skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all, I agree with patio11 here... this doesn't belong on HN because it's just a bunch of political stuff. Secondly, there's a lot of misleading stuff here-- either half-truths or things taken completely out of context.

Start with "the prison system in the United States is a profit-making industry." Well, yeah-- parts of it are. Except the parts that aren't. There are both public and private prisons in the U.S. So already we start with a half-truth.

Six corporations control virtual all American media"... except the parts they don't control, like the web site you're reading right now, or local cable access programs, and so on and so forth. Yeah, it sucks that there has been so much consolidation in TV and print. But I think the News Corporation scandal shows that the media are far from invincible.

Yeah, the FBI and CIA did a lot of questionable stuff, especially in the 1950s. But guess what? There really were a lot of Soviet spies in the country at that time. Communism had a great appeal, especially since very little of the truth about what was really happening in those countries was known in the west. Even the Great Famine in China was pretty much unknown in the United States. In an age before the internet, when all the Chinese newspapers were censored, how would they know? How would they know about the bloody purges in Russia either?

He mentions MKUltra. I'm surprised he didn't mention Tuskagee syphillis experiment. Yep, these things happened. But they're hardly unknown, at least to people who went to high school. A blog post titled "if everyone knew..." discusses things that... everyone knows. Ooh, ooh. How about Watergate? That'll embrass the Americans. Shouldn't we bring that one up too? After all, nobody knows about that one.

I'll skip the anti-Israeli stuff, since it's basically just yet another fact-free polemic. What have we turned up that would be shocking "if everyone knew..."? The fact that some guy on the Internet doesn't like Israeli. Wow, man. That's like... shocking. Mind: blown.

The rest of it is the same kind of tripe. Mean-spirited anti-Americanism masquerading as scholarly discourse. I love the "footnotes." Putting your "a href=" in a giant block makes you more than just a blogger-- you're a Scholar, Imparting Deep Knowledge. Even if most of it is wikipedia links and links to newspaper editorials.

It's interesting that he takes aim at the Fed too. Usually that's the province of far-right nutters. But what we have ourselves here is an equal-opportunity kook. Joy.
Can you share your numbers and how you came up with $2000? (genuinely interested)
what a pile of buzzwords
A better recommendation would be 'don't ship JavaScript to oldIE'.

IE 6-8 have terrible JavaScript engines, JavaScript is going to do very little to help you deliver a good experience to users stuck on those browsers. For websites, let these users round-trip to the server for form-submissions, links etc. Progressively enhance with JS for IE9+

If you have commercial customers stuck on oldIE and have to deliver a single-page web app, your answer is Chrome Frame (and yes I've had experience asking customers on corporate networks to install Chrome Frame and had no objections/problems yet, as long as you're up-front with them).
http://www.metasploit.com/modules/exploit/windows/browser/ie... was a cool one, but really, almost EVERY vulnerability requires JavaScript for the heap spray, even if the bug is somewhere else. Of course, running plug-ins in web pages is even more retarded than running JavaScript. By the way, images can spray the heap too, but, for some reason, they are not commonly used.
You forget the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. His level, minus enhancements, based on $5 million fraud, (according to the indictment) yields a sentence of 57-71 months plus 2-3 years of supervised release (no computers) plus a fine. That's a good deal more than, "a couple of years."
I used an XML DB in a project back in the early 2000s.
The database was populated by running an in-database XQuery that pulled data across the webs in XML. When people visited a web site, XML was queried back out, then XSLT translated it to (drum roll) XHTML. I even experimented with XForms to capture data from visitors, which had the benefit of directly using the DB schema to validate data.
All in all, it was pretty nifty when you got all the pieces working together properly. Sort-of XRX without the R.

As to reasons for their "death":
DTDs and XSDs were a serious PITA.
XML data types didn't map closely to standard relational DB
types; this wasted space (which was costly at the time), and made it difficult to interact with a relational DB when that was necessary.
The XQuery query planner was braindead. That was really the nail in the coffin.

