skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Without belittling the realization of ones own mortality which is a very healthy thing, the question here isn't whether a police state "makes us safer" (it probably does) but what level of trade off between civil liberties and privacy we are willing to make to be safer.

Since being safer is infinitely possible and impossible to measure, we should start and end the conversation with civil liberty, not with safety. Do you want the government to try to perform stings on would-be terrorists, potentially entrapping otherwise innocent people? I'm ok with that. Do you want a government agency to have sweeping search and detention rights with cause or warrant? I do not.

As others have noted, anecdotal evidence is the enemy of reason when cases of actual terrorist attack are so infrequent versus the frequent antiterrorist measures taken "at" you.
I fail to understand why anyone would actually try and have an argument on there. But it's humorous nonetheless.

"Who needs movies when you have tuxracer?"
America could still go over the cliff — and take the rest of us with it
most of the course(CodeTV and screencasts) are downloadable in SD/HD formats, but trust me, SD has got excellent resolution, and so don't download HD formats.

Another worth mentioning point, go to CodeTV and download if you want it for offline access.
They are equivalent, but the latter version is more readable.
My internment camp is named the Seattle, Washington Area network. There is snow falling on the cedars here.
Contentious bills have close vote totals because they do as much damage as possible while still passing.

I think it often works the other way in practice. To secure votes on contentious bills they have to slip in riders (ie pork) to secure specific votes. Therefore the fact that it is contentious means that they have to make it worse.
Areas like this is where 20++ technology will come into its own. The discovering that combine the chemistry, physics and biology of the the modern world is simply astonishing. Bonus points to those that recognize and utilize it.
Its not immediately clear disproportional representation is a positive outcome.
Why the Chromebook Matters
You mean like App Cache?
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/appcache/beginner/
>They did not have issues with his application of the Sherman Antitrust Act or relevant precedent, though.

I think they did. I'll give you a quote from the actual appellate opinion: "To establish a dangerous probability of success, plaintiffs must as a threshold matter show that the browser market can be monopolized, i.e., that a hypothetical monopolist in that market could enjoy market power. This, in turn, requires plaintiffs (1) to define the relevant market and (2) to demonstrate that substantial barriers to entry protect that market. Because plaintiffs have not carried their burden on either prong, we reverse without remand."

Naturally there is a context to that (and they didn't reverse everything the district court did, but some things) and you're invited to read the entire opinion if you're interested.[1] Incidentally, if there is one thing I've found Wikipedia to be regularly wrong or incomplete about, it's the content of court opinions.

Moreover, findings of fact are a distinct thing from conclusions of law. "Findings of fact" are usually decided by juries, but sometimes by trial judges when there is no jury, and it means deciding what actually happened, not deciding what the law is. For example, a finding of fact might be whether Microsoft did actually pressure OEMs not to bundle Netscape, but not whether or not having done that would be a violation of the antitrust laws, which would be a conclusion of law rather than a finding of fact.

(I should point out that we're having a nice theoretical discussion here and that this is not legal advice, and if you need legal advice you should consult an attorney.)

[1] Here is one freely available copy of the appellate opinion I found through Google: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/msdoj/msft_ruling.html
I'm guessing Eric Schmidt -> Google -> YouTube -> Gangnam Style.

On my plane back from Detroit to Beijing, there was this nice old man going around shaking everyone's hands. When I saw him, I realized that it was President Jimmy Carter. Now what sort of secret mission did he have in Beijing I wonder? At least now I can say I shook hands with a president!
I trust in the pragmatism of the financial elites to prevent a collapse. More pressing are Spain and Italy. But again, pragmatism over dogma. No one can win if the casino is closed.
Microsoft is part of US military and weapon manufacturers like Boeing, and doing projects for them. Most of MS research is related to military if you look close. Also now it is protected from any acquisition.
Putting aside the problems of districted voting, is this naive attempt really that bad? Why is it a problem if I am in a different voting district than my next door neighboor, we both still go to vote, then have our votes evaluated by the system resulting in a winner. The goal is to make said system as fair as possible (while maintaing the concept of districts). I do not see why physical boundries are relevent at all.
As cduan pointed out, this algorithm might have a bias favoring urban or rural voters, which is a problem.

