skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On dialup (western europe) i used to get around 6 KB / s. Combine that with high latency (1 second roundtrips) and a slow machine and 2 minutes doesn't sound crazy to me for a 100 kb page.

And ofcourse, nowadays if i'm on a train my phone will often downgrade to gprs speeds, and it feels like i'm back on dialup having to wait a minute for a page to load.
Yes as it happens, pretty close. Unfortunately British Telecom had a policy of dropping data connections after 2 hours in those days...
Whatever happened to the mosquito laser?

http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20120903/07...
" The future of work consists of learning a living " - Marshall McLuhan
No, it's still more complicated than that.

From Ed's posts, it was originally placed in the store as a promotion related to a Humble Indie Bundle.

http://www.formspring.me/EdmundM/q/406960226210700795
"But as the stations tracks were severely curved, a dangerous gap between the train doors and the platform was formed making it an unsafe area."

Wow, the fear of lawsuits and lack of common sense in the USA stretches back to the 1940's at least!

This gap in between train and platform is par for the course in London, where they have coined the famous term "Mind the gap" and it seems to have worked pretty well :) I guess there are still plenty of cases of people falling into the gap that we don't hear about much (see the london tube employee AMA on Reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/13k9qm/i_am_a_london_u... )
Hacker, Verizon duel over customer record claims
Is this horrible button placement or am I missing something?
SnapChat Privacy "Hole"
Its all code. If a group want a bug tracker system X, and a second group want bug tracker system Y, then build a middle layer system that converts information back and forth from X <--> Y.
Doesn't almost all systems programming take place on platforms built on C? If creating a new machine and new language, convincing the existing systems programmers to move is going to take something very compelling.
Sorry, I didn't notice the typo. It's fixed now.
Military turns to ESPN to help analyze drone footage
Missing British-Somali man reappears in New York court
In my eyes, the most important argument for protecting your data in any case is that you lose the control on how the data is interpreted by anyone. Privacy just limits the possible (legal) perspectives anyone can have on you. Any data you lose can be used as facts, even if they are out of context, incomplete or perceived or stored in a way that distorts the data. Any data collected leads to reversal of evidence. And it is much harder to fight that, because you have to attack the technical aspects on how the data is collected and/or what is wrong with the data (by giving up more information).
If the problem is the discussion about loopholes, than why not just create a second mailing list about that topic and leave the other ones open?
I used to find that Ryanair had a tendency to lowball the aggregators, and then whack on ridiculous extra charges at the end of a tedious and lengthy purchase process. Have they stopped doing that now?
Potato ‘people’ help Boeing test Wi-Fi
This is fantastic news. I love seeing that Flickr is waking from its long winter, where I think most people had sort of written it off as having long been pulled into a vacuum of irrelevance.

I think I'm ready to start really paying closer attention to Flickr, using it more seriously as a service, and having stronger hopes for a proper resurgence.

The Flickr of a few years ago probably would not have even made an announcement like this one. Somebody in there is pushing for improvement.

Flickr has, in my mind, always been "the good guy" on the Web, and this announcement fits that story well. Thank you Flickr for rescuing us from the greedy clutches of Facestagram.

Still, it's a service that's out of my control, and I will also double down on preserving my images under my own control as well.
>One can always hope that this leads to innovation in mosquito repellents and mosquito targeted insecticides.

Right, because we need more repellent resistant mosquitos in the next generation...
Perhaps that particular situation cannot occur, but similar situations can and do occur.

The point of the anecdote is that it is possible to commit a very serious crime without any mens rea or even realization.
Christmas Trees API in Helsinki
But for the slow sites highlighted, I don't understand why client-side performance and bandwidth usage apparently isn't a priority; I mean, their site, their front-end is their primary product, the thing they make money off of. A ten second load time is simply unacceptable; just look at the performance guys at Google, who have and are working hard to shave milliseconds off of page load time.

