skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are a few voices in the new GOP that are better at civil liberties (Rand-effing-Paul). But you're right that the GOP has traditionally focused too much on law and order and too little for the rights of the accused. I have voted Democrat for prosecutor/DA type positions for this reason. It wouldn't have helped in MA though.
Filesystem is mostly useful for a number of cases (though perhaps not the average person), but I am glad it's there and one can access external storage or /system (read only) without root.

It's pretty useful for the following conditions:

1) root users that want move around and change config files (boot animations, system wide theming, etc). Also for flashing stuff in recovery where you need to point to the file you want.

2) ROM modders/developers - looking at various files live on the device and also for low level things such as filesystem access in recovery to get yourself out of a jam.

3) app developers - I like to use sftp on my device and sshfs on my pc to directly access sqlite dbs for apps I am working on and play with the db directly without having to reinstall the app to update it.

4) Those that want apps that obey filesystem rules versus global (like for a music player, I use one that reads by directory instead of just dumping everything in by tags).
The quibble isn't with the hierarchies. It's with the navigation. The point is that some do not enjoy navigating anything, hierarchical or not. That's why librarians' assistants have jobs.

So if you have a magical medium where information can be abstracted behind any means of retrieval, you give the apes what they want: their bananas in a pile, instead of in tiny, head-scratch-inducing drawers.
I'm sure there is a use case for sharing files between applications beyond what we currently have (Photos, Contacts), but, in the 5+ years I've been using my iPhone (and it's 200+ current apps installed currently on my phone) - I've never run into it. I (personally) love the fact that everything is reasonably sealed off. In fact, the major problem I had with the iPhone was that it allowed applications to access my address book without my explicit permission (since resolved) - it wasn't sealed off enough.

I'll be the first person to sign a petition requesting that Apple continue to enforce their absolute separation without really explicit guidance from me. The tradeoff (lack of flexibility versus increased security) is one that I'm very happy to make.
Why aren’t we allowed to take photographs at the Sistine Chapel?
In 2004, Museo Vatican made announcement about a restoration work at the Sistine Chapel. The Japanese TV Network, NHK came forward and striked a 15-year deal for an "Inglorious Restoration" of the Chapel.
When I was a kid in art class the canonical example was the old Hartford Whalers logo, which had a negative-space 'H' between the 'W' and the tail fluke.
Agreed. I really enjoyed the HyConn episode up until I read up on the aftermath. It's for the best that handshake deals based on up to sixty minutes negotiation is not binding, but it would be nice to be able to easily track down the real story on companies after the episodes air.
I use Android's filesystem to move files from SD to internal or reverse, from the downloads folder to more appropriate categorized folders, and to find files to delete for more room. I appreciate having this ability a lot. Things like this should just be standard for any OS. I also open some local html files with file:// on firefox mobile sometimes.
Just curious, I just can't understand how underlining in different colors and taking notes in the margin helps anything. I recall trying to take notes in university classes, but I just stopped, since taking notes at the same time as listening to a lecture makes it difficult to follow the lecture (that you're there for in the first place). In the end, I didn't take notes for 4.5 of the 5 years I was in school, and had good grades. But maybe it just worked for me?
This isn't a very well informed rant. Sandboxing exists so that malware doesn't get access to all of your files. The address book used to not be protected and look at the crapstorm that caused when Path accessed the address book without informing users.

And a file tree is a poor abstraction for "mere mortals". John Siracusa has a much better discussion of why an exposed file system is a bad idea in the last episode of the Accidental Tech podcast.
http://atp.fm/episodes/6-live-like-other-people
tree hierarchy of more than 3 levels is a big mess.
The vast majority of computer users (outside of knowledge workers, and techies) are completely befuddled by hierarchial navigation. Eliminating it was one of the great steps forward on the iPhone.
Except when it comes to legislating religion, fighting the war on drugs, increasing defence spending/budget, etc...

The "small government" idea is almost just a talking point now for the Republicans (Note: I realize that some Republicans are truer to those values tha nothers).
If someone is able to purchase food at a supermarket does it follow that this same individual cannot also have difficulty understanding a hierarchical filesystem?
It is important to understand that 500 Startups consists of two separate entities/programs: an accelerator and a seed fund. It is very common for 500 Startups (the seed fund) to invest in YC startups.