I have an even simpler algorithm that I think solves all problems of bias. Say you want a state to have N districts. Create N district labels (probably the numbers 1 through N). Now assign each voter in the state to a randomly selected district. For each district, take all but the largest contious regions and re-asign each voter within them. Repeat until all districts are continuous.
Or we could move to a popular vote.
My Month Long Windows Phone 8 'Experiment'
Set up the system so that the politician's best chance at winning comes from doing as good a job as possible. This means providing as few oppurtunities as possible to game the system.
Are We All Being Fooled by Big Data? - Mike Moritz
I'm not even sure that the solution is technically sound, as it appears to ignore the possibility that multiple people live at the same location.
I think it would be awesome but it will never happen.

You claim a value for your patent. It is treated as property and subject to tax if transferred from one entity to the next. The catch is that you can only sue for a certain percent of the claimed value. You can change the claimed value of your patent, but then you must pay a tax as if that was earned income. You would have to be allowed to set your initial claimed value of the patent at whatever you wish. Kinda the same way that when you start a corporation you can decide how many shares you have (like 1.000 or 10,000 or 1,000,000). But once that is set you can't just change them around without registering the change with the state.

In theory it would punish people who transfer patents a lot, but have almost no affect on people who register or hold onto patents. Since trolls thrive on shell companies, it would be very expensive to constantly transfer high-value patents.
I don't know. But Maemo didn't also happen to be the most popular desktop Linux distribution. And it was effectively abandoned at birth by its creators, which I have a suspicion Canonical is not about to do.
They would likely have the support of the party which is being dissadvataged by Gerrymandering. Combine this with the fact that (I think) this type of solution has a natural advantage based on its merit, and passing it does not seem as unlikely as you think.
Generally aren't these usually the more junior engineers who don't have any sense of responsibility and want to exercise some authority or senior engineers, the best days of their productivity now lie behind them?

It's usually a symptom of a bad company culture to be honest when the people making hiring decisions feel the need to "spread" it around so as not to take the blame for those few bad hires that will inevitably happen.

As engineers we all know that bugs happen and shrug, feel bad for a bit and move on. When someone else makes a bad hiring decision, these same engineers grab the pitchforks demanding to know why they weren't consulted.

It's kind of silly when you think about it as human behavior is much more complex than software. Hiring is hard.
What academics (eg Microsoft Research) mean by "innovation" is "what lets us publish papers".

What ordinary people mean by "innovation" is "what cool new things can be made available that noticeably change Grandma's life".

Most academic work is USELESS for this because it ignores too many constraints, making the market hostile to it. Richard Gabriel did a piece on this, called "Money through innovation reconsidered".

Don't buy academic hype.
I've always seen "garbage collector" used as a generic term for an automatic memory management system, not a reference to the specific algorithm used to do it. It could be a tracing garbage collector or it could be using reference counting. Where are you getting the definitions that parent would benefit so from committing to his memory?
I am a 95% electronic banking user. I have a wallet that fits my 2 cards and basically nothing else. I have had cash probably 5-10 times in the last year, and usually spend it to be rid of it, or lose it.
I was completely stumped when traveling in the US recently. There is absolutely no way to avoid cash - the amount of tipping that is required makes you a bit of a tosser is you don't do it, and the US is very much cash based. Busses, shops, taxis etc, all cash. I was only in California, but it was a very big change handling cash again, after most my life without it. It felt sort of unsafe...
Isn't having laws that prohibit putting ethnic groups together in an algorithmically generated way discrimination in itself?