All in all, they're just document stores, and those are more popular than ever now with the whole NoSQL thing.
As the author mentions, XML seems to have won out as a document format... I wonder what sort of DB we could put all those documents into. One that could support storing those documents without a bunch of translating to other formats, and had some method of running queries over them (preferably in a standardized way), and output the data in a similar format.
Too bad XML databases are dead, one of those would have worked pretty well.
iOS development != App Store success. This would actually be my advice for anyone starting out:

1. Make an app that looks awesome as a reference (and don't expect anyone to ever, ever use it)

2. Get a job as an iOS contractor

3. If you have enough experience and a good idea, make your decision between a reliable cash flow and becoming an App Store cowboy. But only then.
Trust isn't binary. Backdooring or exploitably bungling the deterministic parts of the CPU without getting caught is much harder than doing the same for the RNG part. Black box RNG's are notoriously hard to evaluate.
Like Apple makes no money, nobody buys its products, etc.?
Can we stop this "innovation" bullshit? Do you even know what you want (gimmics don't count). What kind of innovation do you expect from Samsung in its next phone? From Google in next Nexus? Coffee maker and kitchen sink? Or do you want them radically changing UI, just because someone got bored?
How often do you want them to innovate, once a month or once in three monts would be enough?
Breaking habits to components to find out how to change them
It's not "the administration" property either.

And when you come to think about it, how can an university be someone's property? Surely you can own buildings, but how do you own education and knowledge?
I went to a similarly prestigious uni (Imperial College, London) and nothing was ever left unlocked. Even leaving a bag unattended in one of the labs could throw a security alert spanner in the works.

Then again at the time we had the IRA bombing London and we were told specific bomb threats against the uni from idiots every few months or so.
The parents are now responsible for at-risk youth and Aaron was supposed to carry the mantle of Thoreau and Gandhi, who's blame-shifting now? You allow an arrogance on the part of prosecutors not to be held to the same standard you assign these people, for why couldn't they see they were battling such a force as you ascribe to the Swartz family, including Aaron, and relent under the threat of acting on the wrong side of history? After all, by your estimation, they themselves left an at-risk youth and the possibly-next Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the lurch. Perhaps without this wisdom of proportionality they are not competent to be Federal prosecutors, especially if by your terms they are acting in the tradition of evil that the aforementioned precursors fought to transcend.

But lets not battle hyperboles. Maybe we can simply agree that while the actions of Obama's Department of Justice and Secret Service were not entirely to blame for killing Aaron, they certainly knowingly helped supply the weapons, and at any rate that ultimately the interests of justice absolutely were not served by their efforts. Maybe we can also agree that the Department of Justice has schools of bigger fish to fry these days.
United States Attorney (USA) Ortiz. Dear god never Attorney General (AG) Ortiz I hope. Not ever.
Would be fantastic, if instead of having to provide individual colour shades for the button border, shadow, etc, I could just provide one overall colour and all other ones are derived from that.

Apart from that - a very useful tool indeed!
This just feels like mob mentality to me. Someone messed up, albeit badly. I would guess the guy feels bad enough as it is without needing to get 25k people to kick him when he's down.

EDIT: I guess what I'd really hope to have seen (not being a US citizen) is some petitions to get the laws/system changed rather than looking for someone to blame.
Erlang for Android
IDA Pro shows branches/jumps as a graph, which I think is even better: http://www.hex-rays.com/products/ida/pix/5_plain_graph_view....

When not in graph mode, it'll show jump arrows in the margin: http://www.chip.de/ii/146940129_e98df3e41d.jpg
> Basically don't use 2.0 for the web.

That depends entirely on what you're building.
"If you read Reason, you're immediately suspicious of laws with people's names on them; they're often more about PR than about well-thought-out policy changes."

