skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) There are people working on that kind of thing. Start asking around, make your interest known, get people to tell you when they hear something. Look into things like Code for America, Make Your Laws, or Votizen; they're not precisely what you're looking for, but they've probably heard about things that are closer.

2) Build it. Get to know people who are involved in your local town's politics and build community support for such a web site. Figure out what the needs of the various subcommunities are, including the people who don't speak English, the people who have never used a computer, and the like and figure out how to account for them. Once you've got broad support, you can work on converting people into actually using your site.

Yes, it's exactly like a startup. Except that you're not going to turn much of a profit and you can't pick and choose your customer base.

3) Keep in mind that any widely used system is going to become a target for optimization and exploitation. That's what government corruption is.
Sorry, there has been difficulty transitioning from SQLite to PostreSQL. It's fixed now :)
Gas Powered Games Lays Off Around 40 employees
Coding in Feature Driven Development
Oh man. The phrase "Want some rye? Course ya do!" is one of those phrases that is burned into my brain. It is now a fundamental part of my brain's structure. Anytime I hear something even remotely similar, my brain just automatically pulls it up, complete with memetic mutation. Did someone bake a pie? "Want some pie? Course ya do!"

I still have my original copy in my closet somewhere. I should set DOSBox up and see if I can make it go.
If only someone could turn this into a useful UI for dwarf fortress!
Glyphicons Sprite Generator for Bootstrap
That's not the one, but this is interesting all the same. I'm gonna have to dive into this.
Tutorial on how to convert Blu-ray to PS Vita
This is a tutorial on how to convert Blu-ray to PS vita with DVDFab Blu-ray Ripper. DVDFab Blu-ray Ripper is a powerful tool that can rip and convert Blu-ray to any other devices. Learn more at: http://www.dvdfab.com/blu-ray-ripper.htm?ad=hcj
I got seriously pissed because a bunch of idiots got excited about the number 500 and Apple, so this will probably be my last comment on this thread.

Anyway, let me tell you this: I work for a (fairly) big 'global macro' hedge fund. Historically we traded fx and rates, but we started (slowly) trading equity last year. The rationale given to our investors was: "the equity market is full of arbitrage opportunities because it is very much a retail market and people tend to trade out of 'gut feelings'.

We are not manipulating the market. You are, and we are profiting from it. Suckers.
Although one might guess so from the domain, this is not an official statement by Dropbox.

On a side note, I do now understand why Google is pushing user-geneated content to googleusercontent.com.
yep he should have used the word dishonest or flat out lying...
Pet-a-Jar - Interactive 3-D Pet Learning System
Not something I expected to see on HN, but term limits on federal Senators and Congressional members is long over due.
Reading others' experiences and yours is just reinforcing my notion that for any given idea there will be a school of thought that takes that idea to the absolute extreme. If the school of thought becomes famous you'll eventually wind up with a group of people boosting it simply out of some kind of sense of taste.

I am not a Buddhist, but I have some trouble imagining that what the Buddha intended to create was something for people to get all aspirational about acquiring, even if it is a skill rather than a material possession. I also think most things, pushed to the extreme, tend to become their own opposite.
What's reasonable to me is: not putting any politician on a pedestal. They all suck for a lot of reasons.

Unfortunately, you see it on web forums all the time that people have no medium or long term memories: basically they see some politician agreeing with them on some topic and there is much raving about how awesome that person is. Two weeks later, the same politician is against the prevalent view on some other topic, and they are the devil incarnate.

Further there is a trend in these discussions to turn everything into "this guy is from this party, so that party is on my side!" craziness, and piles of confirmation bias start happening.

So I see comments on how various parties will spin any event and posture themselves towards it, with references to a larger political climate - such as the one you quoted first - not as "anti-$PARTY" or "hate", but as a reminder that the politicians are always playing, a "here is the game now" statement.

Similarly, regarding your second quote, calling a politician a clown, is not anti republican anything. The senator has a history of open access, but also has a questionable history in larger civil liberties contexts. The senator posturing himself as a champion of Aaron Swartz because of the open access issue, is just that. We've seen a lot of stuff lately reminding us of Aaron's stance on, e.g. Chomsky and the concept of manufactured consent. This politician is in fact doing what Aaron didn't like in the manufactured consent game. It is a reasonable statement to point it out.
Note: when the framing of this as "Obama's DOJ" and other types of strong political gaming that will occur around this, no one will mention Ortiz has been a US Attorney since 1997, and therefore doing this sort of action for many administrations. It will turn into a discussion of which party is responsible, rather than a reasonable discussion about what should be done about an actual problem.

