skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bullshit. If you're talking about the American people, the political will is there in spades. But thanks to gerrymandering and the filibuster, their voices been successfully nullified. The GOP holds the House by a wide majority, even though their members in it received fewer votes than the "minority" in opposition. And while the GOP has a numerical minority in the Senate, they still control the chamber since it (alone in the developed world) runs on a self-imposed Supermajority rule, not a simple majority.

These two departures from basic democratic control have freed the legislative body from proper accountability to the people, rendering the will of the people increasingly irrelevant to the operations of the government. Saying political will "is just not there" like this is some sad but immutable fact of life ignores the reality of the situation: America has suffered an unofficial coup. We are now suffering under an intrinsically illegitimate government that preserves its power thanks to very clear, very precise structural problems that have been magnified enough to effectively hinder the legitimate will of the people.

These are facts, and they are neither debatable nor acceptable. The situation must resolve itself and it must do so in favor of the people.
As I recall, the first to exploit this was Joybubbles; however, Tuftes may have been the first to build a blue box. The information on MF signalling was freely available in 1960 when it was published in the Bell Tech Journal so it is conceivable that there may have been others who developed this in parallel.

For those who are interested in more on Joybubbles, then there's a documentary being made about him. More info at http://www.joybubblesthemovie.com/
Here you go: http://blog.markwatson.com/2012/07/my-simple-hack-for-using-...

From what I know, lein's policy is to make adding .jars as hard as possible.

Update: just found this other method http://www.pgrs.net/2011/10/30/using-local-jars-with-leining... which looks cleaner - just a bit harder (see the last comment).
Oh, but you can... http://www.pokertableratings.com/buy-hand-histories
Aaron Swartz: A week later & still more questions then answers
The point is what should not be the punishment, namely locking him up with actual violent criminals, thus in turn subject to actual violence, rape, etc.
The article claims that "[human speech] would be the highest level language of all if anyone could write an interpreter for it."

What a load of nonsense.

Human speech is a lousy language for precise expression, and often fails even for human-to-human communication. This is why we invented mathematics.

I stopped reading at that point.
Did you literally create an account just to say that?
The site does not load for me, here is a google cache link:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:d8XynYp...
I stopped reading after "; or why C++ is dying".
Any specific one you would recommend?

Most of the ones below seem somewhat too basic for me.

http://www.amazon.com/Paul-J.-Nahin/e/B001HCS1XI/
Should we be making an example of Ortiz and Heymann?
This was the best app created at #PenApps
Downloading it as I speak.

Not everyone knows how to push using those apps
and I hope this makes life simple. :)
The Internet in Cuba is characterized by a low number of
connections, limited bandwidth, censorship, and high cost.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Cuba

Madness is exactly the word the Castros were aiming for.
I didn't even finish the test. They could've picked more ambiguous letters.
Maybe the guy despised corporate bullshit, but entered a Discover-sponsored sweepstakes or something similar that had a like requirement.

Or, he had to like Discover's page to be able to post comments there bashing their corporate bullshit.

There are a number of explanations, and deeming Facebook to be faking likes based on "I don't think my dead friend would've liked this page" is a little tenuous.
Advertising is just the most obvious example of something which other networks - such as cable television - charge the content provider to deliver to their customers.

I am not a lawyer, but the implied contract argument doesn't seem to hold water. Google and the ISP aren't in privity - unless of course there is a contract between them such as the article provides. I'll leave aside the applicability of common law principles to France in regard to the theory of implied contracts required as a premise to the argument.
Top 20 apps (full list at https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/pennapps-spring-2013...) and their universities are:

Artichoke	University of Michigan

Astoria	MIT

better auth	University of Michigan

Cartesia	University of Pennsylvania

Cloud Sequencer	University of Michigan

facewash	Kent State University

Hamilton	Carnegie Mellon Univ

Hot Cocoa	MIT

HTML5 Virtual Game Controller	The University of Texas at Austin

Inventory	University of California Berkeley

Skye	University of Waterloo

Skynet Command	University of Pennsylvania

SmoothRide	University of Michigan

SocialContribute	Penn State

SoundSculptr	Bergen County Academies High School, The Dalton School (High School)

SparkTab	Lehgh

TakeNote	UPenn, UMich, Lehigh

virtual perspective	ETH Zürich

Webtube	University of Pennsylvania

ZeitPlanner	University of Pennsylvania
>That's one option, the other is to approach Netflix, Google or whatever and negotiate.

Negotiate implies a free market. There is no free market for access to an ISP's residential customers. They have a complete monopoly over the ability to send packets to those people, resulting in a market failure that requires government regulation to avoid monopoly abuse.

>Raising prices on everyone because xx% makes Youtube Orange's largest bandwidth hog could make the rest of your customers mad.

