounds like the author was more in love with the idea of guns than guns themselves.
"You don't understand the situation."

I sure do. My point was-- the first time this happens, there will be an outcry that makes this one seem small. At that point, I can delete my account. Maybe the poor sucker who was the first victim can't, but I can. MAYBE Instagram at this point is so malevolent that they give me the finger and retain my photos, but that seems kinda unlikely.

Edit: And I couldn't give a single damn about whether my friends see my visage next to a coke logo if I was willing to photograph myself enjoying a coke. It doesn't inconvenience me or my friends one single bit. Even if they throw my photo into a cigarette ad, I'd probably send them an annoyed note, nuke my account, shrug and move on with my life.
Makers of To-Do App 'Clear' Devise New Virtual Pocket Pet for the iPhone
this-is-not-an-attack: SSH probe username of security researcher?
I agree. Personally, I wouldn't mind paying more for software in return for more control over how my information is used, but I'm probably in the minority. I just assume everything I post Facebook, Twitter, etc, is available for public consumption regardless of what privacy controls they have.

The thing about this model is it extracts a large cost from a very small proportion of the users and the rest get a free ride. If they'd included it as an opt-in service and shared some of the revenue with the users whose photos they sold, it would probably be very popular.
| public domain

That means something specific. It's probably best to use another term. People are not releasing their photos into the 'public domain.'
Instagram's new TOS[1] state:

To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.

In other words, they're trying to monetize Instagram a similar way Facebook is - Sponsored Posts - your photos and associated data can be promoted by companies without having to notify you about it.

Furthermore under Section 106: Exclusive rights in copyrighted works aka. 17 U.S.C. § 106[2] Instagram cannot sell your photos and it cannot use your photos and alter them in any meaningful way.

Having said that Instagram could have communicated this better as this hasn't helped the situation either.

[1] http://instagram.com/about/legal/terms/updated/

[2] http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html

====

NOTE: Also posted this at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4939650
The cake is Not a lie... Happy 25th, Perl
I don't see why ISPs are natural monopolies. I live in Russia and ISPs in big cities are highly competitive.

When you serve high-rise apartment buildings, ethernet is a viable alternative to DSL. I don't see a technical reason why an independent ISP can't serve a few central districts of a city with fiber and ethernet as the last mile (in this case, the last few meters).

I imagine in USA it's ridiculously hard to lay your own cables between apartment blocks and host a few boxes in a common utility cellar; and maybe it's also legally impossible to serve a subset of a city or even a state.
But in Russia each apartment block has 2-3 ethernet ISPs offering Internet plus one DSL. These networks grew organically: they were profitable from the day one when they served one large building and they they added a few buildings a month; the industry wasn't regulated so they didn't have fixed regulation costs.

Now there are some stupid regulations and the costs of starting that kind of business went up, but there are still a lot of options to choose from.

So it seems that by promoting anti-market regulations dedicated to delivering predictable and quality service, you are now stuck with clumsy monopolies. So much for violating principles of capitalism.

Additional beauty: Even in smaller towns or remote districts where there is no competition, the de-facto monopolist still has to look up to the "industry best practices". Of course they may still offer comparatively worse service for the money, but on some level the knowledge of "how the things should be" forces them to develop better network than they could get away with.
4) Study finds the scanners are unsafe, contradicting what the companies selling the scanners claim. TSA sues companies providing the scanners and makes them the scape-goat

Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but one can hope...
I agree, it will always be difficult for the human mind to see his treasures taken away. We tend to easily forget the help we received and assume we did it all on our own. As previously said, it also has a lot to do with the benefits you can see in society.

For me, it helps to think of all the things I have my country to thank for. I saved up to my first computer when I was 10, with government subsidies, which later led to my career. I attended university for 5 years without paying tuition and without being a burden financially on my parents. The government paid my tuition when I went to a US school for a year. They even got me a lawyer when my US landlord sued me for $30,000 for a leak they were responsible for. I'm thankful for my cousin, whose mother died in cancer and father died after having to have his leg amputated (becoming an orphan at 17), and he himself suffering for his whole life from an incurable disease even after a kidney transplant. I'm thankful that he can life a normal life today with no medical debt and a normal job. I'm thankful for the government providing living assistance to my grand mother, who recently suffered a stroke, so that she can continue living at home close to her friends. I guess I have a lot to be thankful for, and I try to think of that when I pay my taxes.
I'm as big a nuclear proponent as they come, but I do wish the media would stop referring to thorium power as "safe" and "green".