I'm probably going to offend a few people here, but creating a website without or with minimal performance optimization is just plain sloppy and uncraftmanshiplike work. Get your act together, or get a different job.
Puzzling... Why would someone use this? (no real explanation given in the readme)
The first sale doctrine is statutory as well as judicial. See 17 USC §109 (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/109).

§109 was part of the 1976 Copyright Act, so first sale has been codified in statute for 36 years.

I don't think the Copyright Act suggests that every purchase of a medium containing a copy of a copyrighted work should be treated as a license rather than a sale. Instead, it says (§106) that the copyright holder "has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize" six particular acts in relation to the work, independently of having sold a particular copy (but not, apparently, other acts).
Math is the ideal tool for understanding how nature works. We see math everywhere in nature, like this hexagram. In principle, we can describe exactly how the hexagram got to be there, through math.

But we don't understand why. Can we know whether math yields to nature, or nature yields to math? Does the question even follow?
I had read this, it seems to all depend on what that "blanket statement" was
If it has GObject as a dependency, then it's not designed for "low-level systems programming". Hell, just having a GC more-or-less discounts it due to the associated problems with runtime size and performance[0]. As a general rule of thumb: if you can't write a kernel in it, it's not a systems language.

[0] It is possible to write a systems language with these features, but low-level systems stuff is not what Vala was designed for.
Handbook of Applied Cryptography - free
>Pirates is way too heavy a term here.

Yes, please reserve such defamatory language for nine year olds who download music, and not innocent corporations run by billionaires who distribute copyrighted material for profit without compensating its owners.
Running Joomla on OpenShift for free
Yes, but not that one PARTICULAR situation. Come on people, don't respond like robots.
The C ABI is not great for interacting with scripting languages though, even if it is the best we have right now. For a start there is no type information obtained with dlsym and you basically have to parse headers the interpretation of which is not clearly defined as the C language really defines an API and the ABI is defined by the compiler. Many libraries for this reason do not define stable ABIs and are a pain to use from a scripting language. Hence Python has two ffi modes an ABI interface and a compiler mode.

Now if someone produced a better solution to that it would be useful...
best of luck to them. very hard area due to regulation and compliance issues. you better like being audited.

i just wonder if it's clear to them that this likely will be a national company? scaling this past the US will be very, very hard - this is using patient data, which is highly protected and in a lot of cases is not allowed to be hosted outside national boundaries.

this is my first litmus test for enterprise start-ups btw - does this work outside the US? the US market is big, but a lot of enterprise customers are multi-national and do not purchase completely local solutions.
On Snapchat:The Communication Ephemerality Creates
I have used it but I haven't actually used it.
Neither. Nature is described by mathematics, and conversely, nature is a kind of manifestation of certain mathematical ideas.
Actually it's worse.

Canonical made pirates of their customers, too.

They downloaded and used a piece of software which they didn't have a license for.
these are just the tip of the iceberg of what you missing when coming from C# going to Java. Lambad, LINQ and var please!
Historically, the "turtles all the way down" approach has not been very successful outside of niches. Lisp, Forth, Java have all been used for OS's that never seemed to go anywhere.
That doesn't make much sense to me. I can see passing on something because it is expensive (maybe), but if I buy something which is expensive, I don't value it less.
I know plenty of people who are incapable of improving themselves.

A lot of people manage to leave the education system without this basic human trait. The scary part is that they had it when they went in.
Guilders have been out of circulation since the euro was introduced.
Apps like 1Password sell an app, the online sync can be through whatever service you want, 1Password already got paid.

Evernote/LastPass/Xmarks make their money selling the service, why would they use DropBox instead and essentially put themselves out of business.

Also, didn't Dropbox just buy some music company? Expect music locker based antics soon.
I know where REST came from, my point is that - as far as normal people are concerned - HTML web apps are.. apps.. not APIs.
I wasn't at all saying "nationalized health care is precisely as bad as invasive TSA screening." I was solely playing with how the parent comment was worded.
Have you considered Scala? Same platform, but a much more modern and expressive language.
>There are practical reasons for government monitoring of communications. Bad people have existed long enough that it's safe to assume the trend will continue.