Do you have some evidence that xx% is actually simultaneously some small percentage of users and still use enough bandwidth as a small minority to require a nontrivial price increase for all customers? Raising prices on all users in order to pay for expansion to meet demand created by a substantial majority of users is not exactly unreasonable. Especially if the remaining minority is offered the chance to buy a less expensive connection with insufficient capacity to stream video, since they by definition don't want to do that anyway.
We tried that. Our country has had great difficulty with central banking in the past, and today. Entire books have been written on this topic, if you wish to learn more, I'd start with the history of the First and Second bank of the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Bank_of_the_United_State...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bank_of_the_United_Stat...
Gailees lists his facebook on his profile: https://www.facebook.com/davefontenot

Let me just say, David, that you're a cretin. You're why my female friends don't want shit to do with geek culture. You're poison in the well.
Why 'Flat' Interfaces Are Effective
And I might sound too demanding but a small icon on my Mac's menu bar will surely be handy.
The question is: can I opt out of this, or am I obliged to deal with this as long as I'm a Facebook user. I personally find this is pretty bad. I don't want my friends seeing my past likes from several years ago and seeing me endorse something stupid that I liked before (on the front page). Do I need to go through my likes and curate it all the time? It's different if it's just on my profile because having it in the news feed suggests that I liked this thing recently.

I think I'm seriously 1 step closer to just closing my Facebook account. Also, look at all those nasty ads on the right side. I use ad blocker so I don't see any of those, but looking at his video, that is definitely noisy.
Rather than manually configuring iptables, save yourself some time and use UFW (the Uncomplicated FireWall) https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/firewall.html which is far easier and just as secure (and reduces the risk of misconfiguration).
Using some of this code, I think screen-stitching can finally be easily used by devs in mainstream apps.

We actually wrote unit tests during a hackathon. :)
Ben Horowitz: We Like Dropouts, Insane Ideas, Tiny Markets, No Way To Monetize
C'mon man, that's not at all what I said. I don't understand your perspective from your comment because you didn't make any sense.

your comment that i replied to:
"That's clearly not what happened in this case."

your comment as it is viewed now:
That's clearly not what happened in this case.
<i>Sorry, caught a call</i>
This case didn't get picked up by or delegated to a loser; it was run by one of the most senior computer crimes prosecutors in the country.

Oh, you "caught a call"? When the phone rings you just hit "reply"?
what does this have to do with geek culture?
It's a little amazing, when you think about it, that a lot of people think you need to spend $100 million to build software to manage grades and attendance.

Especially as geeks in the startup world often build far more complicated software on budgets quite a bit smaller than $5 million.
Corrupt, heavy-handed governments

Corrupt, heavy-handed governments inflict wealth on themselves, but necessarily inflict poverty on most of the common people in the territory they control. Unlike most Americans, I actually lived in a third-world dictatorship when it was still a dictatorship, and I know that the process of the coming people gaining freedom from dictatorial rule is not an easy process. Yes, people who seek freedom and fair administration of justice eventually find that they gain prosperity too, but in the short term it can be frightening to seek freedom when the secret police can suddenly assassinate or imprison regime opponents. I am glad that the dictatorship I used to live under (that of Taiwan) had fallen by the second time I lived there, and I hope the dictatorship of (for example) North Korea falls soon, but the condition of many common people around the world is not aptly described as "self-inflicted."
The most important steps are:

1) Making sure SSH only accepts public keys. This removes the possibility of a hacker guessing a password.

2) Use fail2ban. This rate-limits SSH attempts.

3) Keep your packages up-to-date, especially Web applications.

4) Use a default-deny firewall configuration, and make sure your services bind to the localhost interface. Letting the outside world directly talk to your database, Redis and memcache lets someone see your application data without any security checks, and this should only be possible for the application itself.
The East Asian economic miracle is all about the state in control of the banks (printing).

Read Quest for Prosperity -- the private/public construct of distinction is a complete myth that is exposed by the titans in Asia and Latin America. The more we stick to the myth in the US, the longer it will take for us to have the same degree of success. Innovation comes not out of motive for profit, but ou of need and desire and capability.
Leiningen's package management is built upon Maven's package management. This means that you can add artifacts directly to your local maven repo (typically located at ~/.m2) to have them used instead. I do this frequently by checking out a project and running `mvn install` or (if it's already a Leiningen-based project) `lein install`.
I agree, it's not at all clear why one should do any of these things.
Something like TL;DR ... maybe ESL (English Second Language) at the top would work.

Though starting that practice means someone will eventually come on hacker news and complain that putting ESL at the top is redundant because they can tell from the writing that the person has English as a second language ;)
Wow, have you looked at C++11? It brings in everything you love about functional languages and improves on it.
Wires smaller in diameter than light waves boost solar cell efficiency
I'm not sure if this article is about this, it doesn't sound like it, but a lot of web apps provide their development team with the ability to impersonate users as it's a great way to debug issues a user may be seeing.
My first iOS app is on the app store
I'm confused by this. The large banks are (arguably) more efficient because of economies of scale, eg. less duplicated management, purchasing power. So it's probably not a good idea to limit the size of banks which is what this article seems to propose, because that'll make banking more expensive.