Thorium is certainly safer than Uranium-based fuels. It's not 'fertile' so runaway prompt criticality is much much less of an issue... might even be impossible. Its fission fragments are on average shorter-lived which reduces the amount of time it would be a radioactive waste hazard, etc.

But it does not eliminate the issues of radioactive waste, and does not make it impossible to have mechanical accidents, at least as compared to existing Uranium-based reactor designs. That is, many of the passive safety spoken of with Thorium-based reactors are a matter of design and not necessarily of fuel (though Thorium fuel is easier to use in the types of molten fuel salt reactors that are passively safe).

Don't get me wrong, I'm on board with using whichever is found desirable as long as we're maintaining the needed safety/design/construction/operation/etc. margin, but I worry that we're starting to oversell Thorium power. As ever, there's no such thing as a free lunch, there are simply advantages and disadvantages, opportunities and risks.
Ask HN: Where are all my saved stories?
You could check out Taproot Foundation in the Bay Area -- a non-profit dedicated to helping great organizations that are underserved through the general work of tech/marketing/design volunteers.

Another idea would be to enroll in coursework at an American university. Upon graduating, you'd be granted an EAD for up to two years so you can work for anyone (if you wanted to). Good luck!
I kind of agree with you here. Perhaps it's just my natural aversion to mass hysteria, but I think that allowing them to use the photos they provided you with an app, bandwidth, servers, and a web application to create is pretty reasonable. Now, I assume that everyone (including Instagram) is aware that using them in any harming way to the original author can only ruin their business. Sure, perhaps legally they COULD use that picture of me sipping on my latte to advertise extra large dildos, but I'm going to assume that they're aware that would be a poor choice. However, if they want to use the picture of my feet in the sand as stock photography somewhere, go for it. I'd be flattered. I would happily count the $10 I would have made on a stock photo website an appropriate fee to access to their service.
> but I'm guessing you still have to pick the right edition when you go to install it. And if you don't have a retail disc, then you probably only got one of the two architectures.

Good guess. They are separate versions, and only retail includes both.
Programming inside the URL string
About http://afterquery.appspot.com/, a pure-client-side javascript tool that downloads jsonp-formatted data from a given URL, applies a configurable series of transformations, and then renders the result as either a data table or a Google Visualizations (gviz) chart.
There was always an opportunity for an Instagram replacement. All you have/had to to do was make it painless to move
It also uploads before you confirm your posting to make the process faster.
Not since Sun->Oracle totally changed the bug reporting system, sorry. It was long ago.

In the ArrayList case, IIRC (it was years ago) the issue was the now-notorious RangeCheck function. For example, get(index) does this:

RangeCheck(index);
return elementData[index];

get() could be inlined, but because RangeCheck threw an exception if the index was >= size, RangeCheck was not inlined. But if you did this:

if (index >= size)
RangeCheck(index);
return elementData[index];

... you could bypass it and calls to get() would involve inlined code unless the exception was triggered. Same went for set and add. Recent versions of HotSpot have mooted this now.
Coding to Last?
Right to choose, how sharing pictures on instagram should be. (UI mockup)
I think you made the point for me. TCP, TLS, and DNS (with the exception of OpenDNS a good 20 years later) see no innovation or hacking from startups. Compare to plain text protocols like HTTP.
Thanks. I've done it.
If you define security as "how many commercial airplanes have been flown into tall buildings", you're probably right. However, I'd also like to include such measures as "how many items have been stolen by TSA agents from luggage", "how many times does the TSA violate its stated policies", "how many bins of 'potential explosive materials' are stockpiled at security checkpoints", "how many times do red-team tests result in missed dangerous items", etc.

