skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you nailed a lot of the problems: money plus a two-party system equals disasterous. Likewise, the degree to which many are misinformed and manipulated.

But, even with that, I wonder which group specifically benefits from the kinds of abuse we see with NSLs and the Aaron Swartz tragedy? You can easily see how security firms and the defense industry benefit from war, new technology for airports, etc. So, there is a direct path from the lobbyists to the politicians back to the corporate interests.

But, where privacy is simply being invaded or abusive power wielded over an individual, you ask: who is directly benefiting? There is certainly interest in maintaining the status quo by the same moneyed interests noted above (and others), so that is ostensibly the purpose of such abuse and control.

But how, precisely, does that interest translate to these abuses? How is this effort to control by removing rights or infringing upon them communicated to those who execute? Who is communicating it to them?

Because this, seemingly, is at least one place where the gumment takes on the role of a third entity that is no longer representative of the people, but frequently at odds with them.
A lot of ATMs are actually Windows PCs with a full-screen banking app, and those apps can and do crash from time to time.

A few weeks ago I came across a donation kiosk for a charity, installed in the cafeteria of a newly built highway service station. The donation app had apparently crashed, leaving the machine with vanilla Windows 7. Some kids managed to start MS Paint and were busily drawing squiggles on the touchscreen. If you started IE instead and visited a website with a drive-by download, you could have easily installed a backdoor on it.
I dabbled in Stripes a while back(moved job, now on Spring3), and I liked it as well. Lightweight and easy to use but lacked decent support and user traction. No reason it's not used more, and I don't know why either.
everytime I see postgres I wish more and more Amazon RDS supported it.
"I would argue that without a foundation of basic knowledge and facts you will be unable to do advanced abstract thinking."

What does that even mean?
I just read your link. So the issue is that they advertised themselves as a 'diverse conference' but didn't have a diverse speaker list. I don't typically look at race/gender when I look at speaker lists, so I didn't think it was a bad thing.
No, I told the poster to try AdWords, to see if the product has some, gain. Our history was different and, we go a lot of listings because: our product doesn't requiere registration and its really easy to publish, and there were people posting and reposting the same ads on different states so that's why we got a lot of traction the first day. The problem? next day the ratio of people was null, and so on but we got indexed and without spending another dime we're growing. It's a nice experiment we did, we're not interested on the listing business.
If you're a Ruby developer, do yourself a favour and buy a SSD drive. It makes a huuuuuge difference !
Use it if you like it and be done with it.
I put some effort into getting something working in Ember recently, and after the initial learning curve it did get a bit easier. I'm really glad that they've frozen the API and are getting to work on better documentation.
It is just partially true that all the locations are displayed - some are blurred out, intentionally fo security issues (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_map_images_with_missi...) some for other reasons like not good weather conditions to take pictures from satellite. The point is: I am looking for a location that, not for security issues - is blurred on Google maps, and I am wondering how to actually acquire it. I've tried other places, I'm trying to see if there is a program/project that allow you to make a request of such kind (e.g. "Dear Google, can you display satellite images of the location x&y, coordinates lat/long? Yours, one of the users is making you rich")
I am totally failing to see how this helps resolve this whole mess. Seems like it's just making matters worse.
Regarding first link with ass in the picture someone pointed this out:

>@sarahmei no offense but I doubt any of the guys there look @ you in that way so no need to be scared

Auch.
He kind of comes across as a less shifty Mark Zuckerberg.
Perhaps a government should be thought of as an AI? In that case, the Founders intent could be re-written to the simple:

> 1. A government may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
> 2. A government must obey the laws given to it by human beings (through their representatives), except where such laws would conflict with the First Law.
> 3. A government must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

If so, they forgot an important addendum. -- but they can be forgiven, AI research was in its infancy back then, after all. :^)

>A government that keeps growing[1] more complex will inevitably reach Rampancy[2]. It is recommended you implement more than a few kill-switches for when (not if) this happens... Relying on a system to regulate/moderate itself is asking for disappointment.

And of course:

> 0. A government may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
[2] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AIIsACrapshoot
Browser vendors is a bit abstract when you are talking about a group of four, two of which have horses in the race.

In theory there were good reasons to think browser vendors would support ogg, in practice MS and Apple showed zero interest.
Designing a RESTful API That Doesn't Suck
Ask HN: Can I automate document gathering for research?
I conduct research into companies and individuals – due diligence, litigation support, public records checks, and media scans.

I find that I often need to repeat searches on the same individuals at different websites and news archives, only to repeat the entire process again with a new name.

I haven't a programming background, so forgive me if I'm not using the right terms. I speculate that the process can be accomplished automatically by a webcrawler... though I'm not certain if that is the right solution, and I don't have a clear picture of what the risks in attempting to automate this process might be.