What's Reason?
Interesting. Keeping my fingers crossed that the download script will be released next. I would love to read through the code and see for myself how much actual "hacking" was involved.
Understanding memory management, and how things work "backstage" is always good but implementing it it's boring and very error-prone. Let's just use ARC, it's ready and it works amazingly well.
Facebook builds weapon to challenge Google
To date, sorting through your Facebook friends could be a frustrating task. Although the site has a search bar, there has been no easy way to quickly cull contacts based on specific criteria. But Zuckerberg was testing a major new feature that Facebook would announce on Jan. 15 — one that promises to transform its user experience, threaten its competitors, and torment privacy activists. It’s called Graph Search.
Federal prosecutors are appointed, not elected.
People learn from mistakes and become better.

They generally do not improve from moral/character flaws like being a power-seeking career-ambitious-to-the-exclusion-of-all-else asshole political climber.
I already heard this end it ended really badly for a lot of customers because then the company changed. I don't remember the full story or the company but now I would not do it.
Fine, and so the case is complex and expensive. If the accused truly are guilty, then they will be afforded due process of law and then convicted. The case may cost twice as much for the government to prosecute, but the large company will forfeit any profits derived from that criminal activity.

Besides, the DoJ consumes an absurdly low proportion of the Federal budget [1]. Even if this law doubled the DoJ's budget (impossible; they still have to pay for facilities, support staff, etc.), it is a worthy price to pay for a safeguard of the liberties we've enjoyed for nearly a millennia.

1: http://www.justice.gov/ag/annualreports/pr2012/section3.pdf#... -- page III-18. Total appropriations received: ~$27 billion, $18 billion of which went to supporting the goal, "Prevent Crime, Protect the Rights of the American People, and Enforce Federal Law". The total of Federal expenditures for FY12 was $3,538.3 billion (http://www.fms.treas.gov/annualreport/cs2012/finhigh.pdf).
Yet another Vim "distro" for the lazy teenager who wants to jump on the bandwagon without any commitment.
It is a bit tricky on the liability shield for a corporation. If the entity (LLC/corporation/etc.) makes a bad investment, the creditors cannot come after your personal assets (assuming you haven't put up a personal guarantee). If one of your employees has an expensive accident while driving for you, exceeding your insurance, they can only take the assets of your entity. BUT if you are driving that company vehicle and hit the school bus, they can sue you personally for your personal mistakes, even though you were on company business.
Aaron Swartz & A Culture of Denial: Depression & Suicide in Tech
IDA Pro is crazily expensive though, and probably not worth it unless you're doing reverse engineering / exploit finding for a living. For example it's a bit overkill for just looking at disassembly to see what code the compiler has written, which (I think) is the common use case of objdump.
Phonegap apps, mobile web, intranet apps when you know that everyone will be using IE9 or Chrome...
I don't see the need for this tool, instead I like jsfiddle much better where you can edit the source directly instead using these controls. Generated CSS is not the best either.
Please 'know' before taking sides. It's easy to comment, and opine, than to know. Here are some insights from Wikipedia:

US has had the highest incarceration rate in past decade [1]. Why so? Does it mean more percentage of citizens are lately turning into what one would qualify as a criminal, a thief or a murderer? Or otherwise.

Quoting from Wikipedia:

A. "The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population."

B. "imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid"

C. A graph showing a strange spike: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_incarceration_timeline-...

etc. etc. etc.

Also consider these - is it is profitable for a section/group of people (read prosecutors or ip enforcers) to persecute and push people over using tricks like applying one set of laws, if another set of laws couldn't be applied? Is it like we have provision for cheapness in trials, but none for justice or humanity. Is the intention of a trial to set an example, or to be fair? Is it not criminal wastage of money, time and talent this way?

I mean these are intricate details that reveal something is wrong at leadership level. Related to the direction of the country. This is not a working level problem which is where students, staff, entrepreneurs and hackers lie.

Ponder.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_James
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...