Sorry I was unclear, it was the other way around. If you can, you have to keep ethnic groups together. So, for instance, if you can put all of Chinatown together, you have to.

The political effect is kind of complicated. On the one hand it gives members of those ethnic groups a chance to win office. On the other hand it creates very safe districts. Given the way the math works, creating very safe districts for your side leads to improving the odds that the other side will win more seats than their share of the popular vote.

Activists are very focused on the first effect and tend to ignore the second. Furthermore politicians encourage this because they like safe seats. But the math is inescapable - an effective electoral gerrymander is created by creating a modest number of ultra-safe seats for the other side, and many more safe but less extreme seats for your side.

So all black seats that guarantee black representation in Congress leads to seats that vote 80%+ for the Democrat which in turn leads to Republicans electing more than their share of the popular vote.
> even if MS doesn't pick it up -- or implement it well -- someone else might.

Unless there are potential patent problems.
The majority of people will use the default OS.
I want my computer to be my own personal property and not the private property of a corporate tyranny like Microsoft or Apple. I will never take away control over my personal computer by installing a proprietary program and there are many others like me that will never go away.
Heroku now supporting Python version switching, and Python 3
Garbage collection seems to be a synonym for automatic memory management for many people. Some even see RAII in C++ as GC. I guess GC is so meaningful for many programmers as it is really convenient, that it has become the main word for AMM; as Google is to searching the web.
Well, no there are several good cases where storing a time in UTC as seconds since an epoch is wrong.

It's a common mistake.

The first usecase is Birthdays. For most purposes people do not want to store the extract time and date of their birthday in the original time zone. Apple do this, much to my annoyance - it means people's birthdays change as you move around our planet, and that doesn't align with how they work in the real world. If I'm born in Utah on 1/1/1980 it does not mean I celebrate my birthday on 31/12 when I'm in Australia.

The second usecase is recurring meetings, particularly with global participants. The mind bending case is where you have DST in some or all of the TZs. The only remotely correct thing you can do is keep the meeting at the same wall-clock time in the TZ of the meeting owner (9am meeting stays at 9am). Most apps don't, and there is no perfect answer (consider a participant in a different TZ - the meeting changes to a possibly conflicting time).

Sometimes storing the absolute time/date is correct. Other times storing the original UTC offset, as well as the time in UTC is. But most of the time, yes, store it in UTC in whatever form you prefer.
Linux users love trashing everyone else for not using Linux, but when it happens to them they get really offended.
The 1.35 million is just the absolute difference between all votes cast nationally. The result of all of the adjustments you could try to make, taken to the limit, is the 233/200 margin of Republican control of Congress.

Incidentally I credit the win in the popular vote for Democrats to a very good get out the vote operation for Obama. I am sure that future incarnations will specifically target every marginal Congress seat as well.
Bravo, sir. Bravo.
Flavor in Curry Favored by Some for Joint Pain
Turmeric, a bright-yellow spice best known as an ingredient in curry, is gaining scientific interest as a natural alternative to arthritis medications.
Some interesting mathematical background, on whether formal convexity measures can work as a gerrymandering metric: http://mathdl.maa.org/images/upload_library/22/Polya/Hodge20...
Zurmo, an Open Source CRM
Milky Way Contains At Least 100 Billion Planets, New Analysis Finds
Is PerfectAudience going to look into CPC billing in the future?
Many (most?) hospitals still use fax machines to get medical records from outside hospitals. There's not really a good alternative yet. Radiology studies are still mostly sent on CD or DVD. We're actually working on solving a small part of this problem -- see claripacs.com. Due to FDA and liability issues, we're going after the research and education market before tackling the clinical market.
Paneles solares, flexibles y ultrafinos
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/340850/python-3-0-dict-me...

Views are lighter than a full copy of a list, yet behaves like a list (eg: supports `key in view`).