Bad governments has existed even longer.

Especially some of them like, you know, the one at constant warfare with other countries, the nuclear-bomb dropping on civilians one, the McCarthyism and J.E Hoover one, the still having the death penalty in 2012 one, the bible yielding one, the BS marijuana prosecutions one, the Rodney King one, the Kent State shootings one, the world leader in incarcerations one, the BS WMD pretext one, the Watergate one, et al.

>Listening to their communications is the best way to stop them, or at least to ensure that they can't act openly.

The second phrase contradicts the first. They quickly assume they cannot talk openly and they don't, so listening to public, unencrypted communications has no use at all. You might catch some naive idiots that way but never the well organised big fish.

Plus, it's all a pretext. It was never about the terrorists, it's about the government having more control, and especially the secret services and such inventing more responsibilities and work for themselves, to ensure bigger budgets and role.

>Very few innocent people will ever know that they're being monitored, and the risks to those people are very small.

Define innocent. In my eyes, John Lennon was bloody innocent. And he has a ten thousand pages FBI file. Same for Martin Luther King. Same for thousands of activists, politicians, and change-makers.

When those people are trapped (and throughout history government has shown the will to trap them and stop them, by any means necessary, from blackmail to imprisonment), all of society is harmed and trapped, because change is resisted.
I, on the other hand, totally love matplotlib
Every insurer like this, however, is US focused, and a lot are per-state. The only corner cases are US citizens overseas and visitors in the US.

Also, to a first approximation, the world healthcare market for private insurance is the US.
New journal of computational linguistics appears, encourages CC-licensed content
I don't think GitHub's hosting of free repositories costs them that much. As you said yourself, it is just essentially free hosting so the largest cost will probably be storage (which is pretty cheap anyway now) and then the much minor cost of Push/Pull/Clone etc bandwidth and processing.

Think of it less as a free service and think of it more as marketing. I have a few free repos which I used to open source some of my personal modules; however when it came time to select a source revisioning service for work, I remembered how easy GitHub was and went with their payed service. I am fairly sure us now paying for our repositories offset itself and my and quite a few other free repositories.
> but I just can't let anyone access my personal photos, my school work, my statements, etc.

They shouldn't be on Dropbox in the first place. What you put on Dropbox is essentially public - be it for their admins or for law enforcement agencies who don't need a warrant to access your dropbox.
No sane person can deny the great things that have been written in Flash when JS in the browser was nothing - I wish I had ridden that wave.
Love that you put in date ranges in Hipmunk, since I am usually not sure which days have the best deals and am not strongly tied to returning/leaving on a certain day
it's nice as a brief history of inexact cartography (something that, as the author notes, is coming to an end, at least as far as earth's surface goes)
Has anyone tried PiccyBoo? does the same but Android only.
>Hypocracy implies no desire to change. The US did, eventually, deliver on its promises. That says to me that the ideals were aspirational, not hypocritical.

Did it though? Or was it just forced to change some things due to mass protests or because it found other ways to get the same conveniences?

I mean, who needs slave labor when you can have an industrial revolution, factories and tractors? That doesn't mean that the old slaves are not equal -- you then have Jim Crow laws, segregation, 70% of prisoners being non-white and other methods of control.

Plus have you talked with native americans, say, in the South Dacota? They have some interesting things to say about the country "delivering on its promises".
EJBCA - Open Source PKI Certificate Authority
I posted this before, but unfortunately, right after uploading my project page Github went down.
Or perhaps we need MORE tests with control groups in both showings to reach a conclusion, instead of getting to the NON-explanation of the "law of big numbers" that it was ..."bound to happen somewhere, man".
Is Debian really 100% free? The Linux Kernel itself isn't 100% free, it has proprietary blobs. Sure, they can be removed, but I don't think Debian removes them by the default.