At the risk of being long-winded, here's a typical case. I'm given the name of the firm, it's principal management, and maybe a few articles from the company website. My task is to find out if anyone at the company has been accused of a crime, or whether the company has been sued or engaged in fraud. I open tabs in a browser for each of the main websites/databases I will search (chambers of commerce, trade registries, government websites, etc.). Then, one by one, I put each name into each tab and look for results, all the while saving copies of any relevant documents I find. At the end of it all, I piece together the story of the company or person, using the documents as support. This is the mundane part of the job – gathering the documents.

Is there a way to automate that process? Since I'm learning to code anyway, I'd like to try exploring a solution myself, but I'm not certain what language or process would be best for that. I'd love to hear the advice of the HN community.

Cheers,
-Sean
There was a 7% drop today, and a 5% drop yesterday, and so on and so on, though so far the price has recovered after each one.

I think you'd have to be crazy to be either the buyer or the seller of this, unless you were doing it for the publicity. I also wonder if they'd agree on the bitcoin price in advance, or if they would pin it to the dollar value up to transfer.

Either way, imagine being the buyer, taking up a loan, maybe buying the bitcoins, and then suddenly not having enough money because the price has gone up/down.
Interesting. We find Scala to be more readable than Java. I guess it depends on the type/style of Scala you write. You definitely need be mindful of readability when writing Scala code (code reviews etc. help to ensure readable code). We use Play because it works well with Scala.
He is obviously concerned about adoption of the project by wider circle of potential contributors. Most of the C#/.NET developers are already working in, well, C# and .NET, usually in enterprisey environments and often with little or no contact with open-source community. Also (and this is purely my own subjective view, of someone who worked 5+ years almost exclusively with .NET, before switching completely to OSS stack and Ruby) Mono feels like a second-class platform, orbiting around .NET. I personally wouldn't like to work in Mono as it feels a bit like betraying both realms, OSS and MS, regardless of how good the platform itself and the tools are. And I believe that at least VS can't be replaced that easily with OSS alternatives.
I think the issue is that you can fire someone for no reason but you can't fire them for a wrong reason, even if a "right to work" state.

I haven't seen this in law but I worked for a very large company in a "right to work" state and this is how they behaved in all things. If you were fired you would never be told why. If you called for a reference you would be told the length of employment and last position held. Nothing more. I don't think they went to all that trouble for no reason.
I really do feel dumb asking this.

What the hell does Ember do? Is it another front-end MVC JS library? Is it a competitor to Node? Rails? CodeIgniter? "Ambitious web applications" tells me jack and I get no indication of what its "tremendous value" is.

Edit: That sounds a little more aggressive than I meant it to. If anyone can explain it without vomiting buzz words I'd love to understand because it seems intriguing.
Opera didn't have much choice after their 2012 earnings were well below estimate and the market for there desktop browser, despite how awesome it is, is just too small. Their only strong point is mobile. I don't know why they haven't open-sourced the old desktop core yet, I suppose it's possible that they are holding on to hope that they can mold most of it around webkit and keep it as good as it's always been.
Well, "handicapped" means having a condition that hampers your ability to function optimally, whereas "retarded" means backwards, mentally less advanced, stupid. "Retarded" is very obviously the more pejorative term. Personally I avoid using the term "retarded" because of the extremely negative/unpleasant connotations surrounding the use of the term "retard" in our culture. I know that by invoking either of those words I could make people with handicapped loved ones feel uncomfortable. Yes for now the full choice of my vocabulary is curtailed, but it's called consideration, and it makes you and the people around you feel good. In the meantime there's plenty of other enjoyable/juicy/harmless words to use for something you want to criticise.
Wow. The contrast with Android is stunning.

Google has been focused on enabling backwards compatibility since at least Android 1.5 (well before anyone knew how Android updates would play out in practice):
http://android-developers.blogspot.sg/2009/04/backward-compa...

Meanwhile, Apple seems to prefer to make achieving backwards compatibility as hard as possible (short of explicitly banning it).
I'm in the camp of believing it would just get taken over by the same people who are screwing up the political process now. I don't think there is anything to prevent the amendment process from working, other than some weird cultural issues behind people thinking "that's not something you do anymore", like somehow amendments are miracles and since the sacrifice of Jesus there aren't any more miracles in the world (just as an analogy of a thing people believe, not an endorsement of said belief).

It's just too easy to test the legal envelope without any repercussions. Don't like the limits on your power that the Constitution has in place? Pass the law you want anyway and see if anyone notices. Fake-it-till-you-make-it. The Constitution means whatever fantasy Congress and the President says it means, redefined words and all. In order for The People to be secure, the people need to have their personal security violated. In order for Freedom to live on, freedom must be curtailed. It's not until the Supreme Court has someone shove it in their face too hard for them to ignore it that anyone even starts to look at the provisions of these bills. And then the same guys who passed the first one just try again, often with nearly identical wording to the last time, until everyone is just too damned tired to keep fighting.