[edit] Also, this seems to be the relevant PEP:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3106/
Every time I hear about the TSA trying to expand to other places such as this, I can't help but think they are like the Westboro Baptist Church of the government agencies.. and I believe that's really saying something.

That's right TSA, congratulations on accomplishing the impossible and becoming more hated than the I.R.S.

If you only would use your power for good and not evil.
What Is Powering The Internet? | Infographic
As far as the relevance of physical geography, I do see some benefits for the original idea of representatives actually representing an area in Washington. That's more likely to happen if boundaries are drawn along somewhat coherent lines that delineate cities or neighborhoods. On the other hand, those concerns are clearly not the main thing that goes into drawing today's gerrymandered boundaries anyway, so maybe losing that notion for geometrically drawn boundaries isn't a large price to pay.
To thwart hackers, firms salting their servers with fake data
Airless bicycle tires are available, and they are relatively cheap:

1) Husky Airless Street = from $19

2) Amerityre Flatfree = from $35

http://www.bikemania.biz/airless-no-flat/husky-airless-stree...
>The piece of paper guarantees you a minimum of 60,000 dollars per year in America.

If only that were the case, it would be a much better investment.
It's closer to proportional rather than disproportional representation in this case. Latinos make up about 30% of Chicago's population, but they're spread out so they wouldn't form a majority of any single compact district, so wouldn't be able, as a community (if indeed it's a coherent community), to send a representative to Washington to represent their views. However, if you connect demographically similar areas, then the community gets representation closer to their actual share of the population.

Of course, we could just use proportional representation outright and achieve a similar result, or elect candidates from multi-member districts and a slate of candidates (e.g. put all of Chicago in one district, and elect the top 4 candidates). But that's a more radical reform that's less likely to happen.
"This machine is a server. Do not power it down."

Reminds me of the notes I would leave to make sure my Mom didn't turn the computer off (or make a phone call and thus cut the dial-up connection) when I was doing something as I left for school. /backinthegoodoledays

Really impressed at this hack, but I think the coolest part of these Github blog posts is just how useful and powerful something as simple (relatively) as Hubot can be when connected to a communication medium like Campfire.

Food for thought for more hacks, I suppose.
While we are at it, why not move to a delegative system. Every voter can directly vote for or against any given bill. They can also 'give' their vote to any other voter, who can vote on their behalf or pass the vote to yet another voter.
At any point in time, you can change who has your vote, or overrule them on a given issue. (And the person who you gave your vote to can do the same if he delegated it to a third person, and so on down the line.)

This has the advantage that if there is a bill that you care about, you can be sure that your vote goes the way you want. And otherwise, you can give your vote to the politician whose views most align with your own, and politicians have power directly proportional to their support.
Ask HN: What's your programming setup?
I'm always looking for ways to make my programming environment and workflow more efficient. So what setup do you have that you think makes you work as efficiently as possible?

Right now I do all my code editing in OSX, and have a VMware virtual-machine running Ubuntu Server. I have a script running that syncs any changed files from OSX to the virtual machine, so I can run / test in an environment as close to production as possible.

Right now I'm looking into creating a base VM, to copy and store in the cloud somewhere, so I never have to setup again, And I really would like to be able to run it in the cloud and access it from anywhere, but that seems too expensive right now.
Right, but you can't raise them too high or else people go and buy their own damn car, thank you very much.
The inspiration for the sign, outside the obvious purpose, was the note on the first web server:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:First_Web_Server.jpg
I disagree.
Only inventions that need a lot of money to be"invented" need any form of legal protection.
You'd have to prove that without patents the incentive for R&D would be diminished to the point where it would no longer take place.
Should a Cash-Poor Entrepreneur Give Up Control to Keep Her Start-Up Alive?
A fundamentally simple programming language: Om
Ah, I see! Deleted my old comment. Nice :-)
Thanks for the great explanation, Sir widget.
Just in case this saves someone's time:

phantomjs-node uses ridiculous hacks. Not being rude but I think the author was drunk when writing that. I ended up wasting quite some time when trying to customize it.