Anyways, I do agree that Debian should be the distribution the FSF should support instead of gNewSense.
Privacy, or a lack of it, requires an additional failure (corruption, or ignorance) to become a problem.

So it's not privacy, it's ignorance and corruption we should fight for/against.
While watching the video/trailer for the most recent Humble Bundle, I was put off by the games this time around.

The one mentioned in this article for example, looked like a basic Flash game. So as an outsider to this indie gaming world, I can understand why they might have superficially rejected it - it's probably a great game if you give it a chance.

Just thought that someone should point this out because the comments have so far been the opposite.
Making burgers is manufacturing. There are better examples though.
Yeah, let's just do nothing and not even thin out this generation.
"...and get the very best of the guilder-investing angels in their round."

I can understand the reasoning but are the 'best' of this pool as good as those from the dollar-pool? Wouldn't the really good/useful ones be trying to enter the dollar-pool anyway? (NB I'm not aware of the back-story yet)

Edit: Just read both pieces and I agree that they're both right. I see this as a difference between Angel vs VC. Angels sometimes get involved because they can imagine having a useful impact on their portfolio. If an Angel takes a tiny slice of a company which also has VCs and 'YC valuations' then they may feel they have no real 'clout' or ownership in the company (not everyone wants a board seat). Even though the economic argument may be to take-whatever-you-can-get that doesn't make it fun or worth your time.
Hacking Joomla Plugins to Rank No.1 for 'Payday Loans' in Google UK
I haven't noticed that recently. I'd guess because in July they changed the prices advertised to include the extra fees:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18718556

Also last month they were forced to remove the 'you have to pay €12 to pay with a Visa card' policy, so now the fee is 2% for all cards. However, they now make the admin fee mandatory however you pay :)

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/holidays/article-2240292/...
>Economic growth means that society is gaining wealth in aggregate. And so long as the pie is growing, it is always possible, in principle, to allocate the gains in a Pareto-efficient manner (that is, in a manner in which everybody gains) through the political process. Therefore many economists consider the "distributional" question, concern about who gets what, to be of secondary importance to their field.

They would, now, wouldn't they? Since they are advisors and lackeys for the rich elites, and they get their bones from the short end of the Pareto principle...
Sounds a lot like Apple's Reminders App. I made a few AppleScripts. In the middle of work when I have an idea/task and don't want to interrupt my workflow is press command-spacebar. ( This invokes LanchBar ) press "r" for Reminders.app, press space to get to text entry mode, and enter in whatever the task is.

That is for a basic task, it will get tossed into the app. I can add things like "Go get the mail today @2:20PM", and it will enter in the correct time and date and remind me with a default reminder popup on screen.

In addition to the pop up on screen it is also listed in the Notification center, which is always a three finger swipe away on the trackpad.

You can even have it reminds you when you arrive or leave a location using geofences. ie: "Remind me to get oranges when I am near Safeway" and when I am near a Safeway it will remind me.

I use it for taking out the trash and bringing the cans back in. All this transfers to my phone as well, without any intervention on my part. So if I am out with a client, I don't want to be bothered by certain alerts. Reminders will know because I am nowhere near the trash cans.

Of course, there is the actual Reminders.app where you can get very granular, enter in large amounts of notes and additions, set it as a repeating item etc.

Entering can be done on your phone vie Siri entirely as well.