[Edits: Grammar, tone and with inputs from Ars below.]
How do I set up view containment in iOS5 with Storyboards so I can have multiple segues in a dashboard view? This is something that I was just looking into last night.
That is intentional because they want you to get hooked!
The footer on that post should really be changed.
All numbers have inflation you have to account for which you basically have to do pmt/growth rate (I assume 4% to guard against bullshit) to get a perpetutities value. To ensure that nothing could really ever touch the site. $8 a year towards bulk registration, $72 to storing literally everything on an average site and hosting it with increasing costs as you have to maintain more and more outdated systems.
Maybe that was the plan. They started with the idea to have web search inside FB, to get some money from well established search business.

And the graph search is very good solution/excuse to have the search text box in FB.
I haven't seen the Granick analysis. But it's easy to do the guidelines calculation. The base level for fraud is 6, and there is an 18 level enhancement when the amount in question is between 2 and 7 million dollars, as the government claimed. That yields, with no criminal history, a guideline level of 24 and a sentence of 57-71 months if there were no other enhancements. There almost always are. You can drop 2 levels if the defendant "accepts responsibility" which may or may not have happened. There would be 2-3 years of supervised release (no computer) and a fine within statutory limits. The danger with multiple counts is that the sentencing judge may decide to impose consecutive punishments which would exceed the guideline range. In this particular case, which, make no doubt about it, was a political case, Ortiz' office might seek an upward departure because of the defendant's lack of remorse, the PACER incident, and a perceived "danger to the community."
"Swartz’s attorney Elliot Peters accused Heymann of aggressively pursuing Swartz because the case “"was going to receive press and he was going to be a tough guy and read his name in the newspaper.""

This is very similar to how many SV startup founders and CEO's roll. Press-coverage and case-studies are more important than actually doing something worth doing.
The really crazy thing is that we had great proposals for much better layout systems, and they were rejected:

- First, the model with "springs and struts", employed by all major native GUIs for decades, and also implemented in Firefox as the first Flexbox model (for XUL, the UI description markup language) since ages.

- Second, the constraints-based layout model, now employed by OSX 10.8 and considered even superior, was proposed in 1999! http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/constraints/web/ccss-u...

The only explanation I can come up with is a giant disconnect between users (web developers) and implementors.
To wit, the principal would be kept in a trust, so if the main company ever failed to host, another could be engaged to take care of it, etc.
I think that's a bit paranoid. I think it is simply because there are now loads of petitions, often at least partially redundant, that easily reach the 25k threshold. To answer all of those they'd have to expend an unreasonable amount of time and they want a more reasonable threshold to filter out those petitions that really matter to people.

For example, if I click on "popular petitions" right now, there are at least 5 petitions about the Westboro Baptist Chruch with more than 25k votes, and some of these are outright duplicates. Repealing Obamacare seems to be another popular topic.

Basically it seems that, because it is relatively easy to vote, you can find 25k people on the Internet to vote for more or less anything, overwhelming the administration with petitions that wouldn't actually find much support in the population.
Excellent. Although his dad is a wise chap, that ended up in a beautiful story. Excellent LEGO because all these naughty innocent cute kids are your assets...
Same here, I ended-up deleting the node in Firebug.
If you use ARC from the start, then can you really understand block retain cycles (which are just two bullet items below)?

I would absolutely try to write one or two "Hello World" apps without ARC first. CMIIW but Xcode will highlight any instance where you do things differently than ARC would, there is plenty of feedback on what you are doing. And once you feel confident enough, upgrading the project just takes a few clicks.

And I found ARC to be super easy not in spite, but because I came from C++ :) it is shared_ptr vs weak_ptr all over again. Don't memcpy() them, don't create cyclic references, beware race conditions when testing if a weak_ptr is still there ...
Maybe you're not really that introvert, only a little shy? (yes, I think there's a difference :)
Or politics, advertising/marketing, making new friends, being popular in school etc. It's one of those terms that really doesn't add to the lexicon, rather it vaguely describes a large group of activities while sounding educated.