But the flip side is: why don't we just let megabanks go bust? If they go bust, the government steps in, briefly nationalizes them, sells off the parts (the shareholders get nothing, of course), and life continues. As long as this period is kept as short as possible why is there any danger of "meltdown"?
Libevil: iOS Function Patching
we have to wait for the app to be published :/
Applaud a great start! Add iOS support and a chrome extension and reverse direction as well and I'd use this all day every day.
One interesting question that i haven't seen mentioned too much regarding creativity, is:How can we use computers to increase our creativity ?

Because definetly they can help with creativity. Just looking at a discussion threads around a subjects can expose one to various mental models. And searching google for interesting stuff(not directly related) is also very helpfull.

I wonder though, are there other useful techniques ?
>So basically your position is binary: Either don't allow your site to be indexed by Google or accept that they are going to profit from your content.

Nonsense. If you want to put "no access" in robots.txt and then go to Google and negotiate a fee from them for removing it, you're perfectly entitled to do that. But you know perfectly well that the value of search traffic to your site is worth more to you than the value of indexing your site is worth to Google or any other web search engine, so any such negotiation is not going to end with a payment from the search engine to you.

And passing a law wouldn't even change that. All it would do is create an explosion of transaction costs as every single website has to negotiate with every search engine to not pay to be included in the index. Which if anything would only cement Google's dominant position in web search forever as any of its smaller competitors are bankrupted by transaction costs. Unless, of course, the law allowed some kind of standard technological means of allowing a site to specify that it doesn't require any payment to be included in the search results... like robots.txt.
Oh the irony of this site being down....
This article appears to directly contradict its main point, by claiming lisp is the most exclusive language, which everyone would want to use, yet almost no-one uses it.
I'm pretty familiar with this problem space having worked in both a state department of education and a school district.

I would not expect this to be a long term success. Virtually every district of reasonable size starts with a homegrown and maintained solution and ends up going with one of the big guys for lots of reasons.

1. Security/liability. You have to have pretty damn good systems here and definitely want to point at someone else's assurances and contract that allows for recourse.

2. Rapidly changing business requirements. This is everything from state and federal reporting requirements to the expectations of end users. It's hard enough to maintain these core systems and keep folks around who are good enough to do it. Now deal with changing technology (oh you want a parent portal? Oh, you don't want to use Flash/Java for iPads? Oh you want ...) and you really can't attract and retain the kind of software people you'd want to continually redesign, refactor, rebuild, extend, and expand. Development on these systems never stops, which is why it's often easier to just drop off the old and buy the new hotness. It's also why scale is so helpful with these systems. If your users want this, someone else already requested it or will shortly. A lot of the improvements in these systems happen because of how many users they have and can be made because the cost is spread across all those users.

3. Interoperability with other systems. Most of these systems are not omnibus catchall solutions for the entire business needs of a school district. That's probably for the better-- the folks who try to do that end up doing it very poorly. But you will want your HR and payroll to talk to your student information system that should probably talk to your assessment system that should talk to your curriculum management system that should talk to your special education IEP case load management system, etc. It's hard to do this and even harder when your solution is built to work in one context. Standards here have only barely helped. Middleware is expensive, shitty work. Again, not easy to attract killer talent and it is a constant need. The big boys have everything else built and just focus on middleware and have probably already worked with and written what's required for all of the popular systems you are using in these other areas.

This is just the smallest fraction of reasons it's a huge PITA to write and maintain these systems. That's not to say that it can't be done but it is to say that this is not a small, well-defined problem space with just a few distinct end-user types and functional requirements that can be built once and then monitored and tweaked over time. Not if you want to do the real stuff that makes collecting and maintaining all of this data worthwhile.
There is giter8[1] for Scala. I wish they would join forces to make an universal JVM project templating tool.

[1]: https://github.com/n8han/giter8
Indeed. For those of us who have been in this industry for years, the whole situation feels Condescending Wonka-esque.

"Oh, you're creating a zero-knowledge cloud service? Tell us all
about how revolutionary it is."

(I cofounded SpiderOak in 2007.)

I'm glad it's happening though. The industry needs more awareness of privacy and more choices for privacy respecting products. This will undoubtedly grow the market for cloud services with meaningful encryption.
Playbook - Share your hookups with your bros (at PennApps)
The meetup is back up with it's 200 users, so doesn't seem to have been 'deleted permanently'.
Smaller banks survived this crisis with relatively few failures but that has not always been the case (e.g. Savings and Loans crisis). However the fact that they can fail is critical and a sufficient reason to break them up even if it won't make them better.