Really I think you could use any measure of security, even one picked out by TSA personnel, and the TSA as currently constituted would do worse than a private contractor reporting to the airlines. (Even if I'm wrong, wouldn't we want to know?) The important thing is that security must be balanced against the other things I mentioned: cost of the security program, indirect costs borne by airports and airlines, and passenger experience. From a societal perspective, we also have to weigh the costs associated with encouraging travelers to drive rather than fly.
The fact that they couldn't find the collision detector implies that the code had no class named CollisionDetector

The fact that it was written in assembly and then C makes a stronger implication that they had no class named CollisionDetector.
Yes, and that's my point.
In the long run, this is not a viable business model. Servers might get cheaper every day, but you're still going to have to pay for them every month your service is up and running.
"Often, however, the same effect is had under the guise of "clever hacks" - look how clever and awesome I am!"

Sometimes I write code like that. Then I delete it and write it the proper way.

Clever code is code you will not be able to understand in the morning.

There is Kernighan's adage

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

Indeed I fear I wrote code like that yesterday (a particular problem that, after talking to 3 other engineers, everyone agreed did not have a simple solution) that I am going to have to debug today. I am not looking forward to it!
Apple iTunes Brings Beautiful Christmas App’s For iPhone & iPad
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4936824
Apart from all the problems Adam Lanza had, and the fact he was, I'm sure, drugged up on a cocktail of psychotropics. Can we stop pretending that the gun killed these people and start acknowledging it was a person who killed these people. Maybe, just maybe, if Nancy was a better parent, and her son wasn't cast away into a land of prescription pills, this would have never happened. We don't need to abandon the second amendment - it's there for a reason - what we need to do is start being better parents, and better individuals to one another.

Disclaimer: I don't own a gun, nor do I want to.
> Once you have 50k employees worldwide, Ubuntu does not cut it.

Tell that to Google.

> OS X might

For LDAP and Kerberos, OS X is much less configurable than Linux and the number of tools is less. So if Linux is not good enough, how could OS X even stand a chance? Because of Office for Mac? It's much worse than the Windows version, many documents are not rendered correctly, VBA works poorly, especially for Excel, Exchange support is not on par with the Windows version, many features are missing and Mac users hate the program.
Unfortunately that site design appears to have been done by scientists. Wow.
Twitter Reveals Feature to Download All Your Tweets
CodeKit — The Kit Language
Firearm ownership comes with responsibility.

Securing those firearms is a big part of that responsibility.

Ms.Lanza failed to secure her firearms.

People died as a direct result of her irresponsibility.
Don't email me my password
100% agree.

It was great how he spent a lot of time on logistic regression before delving into SVM's or Neural Nets - it was much easier to understand the cost functions & regularization for other types of classifiers after having understood those for logistic regression.

My takeaway: if you can avoid adding risk to your systems by using more complicated models, you should.
Happy 25th Birthday, Perl
Ah, but the TOS states using the site means you accept it. You have to use the site to delete your account.
This is my read, too. With median incomes declining and expenses increasing, being close to the safety net of family and established social circles has more value. And the cost of moving must seem harder to justify for a generation of college grads with fewer employment options and a heavier debt load.
In case anyone is in the same position I was, there's an invisible link on the side with which you can advance to the next slide, and you may need to scale down so you can see everything. There are no scroll bars, even if it doesn't fit on your screen.

Well, there weren't on mine, anyway.
I'm inclined to believe this is legitimate research - looking up the IP address seems to check out, it's at least assigned to "Technische Universitaet Muenchen". First probe I've seen that truthfully declares itself as non-threatening.
useful thoughts. it reinforces my view that it's really the intent that bugs me. I've dealt with crap code, littered with comments like "I'm sorry, didn't know what I was doing, etc". The person/people knew they were in a tough spot. In other cases I've dealt with crap code with random comments like "Java sucks. Sun sucks. Everyone using Java sucks and is stupid - Ruby is the only true language, and it sucks that this is in Java" and "if you're too stupid to understand this, quit right now and tell so-and-so to go hire a real programmer".

Just... garbage attitude oozing through the code at every line - difficult to work with.
So indeed it is true! We may color every map with just four colors!

Not true. A map of a country with four or more enclaves (e.g. late 19th century China) would not meet this condition.
Reading this really brought back memories of when I was writing Windows code. It really felt like half of any project was spent on working around the OS, rather than with it.