It may be a little overboard for some, but it is what I have been using lately, and has served me pretty well. A heck of a lot of these items used to be a battle of "should they go in my calendar, or should they go in a todo", now, only appointments go in my calendar, birthdays, things like that. Any action that is a one off, or even repeating but not really something that I would ever mark on a calendar or need to know abbot after I am done with the task, that goes through this new system.
Yah it is.
Looking for the best present in the world-150$ bugdet
Blast Away!
Google Creative Lab’s Steve Vranakis: Technology should be both a tool and a toy
Blog comments 2.0
As shardling pointed out[0], the use of "pirates" was editorializing of the title by new user kotakufanb who apparently didn't observe the guidelines ("... please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait") as the word "pirate" appears nowhere on the article.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4959153
Agreed. Even when I have to write Java these days (you can't write Hive serdes in Scala), I wrap it in an SBT project and write all my tests in Specs2. (See e.g. https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/tree/master/3-etl/hive-...)
String in Switch statement

I don't see this as an improvement. A good practice is to use Enums for case/switch. Using String is harder to maintain.
I'm Portuguese and this has been on the news for a few months now, it's quite scary to think of the consequences this can have when it reaches the mainland, especially in the USA, where over 200 million people live.
Of course knowing we could be observed has profound effects on our behavior. I wonder if any studies show it.

This looks a lot like what religion can induce, and I would really like to see what happens once you ask people to "confess".

I was about to say bad things about this all, but I won't. I'm not sure who's listening in, and who knows who will, tomorrow...
Improve your iPhone app development skills this Christmas
I've recently been looking at it too, and trying to find clarification of the retrieval fee. It seems there's a lot of (potential) misinformation, though I'm still trying to verify that.

My guess is the best idea is to upload to S3, using whatever tools you can for that, and then archive from S3 to Glacier using the AWS lifecycle rules.

See previous discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4411536 and http://liangzan.net/aws-glacier-calculator/ - my concern is that they don't seem to match Amazon's Glacier calculator at http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

http://alestic.com/2012/12/s3-glacier-costs also seems relevant.

So be sure you know what you're getting yourself into, otherwise you could end up with thousands of USD in billing.

If you get clarity on the retrieval fee, please let me/us know.
Looks great. Light UI, responsive, low prices.
Fragmenting the CSS doesn't sound like such a great idea, as you will have additional requests on each page? But I guess you had that in mind.
Potential privacy breach as iOS 6 bug enables Javascript..
>They think its an automatic profiling change because we are often away from home and switch the router off.

Why switch the router off? Just leave it running, it's not like it uses much power...
Well, you not counting something I want to do with code as freedom does not make it less of a freedom.
That, and also, that by limiting my ability to limit other users' freedom you are in fact limiting my own freedom: I may not use your code licensed that way. That's way I go with MIT, BSD, whatever, and leave GPL folks to play their hypocritical games with semantics, definitions and freedoms.
> There have been countless times when I wished I could
> have just used a String in a switch statement. When I
> hit this block when coding, I’m forced by Java to refactor
> my code to use a primitive datatype in my switch statement

I tend to use an enum instead, as it keeps the meaning clearer. For his example:

private static enum StringFields { ADDO_QUAYE, BOATENG_NICOLAS, DEFAULT }
try {
field = StringFields.valueOf(fullName.replace(' ', '_').toUpperCase());
} catch(IllegalArgumentException e) {
field = StringFields.valueOf("DEFAULT");
}

switch (field) {
case ADDO_QUAYE:
System.out.println("He is the SRC president");
break;
case BOATENG_NICOLAS:
System.out.println("He is the SU president");
break;
case default:
System.out.println("He is no body!");
break;
}
Azul Zing Java Virtual Machine Widens Scope
In my view it's exactly the opposite:

(-> (california) bay-in city-on) ; "The Californian bay's city"

vs.

(city-on (bay-in (california))) ; "The city on the bay in California"

The former ("->") starts with what's fed into the pipeline, the latter starts with what you get out of it. In addition, "->" avoids the nesting of expressions regardless of the number of steps, which might be useful in some cases. But both styles have their place.
That is the essence of the contradiction. We ultimately don't want jobs, we want the results they create. There is no law written in nature that man must work 9 to 5 to live.
I've just downloaded it and the version on there at the moment isn't family friendly (my kids are 5 and 7) and both love Minecraft. I was just clicking through and heard "It's f*cking enormous".
you can commit code from your phone but not change the TODO list?