Banks that are too big to fail are too big to be allowed to exist. Government protection only for the commercial/retail part is an obvious but insufficient requirement.
For those not familiar with Leiningen: it is a command-line tool that handles management of project settings, build settings, dependencies, deployments, debug console, packaging...and a whole bunch more. It is trivially extendable, and a large number of plugins already exist. If you're familiar with Ruby, it's the equivalent of the "rake", "gem", "rails", and "cap" commands all rolled into one. In short, in this programmer's opinion, Leiningen is reason enough on its own to go and learn Clojure!
Strategery - it's an iOS game that a guy here showed a few years back. I'm addicted. That's the only one though that I think I've ever used for more than a few months.
An open letter to Xcode
"C has retained its popularity because the answer to the question what is the lowest level language I can code in without using assembly has always been C"

What a way to miss the point! There are plenty of languages between assembly and C. C wins because it's about as high-level as you can get before you start incurring run-time penalties.
this hack is fucking amazing....still completely lost as to how they pulled this off!?
thx! will fix that :)
Slightly OT, rather than Chrome to Phone I use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/qr-code-tag-extens..., so I can send a URL to anyone in the room with a smartphone. Admittedly they have to install something like Google Goggles first
Anyone else think the inventory app has some serious potential?
Yes

BUT it's also a form of "insurance". If there's a suspect a bank won't be able to honor deposits, bank run ensues, THEN the given bank can't honor deposits obviously, because no bank works like that today, that is: self fulfilling prophecy

It's a necessary evil (for the customer's sake)
Have you had a lot of people that aren't you try to break the living hell out of it? Especially those not familiar with the usual workflow? Especially those that take pride in destroying things?

If it can pass that, and you're confident going forward from there, then I would think it's ready.
The tense doesn't work in both the past and present. That's why you had to switch to the past tense to make your second point. Translating it back to the present gives "Facebook says that you like something that you do not", which is what the OP is complaining about.
Wow that was really cool. It's too bad the pictures started breaking when he was documenting his time in North Korea, all of those would be really interesting to see.

Odd how easy it was for them to get in. Flash a couple passports, visas, and fake like you like the great leader and you're in.

He commented that the route he took is no longer an option for tourists - not that it really was in the beginning, but the travel agency where he bought his tickets was informed that that one was no longer available. He said that when asked who recommended the tickets and where he found them, he responded with "we found them and bought them". I wonder how the travel agency got involved. (After reading more - he contacted the travel agency late enough for them not to alter the travel plans, but soon enough to talk to the Koreans to set up a guide).

I never knew how isolated South Korea was because of North Korea (no road/rail transport to the rest of the world).

That was pretty cool, and ridiculously in depth.
I believe by AI, he actually means oracle.
Feds Hounded 'Net Activist Aaron Swartz, Says EFF's Parker Higgins
Errata: of course are "more than 1200 millions" instead "more than 1.2 millions of people"
If you had done any serious dealing with colors you would know that there are multiple ways of converting to grayscale. I personally know of three: average, lightness and luminosity. All three are ways of converting to grayscale and every good image manipulation software (GIMP, Photoshop...) will offer you all three.
I picked the first one because it's the one that is easiest to understand and the one that almost everyone will be able to come up with.

> You can't convert from RGB to grayscale by simply averaging the three values

Of course I can

Edit: I just googled "RGB to grayscale" and this was the first result:
http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/08/24/algorithms-convert-...

I recommend reading it
As usual, xkcd has something related to the topic: http://xkcd.com/1162/
Ask HN: Can anyone recommend a cheap Android tablet?
I'm just wondering if anyone can recommend a cheap Android tablet around £50.

For instance: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/NEW-7-CAPACITIVE-MULTI-TOUCH-ANDROID-4-0-ALL-WINNER-A13-TABLET-PC-NETBOOK-EPAD-/400337692134?pt=UK_iPad_Tablets_eReaders&hash=item5d35fc65e6

I only want to use it for things like checking my emails.
When you're logged into Jonny Wonny and you're scrolling down your News Feed, how come a post from VICE is there (3:19 & 3:16)? You had to like VICE in order for it to appear in News Feed. So your whole argument is false.

A friend could have liked a brand years ago and it could just be showing in your News Feed now, it doesn't have to show based on when they liked it.
The sums of debt some of these banks got into swamped their share value, and in some countries were a fair chunk of the GNP. But I certainly wish we had removed shareholders from any bailed out bank.

One issue is some banks were on the border on if they needed bailing out, and shareholders might prefer the risk of catastrophic failure than taking a bailout which would lose them their shares.
Temporary nationalization of banks was suggested in 2008, but the idea is not politically viable on the right in the US.
Yes, brilliant.