You do NOT need to use any hacks whatsoever to run dnode on phantom, just browserify(https://github.com/substack/node-browserify) the shoe and dnode modules and use the example code at https://github.com/substack/dnode .
I know the current monetization for videos is low. That's not for lack of audience, its because advertisers have not really switched over a lot of their ad spend to online video.

Look at this video from HuskyStarcraft. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfBKFLrUQU4. That's his episode celebrating his 700,000th subscriber. 700,000 people subscribe to his channel. He posts several videos a day, usually about 20-30 minutes in length. Each video gets hundreds of thousands of views in a day, and even more over time. There are entire cable networks that don't have that kind of viewership, and this is just a highly-caffeinated guy broadcasting high-level StarCraft 2 games. There are thousands of Youtubers just like him.

There's a huge audience worldwide on Youtube. It and sites like it are already the future of broadcast, and the traditional networks are way, way behind. They're going to be less and less relevant as time goes on.

If you take an existing show that, as I already said would likely be cancelled, and move it to Youtube there could be an amazing response.
ASK HN: Startup Event Calendar?
Looking for any Silicone Valley event calendars.
Also, let's not forget that Google's core products push the web (and technology) forward, whereas Microsoft is primarily enterprise-focused. Since R&D is defined as the development of new products and creating new knowledge, Microsoft would have to spend approximately the equivalent of Google's entire $30bn budget to be operating at the same frontier.
Google Said Set to Resolve FTC Antitrust Probe Tomorrow
That could easily have been a software limitation in that program rather than hardware limitation.
Submitted yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992803
Without them you wouldn't have the medicine.

How do you prove that?
I disagree. Here my statement: Without patents you would have cheaper medicine (but I cannot prove that either)
If you're suggesting this isn't a good reason to want to work for GitHub I think you're missing the point, which is that GitHub seems like a fun place to work in general.
NORTH Korea...
Congratulations, the two of you have aptly demonstrated why these things are never implemented.

There is more than one way to algorithmically draw district lines. The different ways will benefit different people. The people who benefit from a particular method will then conspicuously be found arguing that the way that benefits them is the One True Way, and hire a bunch of lawyers and the RIAA's copyright mathematicians to come up with plausible-sounding arguments for why they're right.

And since neither of them is actually "right" because there is no One True Way, it immediately degenerates into a cynical political battle to choose the best automated gerrymandering algorithm for one's own political party.
The problem you're describing a solution to doesn't exist. Gas included in the rental -- Each car has a fleet card that can be used to fill up at most any gas station.

With ZipCar, the rule is you should never leave a car with less than 1/4 tank of gas, and if you do, you're hit with a $20 fee. I think the GP is upset he had to spend time filling the tank back up.
Ethanol and Biodiesel are NOT the same thing. At ALL.

Ethanol is grain alcohol. Biodiesel is (quoting wikipedia) "a vegetable oil- or animal fat-based diesel fuel consisting of long-chain alkyl (methyl, propyl or ethyl) esters"

When you buy ethanol you would certainly not expect to be delivered biodiesel and if you were, it would be unusable for your needs. You can't run an ethanol engine on [bio]diesel, and you can't run a diesel engine on ethanol.

Edit: my real point is, if they were reporting ethanol as biodiesel, or vice versa, it's hard to see how it could be a "mistake."
While I agree with what you're saying, I think that a good argument in favor of cases is that when the phone finally DOES break, you're replacing the phone. But when your case gets all scratched up and broken, you just replace the case.

-Naked Nexus User.
Solve the fuel quality problem by reimbursing fuel 100% (and usually directly paid by zipcar), but then offering a $1-2/gal bounty for the low fuel situation.
Jeff Bezos at 30
Fitbit, why can’t I have my data?
I wonder what would make a non-Ubuntu OS user who does not care much about "open source" to choose this over Android.