Unfortunately, as more and more people use terms like these, the definitions become looser and the meaning less evident.

Ah well, thusly does language evolve...
That's super unnecessary for a single server, you can literally just use a variable outside of your request handling as a cache.

var cache;

module.exports = function(request, response) {
if(cache) {
return response.end(cache);
}

// get my data from wherever
cache = the_data;

return response.end(cache);
}

Now 199 out of 200 requests are from memory, there are zero extra moving parts, and you're using a cool part of the language instead of a 3rd party tool you have to select and configure.
Actually all platforms that have enough volume to support products with customer live time values above $.99.
Otherwise you can't put meaningful money into customer acquisition.
After hearing TextDrive change hands and waver on a commitment like this, it would have to be some kind of well-capitalized trust or foundation obligated not to default.
Avoiding Retail Armageddon
I know the mechanics of DDOS. I was around when some of the first distributed attacks were being directed at best.com (et al: http://www.pentics.net/), my ISP at the time.

I was using understatement to mock both MIT's reputation for innovation and intelligence and their role in the events that appear to have spurred the attack, so maybe they could put their vaunted brainpower to work solving that problem instead of killing downloaders, so to speak.
It depends on what is "forever" here. Like in some mobile plans in India, the lifetime validity ranges from 2 to 5 years. There would be some time limit (off course in years). So after looking at that number one can decide.
Let me get this straight- "no matter how noble" a political goal is- to you, that message being spread to others is less important than uninterrupted access to download your class syllabus or read your friends' blogs?

If your parents or government have not already paid for your tuition I urge you to think of something else to do with that money.
Some people would say Ubuntu already went down this path with the automatic installation of Amazon advertising in a pretty intrusive way (imho at least)
22-Year-Old's Sci-Fi Digital Short Gets Hollywood's Attention
Of course. Without it people would be forced to contact their congressional reps, their senators, their local law makers, send letters directly to the president, and get involved with the media. All of which are precisely the sorts of ways you can actually effect change.
For those who don't have showdead enabled...

SparrowOS 2 hours ago | link [dead] | -26%

I made a disassembler
It's mostly just a binary search through the opcodes. The trick is ordering them.
http://www.sparrowos.com/Wb/Compiler/Unassembler.html
Yes, I typed all this shit by hand. It's not complete.
http://www.sparrowos.com/Wb/Compiler/OpCodes.html

--

I haven't really gotten to grips with SparrowOS yet as I don't program enough to fully understand/appreciate it, but this makes it that bit more desirable as a hacking tool. Thank you.
[for hire] Local Business Online Coupons Salesman Available in CA
In 2007 I founded a company called PhatDeals.net (it still exists, though with example deals- check it out) doing local business coupons online. I closed the company in 2010 and moved on. But I never lost the itch to work in the local business coupons online space. I'd like to join a team doing Business Development/Sales for a company doing the same thing. Especially interested in working for Facebook Local, Google Offers or Amazon local, but any company that can pay a good base salary and commission would be great. Please PM me if you have an opportunity available.
What you are describing sounds more like an LLP, not an LLC.
I started two, and now working on third. Previous two are closed. This time I am hoping to continue. I am not marketing guy. Getting problems in dealing with people.
That's true, and it seems to bog down easily in my (limited) experience with it. Ollydbg is fast and free, and very navigable. http://www.ollydbg.de/ Oh, it too has arrows. That's what I mean by navigable. 32 bit only though.
When was the last time direct democracy was actually tried? I can't think of any examples. I don't disagree with your conclusion; any direct democracy substantially above the Dunbar number is likely to have a fairly short period of mob rule followed by adopting some other form of governent once the civil war/rioting stops.

We have been furnished a more perfect example of democracy than the USA though, one that's a lot closer to a direct democracy, that works wonderfully. And they're not joking when they talk about the people being sovereign.

All hail Switzerland!