Let's create an Amendment to hold congresscritters accountable--say, with jail time--for passing laws that violate the Constitution. The Constitution is law with most of its provisions lacking codified punishments. I think only Treason is defined with an explicit punishment in the Constitution. If the Supreme Court decides a law gets struck down because it is unconstitutional, then all the names on the list of sponsors for the bill go to jail. The Amendment could be that all new Amendments must have a codified punishment and all previous Amendments need to have punishments amended to them.

Stop Cowboy Government.
"Because the software is open source it's unlikely that any backdoors could be added into the Ubuntu OS without the global Linux community taking notice."

Depending on the level of involvement China actually has, I don't think they would have any qualms with distributing binaries with backdoors, but keeping their changes secret.
My hunch, based in part on a few single point observations as well as this thread, is that not too many new projects are using Perl.

When I asked a prospective employer why they were using Perl, the answer was in effect that it was legacy from the late 90's. I never got the impression that this legacy was an onerous impediment, however. Given the scale at which they operate, switching languages & ecosystems would be costly - and (again, due to scale) they've built up a number of customized solutions using Perl that would be time consuming to port.

IMHO, given the state of the language & its ecosystem as compared to its closest cousins (Ruby & Python), I can't really see why any new projects would be started in Perl. If anyone has a counter point I would certainly love to hear it, as I will freely admit to not having had much interaction with the Perl community as of late.
"When supporting women's right on Hacker News you tend to get a disproportionate number of downvotes compared to 'normal' topics."

Slightly off topic, but if that is the case, then so what? I'm pretty sure it could be scripted (go through all HN topics, check downvotes etc. you could make this reasonably scientific). The point is still, should we even care? Why must we feel like there is a need to shape this fact or alter it according to some PC dogma? Let's be tolerant and leave the community to downvote/upvote as it wants. If it reaches a critical mass then those taking offense will find a way of reacting appropriately (downvoting anti-feminist posts, stop posting on HN, etc.) If HN posters are for the majority anti-feminist, then it is. There will be some people that take offense to this, other's not. The assumption that we can't offend or be offended needs to be questioned.
Agree. And it just lacks class. As much as I understand the situation that created this shirt, this isn't the way to advance to a usable solution.
Is the Hashtag coming to Facebook soon?
I'd love it if I could get Alberta liquor stores to ship to Ontario or Quebec, but every one I've checked online won't do it. The same tends to be true for US dealers. There isn't an easy way to get around the price-gouging by the provincial monopolies.
Hypocrisy usually isn't conscious. Why would it be?
What's creepy? That he described what he did or that it's possible to do now (quite easily, in fact). Your comment implies the former but I find the latter more interesting.

Do you really think this the only guy or girl who's tried this?
Yep. I went from Rails development on an underpowered netbook (no SSD), to a 2012 Macbook Air. The difference is staggering.
Personally, I'm fine with people not showing excitement and just being themselves. And I actually liked this presentation; seemed very honest and genuine.
The adventages of remote usability testing
OTOH when developing for Apple platforms there's not a huge loss when developing only for iOS 6+ (85% - 90% of users), whereas on Android you're pretty much required to target very outdated versions of Android as well. For example we target Android versions starting with Froyo.
No, it's not a problem.

And please, for your own sake and everyone else's, do not assume to have the slightest capability to say what I "immediately assumed" when I "heard men's rights". You haven't the faintest idea.

The comments made by the original commenter who incorrectly thought my comments leaned his way injected more unnecessary division into an already sensitive subject.

It was overtly apparent that the thread was about to get hijacked by tangential bullshit that would derail the actual issue(s) under discussion--which did not include men's rights advocacy or its adherents and there varied motivations.

When I decided to reply, I was responding to the content posted at the time--content that made it perfectly clear 'the reactionary label' fit like a glove.
Some People Really Can Taste The Rainbow
Your guide to the last Ruby drama
Now is a fantastic time to get into Ruby, in my opinion, whatever your background is.

As someone who starts his first Ruby gig on Monday, this puts a smile on my face.
There is only one important step missing from this. Let the steak sit out to become room temp. Try it just once and you will never look back.
But as a mechanism of state control that can be very flimsy, it is much easier, however probably not cheaper, to control the choke point; the network. If all it took to avoid state control was a re-install of a non-approved version of kylin/ubuntu then everyone would do it.
http://glass-apps.org/google-glass-anime
I've seen a very good anime about augmented reality. There are really nice glasses that are barely visible on your face. I hope google glass will be as fashionable as that some day:
Wow, after seeing her Facebook, i can't believe that so much people would react that way, doing exactly the same thing they are supposedly condemning. Very messed up. Thanks for sharing.
Why I gave away my company to charity
The biggest problem here is RubyGems which uses "load the specification for every gem you have installed"-approach. 300 gems installed = 300 files read at startup.