To look at the flip side, it is rare for YC to invest in companies that did not actually go through YC (it has happened before, however).
Where yo' curleh moustache at?
Setting aside the issue of denying to enter contract with somebody because he's gay (to remove any doubt, I think it is stupid), how the absence of laws that prohibit this behavior on the state level make US not "land of the free"? What the word "freedom" means for you?
And a good reason of why chess does not translate to other activities is that probably most of the patterns that you learn in chess do not show up in other domains so you cannot really use those learned patterns in other situations.

For example, learning a new language means learning lots of new patterns. A lot of those patterns are new grammatical rules. If you were to learn a Latin derived language like Spanish then a lot of those same patterns can be re-used to learn another Latin derived language like French. With chess, unless those patterns you've learned exist in other domains then they are useless and can only be used to play chess.

One of the thing chess can do you for you is increase your memory, maybe, since as you said you need to become a chess database. The cost is probably too great and the reward too little, though.
> People can navigate a web page.

Not very well, which is why so much time is spent trying to avoid increasing navigation depth and reducing the amount of views to minimum.

> They can find a food item in a menu or in the supermarket.

First time I see a menu that's comparable to a filesystem tree I'm going to burst out in laughter and think it's a gimmick. A supermarket is closer to an art statement about inherent chaos of modern lives than to anything hierarchical.

Yes, there are hierarchical systems, the big one being a common management structure (which works eh), and administrative subdivision of countries (hint: people almost never actually traverse that tree, they always go directly for a specific entity in it. Also, they routinely get lost in it). They're a bother and used when they can't be avoided, or when nobody bothered to work on something better. Or when you need to sort a bunch of numbers or something. The reason for avoidance being, besides the low transparency, complex data maps into trees really poorly.
They're crying crocodile tears for Aaron, I'm sure. :P

You say that as if politicians haven't taken positions in the past just to win elections (with no intention of following through, or without changing their beliefs on the larger issues raised).
If I actually don't know what data I want to put into my DB before I write to it, is a Mongo-esque solution appropriate?
Nobody has commented on the suggestion to aid learning with Spaced Repetition Software - specifically the Anki open source program.

Anybody try or use this technique? It looks interesting and sounds reasonable and effective. I took a peek at Anki but have to admit it looks messy (and the iOS app is $25, which is def. on the high end of the iOS pricing scale). I'd be curious to hear others' experience in this area...
This seems like advert for 'eBay pages'.
> To this end I hope we will avoid politics even if the article itself is political.

So if the article is about politics, specifically, and how that involves tech, what's to be done? A comment thread about kung pao chicken? That's not useful.
It appears nothing is more important than the banks.

"Back in December 2012 the FDIC and the BoE published a joint paper outlining their new approach for how to resolve any future collapse of one of the Too-Big-To-Fail banks...

'deposit guarantee schemes may be required to contribute to the recapitalization of the firm'[1][2]

...the new system raids the Deposit Protection scheme, gives it to the bank instead of you and when that fails to save the bank…then what? The bank fails again and there is no money left in the Deposit Guarantee scheme."

[1] http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2013/03/plunderball-the-new-euro-b...

[2] http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/news/2...
I'm a user. I hate file hierarchies. IMO, the ideal interface to a computer's data storage system would have two ways to find a document:

1) A list of most-recently-seen documents. Each application would have its own list of documents it had seen, and there would be a per-user list for documents from all apps. Documents are added to the lists when they're created, opened, downloaded, etc. There is no limit on number of documents in the list, and the list is searchable. Some modern applications have primitive equivalents, but not as the primary document-opening interface.

2) Give each list a search box, with results as a flat list of extracted metadata. Honestly, just clone the current standard web search engine UI and use that. A search box is the closest computers have come to being user-friendly, and is certainly nicer than dropping the user into a file manager.

---

Example: Firefox's "recent documents" list would be a combination of browser history and downloads panel. To open a file you just downloaded, find it in either Firefox's list, or the global list, and click/tap it. To open a web page you just created in a text editor, you would click/tap it in the global documents list and indicate that Firefox should handle it (e.g. with an Android-style app selector).