In this context, it is reasonable for anyone who wants to address the problem, rather than the politics, to take steps in discussions like this to remind everyone that the person in question may in fact agree with them on this issue, but they, and the party they represent certainly don't agree on every issue. This is a giant problem - the thinking that any party agrees whole-heartedly with your stances, or that any given politician has the right answers to all problems.

Finally it should be noted that tptacek gets accused of hating just about every single group that exists at some point. It seems he is in that rare place of "he thinks for himself", and so gets these sorts of "super partisan" accusations about hating the democrats a lot too. Isn't it great when your knee jerk defense of your chosen favorites causes you to attack someone who regularly gets attacked for being too much on your side?
That could be one effect, but another effect could be shrinking of the economy. (eg. cases where someone would have made a good & smart purchase but didn't due to amount of effort involved)
Gruber makes a specific reference of Brushed Metal as what he refers as phony "skeuomorphism".

BTW Braun design, esp. Rams's are the closest to "flat" in a 3d world [0].

[0]: https://www.vitsoe.com/gb/about/good-design
jumbofiles.com has offered 50GB of free storage for years, what's the news?
Is this an issue / problem?
'Jobs? Where we're going we don't need jobs.'

I've always wanted to have a parody shirt with that phrase on it, with a pic of Doc Brown wearing his metallic glasses... above it it would say "Entrepreneur" in 'Back To The Future' text. If I had money I would pay an artist to make that t-shirt design.

Sorry - that's what this "ad" reminded me of.
The batteries used in the Tesla and the 787 are completely different.

And the ones on the 787 are made in Japan so I am sure the quality is extremely high, there is just an engineering problem they didn't anticipate or maybe they outsourced a component that failed.
Politics used to be rather off-topic here and I think it was better that way.

Also, the President is not the correct target for this complaint. All he can do is sponsor legislation. It's your legislators you need to talk to about this.
Hey dan, I will be a bit late for the meetup. I will be arriving at SF in 1st of feb. Can we still meet for a coffee or sth somewhere?
> If we think [Aaron] was treated poorly, we should realize we are condemning the system as a whole, not just the treatment of Aaron, and we should beware of special pleading for this famous person and friend of the famous; our concern should go equally to the unknown, poor and poorly represented person.
Those bots have gotten significantly better the last few years. I would say the best bots today are beating nearly all of the recreational players and even the lower rungs of professional players - but the very best players can still beat them, should they be paying attention to their tendencies. The bots have a big advantage over them though in that they are robots: they don't get tired or hungry and their judgment never gets clouded on runs of bad luck.

PokerStars and FullTilt have worked hard to rid their sites of bots but many other networks have turned a blind eye to them, some even explicitly allowing them - since the bots pay rake like any other player. Every so often the players will revolt and the sites will crack down but the bots always find their way back again.
I did a Master's degree in CS and have absolutely no regrets. It was, without a doubt, the most enjoyable, interesting, fun and educational period of my life.

In the 20 years since I have, at some point, found almost every subject that was covered useful. Most useful of all, though, was the education in critical thinking, critical systems thinking and soft systems. The lessons I learned there are ones I still use every day. Almost every job in technology involves, in some form, solving complex problems in complex, continually changing environments with many participants with differing interests, motivations and capabilities. This has stood me in good stead from my first job as a developer to my current role managing large programs of work.
> if you doubt that, try coming up with some examples of operations you can perform on a value without knowing something about the type of that value.

Interestingly, the fact that this reduces the domain of possible functions significantly is specifically what lends static type systems incredible power, such as described by this author who has never run his own (deployed) Haskell libraries: http://r6.ca/blog/20120708T122219Z.html

For example, the only obvious function that goes from A -> A for all possible values of A is the identity function - and I'm struggling to think of any other non-obvious function that could do the same.

Of course, this only works with highly polymorphic functions, but that's still a huge statement.
Apple stock ends the day at exactly $500.00
I dish out upvotes sparingly, and you just earned one my friend!

That was one of he first games I played on my super-computer (200Mhz) back in the day (along with King's Quest VI)!

The intro music was fantastic, and the live-action videos made the graphics even better.