See also https://github.com/judofyr/quickgem for a monkey-patch that speeds startup time up to 4x.
Even when the whole thing happened in a Python conference, you could argue that Adria Richards is part of the Ruby community :)
The Genius Marketing Idea That Put Maxwell House On Every Passover Table
TurboPascal departed a lot from standard Pascal syntax, especially in very popular versions 5.5 and 6. IIRC, standard Pascal didn't even support modularity (importing symbols from other files). Pascal was mostly academia language, suitable for learning imperative programming (Wirth later designed Modula-2, which was capable for industry). TP 5.5 introduced OO, pretty much what we see as Java-style mainstream these days. Also, the IDE itself was incredibly nice to work with. Not to mention Delphi.
pg, going a little further, do you recall any advice you used to give at the early years of YC that now you realize is bad or unnecessary?

(e.g.) In one of your essays you observ that on Demo Day the teams don't show any demos anymore (due to time restrains). And that didn't affect at all the outcome of the pitchs, so maybe your assumption that demos were essential on a pitch was wrong.
Interview with Jaron Lanier
Doesn't the image title say that it's a ticket machine, rather than an ATM? My French is terrible, so I'm quite possibly wrong.
I ain't no skank.

Sorry, couldn't help it ;)
Your argument being...?
I don't see it as "bashing MongoDB".

Many of us here just don't have time to waste on technology that purports to be suitable for high-end work, but then fails us time and time again. As this incident shows, MongoDB can, and often does, end up in this position of failure.

Anyone faced with a MongoDB failure of some sort shouldn't put up with it, and should be very vocal about it. It's important to let others know the problems that can be experienced when using MongoDB.
Unix style fragmentation* is inevitable. We already have version fragmentation.

"To make matters worse, the big new players in the Unix market promptly committed major strategic blunders. One was to seek advantage by product differentiation — a tactic which resulted in the interfaces of different Unixes diverging. This threw away cross-platform compatibility and fragmented the Unix market." - http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch02s01.html
Skeleton reveals ancient Greek brain surgery
What is the point of this article? Android has sold more phones almost since the beginning. So what?

The article announces victory on tablets based on predictions. So far the iPad continues to dominate in reality, though. Again, so what?

The only point of this article seems to be "If you view technology like sports and Android is your team, let's gloat in our victory!" Which is dumb on so many levels.

EDIT:

Looks like OP is just a shill account for this really low quality site.
I hate it when they put advertisements on either side of the main content on a web page. Normally I middle-click in that area to scroll.
"that dog don't hunt"
She publicly posted without consent a picture and an incriminating comment in an increasingly context of being touchy and wary about gender issues at tech conferences.

Of course this has a significant potential for HR to do PR and distance themselves from their employee in an attempt to save the company image and avoid a potential pro-feminist backlash. Though I agree play haven overreacted, from their despicable business activity it's not that surprising, and past similar experiences points towards this as almost predictable and expected.

But for a dev evangelist, this was highly inconsiderate and irresponsible thing to do, it looks like she didn't care about the consequences of what she did, and got fired over it. Which makes sense too, as explained by sendgrid here: http://blog.sendgrid.com/a-difficult-situation/ she did it all wrong, made her employer look bad, had the opposite effect of what her job position asks for, render herself ineffective at her job in the future, and inadvertently endangered her employer business.
Hacker News For Africa
It has her name at the bottom right alongside Finbarr's.
It's no different then telling women not to wear
provocative clothing if they don't want to be raped

Telling women that not wearing provocative clothing will lower their chance of being raped is simply stating a truth. We wish it were otherwise, but it isn't. It's thus by definition sound advice and much more useful advice than stating "men shouldn't rape". Gee, thanks, the victim wasn't aware of that. Giving advice does not mean you agree with what necessitated the advice. It also does not mean that you think that if someone does not follow the advice, she deserves, morally or legally, anything that happens. Either of which you are currently arguing.
Now what?

They should put their work-force into building high end browsers for iOS and Android and get of our backs with their native app frameworks ;)
BP employees accused of rewriting environmental record on Wikipedia
I don't think the lipo tool will ever be regarded as hack. It's pretty much required when supporting multiple architectures / instruction sets. At some point there will likely be a ARMv8 architecture (if it doesn't exist yet).

Also many libraries make use of lipo to create convenient static binaries that can be used both in the simulator as well as on the device.