I had my girlfriend (now wife) follow a guide and talk me through the entire game so she could experience it. The "want some rye?" line is stuck in her weekly-quotes, too!
Glee potentially rips off Jonathan Coulton's Baby Got Back
I would argue that McDonald's is certainly on the leading edge of cuisine. Their logistics and quality control (perhaps you would prefer to call it "consistency control") are impressive and their cultural, economical, and dietary influence is enormous (for better or for worse).
I'm really sorry, I didn't know it caused that because it didn't happen in my browser (firefox) but after the complaints I looked at it in chrome and it does indeed break the formatting. I can not edit my previous post anymore, again sorry for the inconvenience.
Alibyebye?
A great essay on the power of the command line by Neal Stephenson.

http://pauillac.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html
Note that the person you are replying to specified No-Limit, which is much harder. It's been a while but last I looked the Alberta Group could only do Limit Poker.
This post made me emotional about his death. I really hope people read this to understand what a wonderful person Aaron was.
And another new voxeljs module for portals:
https://github.com/substack/voxel-portal
http://substack.net/projects/voxel-portal/
> To the extent that Aaron couldn’t live even with the possibility of the penalties that he might have received at the end of the day, then maybe he should not have been committing acts of civil disobedience in the first place.
Which sites explicitly allow bots?
Click on any of these demos: http://voxeljs.com/#gallery
The first thing I'm going to do when it arrives is figure out how to strap a Kinect to my head.
Care to share one of these "well told stories of amateur investors making literally billions of dollars finding holes in option contracts that the hedge funds and IBanks missed" ?
I'm sure that nobody at Fox will be facing jail time for copyright violation if they did rip it off. "I care about content, but only as long as its mine."
The reason Google does that is to sandbox off possible XSS attacks from user data on google itself.
Mega should sell a Silent Circle (encrypted communication) kind of app that allows users to share keys. Key could be QR code you hold up to your webcam and allows your browser to find the data.
Yuasa stated today it would "take months" to fully investigate the battery fire.

And this is unsurprising. In aviation, you don't just push a fix and deploy.
IF Only, this was done earlier. Any system which requires a health check when the water rises above your head is a bad system.
This is an oblique, needlessly wordy way to say that if you make public all the information needed to download a file, the authorities have the information to issue a takedown order for that file. Absolutely true, and MEGA was not created to solve that problem.

Possibly the biggest point in the case against MegaUpload was that when they received a DMCA complaint, they deleted only the links mentioned in the complaint. (MU had a standard deduplication system, where if a file is uploaded more than once, the new copy is simply created as a link to the original to save space.) Other links to the same content were left up. The prosecutors claimed MU was required to delete the actual file in storage.

MEGA avoids that issue entirely. If every file is encrypted, and MEGA doesn't have the key, they have no way to connect uploads of the same file and remove them en masse. It's true that DMCA complaints can still be issued if a copyright holder discovers a link to a pirated file, but that wouldn't wipe out every other copy at the same time.
I'm not sure if you're trolling? The machines are being removed precisely due to concerns over safety and effectiveness.

Efficiency is the number one reason they are being removed, as stated by the TSA. The backscatter machines produce an R-rated image of the person being scanned. This requires secondary personnel to view the image in a separate area and then communicate back to the primary personnel at the checkpoint. TSA asked Rapidscan to write software which could render a non-R-rated image which could be displayed and interpreted at the checkpoint, but Rapidscan could not or would not.

If you have studied HCI, the simplicity and efficiency of the interface is highly correlated with the ability of the user to complete a designated task. Making the checkpoint more efficient increases TSA personnel's ability to accomplish their objectives.

The UI of the ProVision is specifically designed for 'non-experts' -- it shows a simple stick figure and a bright colored box for any area of the body that triggers an alert. What could be easier to interpret? You can even look at your own results as you walk through.

Whether or not you're a fan of TSA, whether you believe the increased efficiency is simply a face-saving excuse to get the "naked body scanners" out of there, the TSA's rightfully concluded the ProVision (RF, non-ionizing) scanners are a superior product, and everyone should be happier to get to walk through them rather than the X-ray based machines.

Personally I'd be happier not having to queue and walk through any fixed scanner... and they are working on airport designs which will make that a reality.
Alright -- I think I understand your initial point now. Definitely agree with everything you just said. Thanks for elaborating.
Oversimplified.

Especially option 3. What if encryption keys are stored in other website (e.g. forum with links and EK). Sharing is possible, just behind Mega eyes.

Moreover, even if Mega stores encryption keys they might be encrypted using password (and some security questions for password recovery). That way it is only available when user is logged in.
The FAA directive covers this:

http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgAD.nsf/...

Look on page 2 for what's expected to be done and how it'll be approved.
Wikileaks claims Aaron Swartz was a source
There is actually a business behind bot-poker-player.

I have played about 20k tables Texas Hold'em Double or Nothing and stopped playing after 6 months with a profit of 1000$.

I have met quite a few bots and an experienced player will most likely recognize such bots. However it took a while to realize it and I had to look up the stats in order to see it.

The algorithm the bot used was really simple. In poker terms you'd call the bot-player a rock. He bets when he has good cards and will always go all-in whatever happens after the flop.

You'd think that this algorithm is too simple to be succesful but that's wrong. There are two factors that make this strategy profitable:

1. If you play on low limits the players usually play incredibly aggressive and will nearly always lose a lot of money whenever your bot bets.

2. Even if you have a winrate of only 55% (which is necessary to not make a minus, because you never play for free, there is a fee for each table) you will make profit because of the cashback your online poker provider will give you after each month.
This is also why you have to play a lot of tables. The bot played about 800 tables each day, which is insane. However it does increase the cashback and the more you play, the more money will get each month.
It is very hard to make a bot that doesn't do stupid things. > 90% will fail and > 95% will fail to beat rake. Plus the top online poker players are basically half machine.

They use stuff like Hold'em manager and various sites to analyze a large amount of statistics against their opponents. Ranging from performance, games they tend to play and win, as well as storing a local database of all their hand histories, positions etc. they encounter. They also use the software to go over their own play to look for weaknesses with the computer giving suggestions. The bots would be going against something that is not fully human and similar to advanced chess results, they would stand little chance.
Quite common for projects to do that, in my experience. I lean heavily on checkinstall for this sort of thing.
Hey stripe listen. Redirecting to stripe.com is STRESS but its good for users because of security.

The overlay can (and would) easily be imitated by crooks who want to steal credit card details.

It would be much safer for users if you offer a paypal-like service where you store their credit details before hand. If you do this, then this is what should happen.

If the users has already logged in, then the overlay would simply be selecting the amount to pay (which coincidentally is shorter for users) and optionally, which source of fund to deduct from if user has multiple credit cards stored.

Security of funds is more important than ease of use.
It's 2013. Time to read up on the Berne Convention.
Only if you are paranoid enough to think that this is a problem. Of course, there are other problems with installing Linux that are ignored, but that's a topic for another discussion.
Quick correction here: AAPL has weekly, monthly and quarterly options.

Weeklies expire every friday (except on fridays when it is also a monthly expiry - the third friday of every month).

Quarterlies expire the last business day of march, june, september and december.
Transparency with JPEGs on Android, from Square
Thank You to the Hacker News Community
Transliterate Japanese to ASCII in your browser
I'm relatively new here and I realized this quickly.
http://www.amazon.com/Big-Short-Inside-Doomsday-Machine/dp/0...
First of all, i dont think that musk needs any kind of stunt to be in the news. He delivered new technology and vision to the world on multiple occasions. Tesla Motors has already solved the Battery problem long time back so musk can easily help Boeing to rectify their battery issues.

Problem with the companies like Boeing, is that they are too much focused on money and not on innovations which leads them into shutting down.
Hacks to structure Engagement-driven Growth
Great Web Series Content - What does the Web need?
None of them were amateurs.
On the one hand, it's important to realize that Linux doesn't have a single command line. It has multiple possible command lines, each implemented by a different command line shell; each shell, in turn, is almost certainly entirely capable of running on a non-Linux Unix-like OS, such as OpenBSD or Mac OS X.

On the other hand, that's precisely the kind of thing you don't mention in a book aimed at absolute beginners. It's more-or-less irrelevant to people coming from a non-command-line background who want to know how they can replicate the magic the more command line conversant can pull off.

Implying that bash is the only shell and that its command line is the only command line is a lie, but it's precisely the kind of lie that needs to be told to keep the early explanations simple and, more importantly, to get the student up and running with simple examples very early. The command line's main advantage is that you can start doing things almost instantly. Bogging down the early part of the text robs it of that immediacy.

TL;DR: Don't knock this book because it doesn't mention zsh or tcsh in the first chapter. I only mention this because I've seen people do essentially similar things.

A lot of education is based around building a lie to use as a scaffold, and then tearing it down once the actual truth you used the scaffold to build no longer requires the lie to stand upright. The trick is knowing when to tear down the lie.
There's a distinction between "difficult" and "comes easily". A lot of CS is easy for me, I think in part because the underlying thought patterns are intuitive and in part because I enjoy poking at it on my own. I don't think, say, mechanical engineering is particularly more _difficult_ on an absolute scale, but I personally would have had to work a lot harder and develop better learning skills for a mechanical engineering degree, and I would have learned a lot more in the process. And exposed my brain to something I'll likely never get a chance to expose it to now.
Here is the original press-release from QIMR:
http://www.qimr.edu.au/page/News__Events/Media_Centre/Media_...

FYI, QIMR is a government-funded research facility for medical research and is incredibly well-respected here. They have a major cancer research facility attached to one of the best hospitals here. QIMR (with the University of Queensland - another big medical research entity here) also perform their own phase 1 and phase 2 clinical trials.

In short, these guys are a juggernaut of medical research here and it's entirely possible that this will see tangible results in the middle-future.