Keep existing file-management API calls as they are, and don't tie them into the document system. I don't want a game to add a new document entry for every .so or .png it loads. Application developers can decide how best to represent their document in terms of low-level filesystem objects (a directory, a flat text file, a binary blob, whatever fits the document best).
And I'm sure the tears of Democrats are genuine :p

Politicians certainly fail to follow through on their promises. But by publicly supporting an issue they give opponents a way to attack them if they don't follow through. So there is some worth to making a public commitment, especially if it is frequent and loud.
Chinese counterfeits: How to beat the cheats
Not likely. It's common knowledge that this is a bunch of floating hulks (eg it's been a frequent topic of reporting in Bay Area newspapers the whole time I've lived here), the only scandal on the horizon is the Navy's potential liability for contaminating the bay by having all these ships gradually disintegrating in it.
Why do we need pointers/references?
Downtown LA is home to a thriving fashion startup scene, but it doesn't get much coverage (aside from male-led startups like ShoeDazzle) because fashion isn't something that the (largely male) startup world understands.
I don't care whether it's for anti-wrinkle cream or a web server, I find testimonials about as useful as that ball of lint in my belly button and trustworthy as a used car salesman.

It's true many of benchmarks out there use flawed methodologies, so lets try to fix that. When you benchmark something as complex as Apache, people are going to find faults with your initial run, no matter how careful you are. This is why you need to be completely transparent with you setup configuration and should be prepared for a followup run with user suggested settings.
In Philadelphia there was a similar mothball fleet, including multiple carriers and destroyers that was pretty clearly visible from I-95. Was always psyched to see that when I was a kid
If you're interested in theano primarily because of deep learning, I highly recommend you check out pylearn2 (not too much documentation, but docs here: http://deeplearning.net/software/pylearn2/ and source on github here: github.com/lisa-lab/pylearn2 ).

Pylearn2 is a set of deep learning algorithms implemented with theano. The LISA (deep learning) group at the University of Montreal (same group that created theano) maintains this library and puts a lot of the code they use for their papers in pylearn2. pylearn2 thus makes it quite easy to use a lot of state of the art algorithms, such as maxout.
Considering someone got thrown in the federal pokey for creating a script that increments the number in a URL, and then saved that output to a file.....

Yeah, I think we DO need to have that discussion on politics with regards to Hacker News.
Note that this post is from 2011, making it much less interesting that he has pictures of a fully assembled Sea Shadow, given that it was scrapped in 2012. Before I saw the date, I was getting ready to put on my tinfoil cap...
Ignorance my be applied equally but thanks to privilege as a male you can afford to ignore or dismiss those ignorant comments in a way that a person with less privilege may not be able to. As a male you're told by society that you're allowed to go out, break all the rules and take what you want whereas as a woman you're meant to be quiet, demure and "proper".

Bringing up alternate social injustices is generally considered a tactic of diversion. It's not that these other injustices aren't important (they are very important) but it happens with such regularity that it's considered de-railing to the conversation.
What is especially clever about the logo is the use of a serif L and nesting the sans-serif N inside of it. The juxtaposition is wonderful, and makes the N that slight bit more subtle.
#2 at what? (Or did you mean: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%232)
The lack of file organization is fine for what iOS is right now. But if Apple is pushing this platform as a place to do real work, there ought to be a way to group assets by project, save/restore them as a group, etc. Maybe this could be done as tags, but I don't know if users actually prefer that to folders.

For instance, on the Mac you have the "Web Receipts" folder for all your saved purchase receipts. On iOS, where would those go? The Apple solution would be a dedicated "Receipts" app, where otherwise a generic PDF viewer would do the same job.

iOS is kind of the opposite of the Unix philosophy - every app has to do everything.
>>Not many people think concentrating on rote learning creates a more educated society

Rote learning? What are you talking about? I never said you should do rote learning. If you want to become smarter in Electrical Engineering the only way to do that is to study Electrical Engineering. Unless playing chess is similar to solving or designing electrical circuits I doubt it will help you much. I hope I'm getting my point across.

But lets assume that playing chess is somehow similar to Electrical Engineering in the sense that 10% of the patterns in chess show up in Electrical Engineering. This means that 90% of the patterns you learned in chess cannot be used in Electrical Engineering. If what you want to do is learn Electrical Engineering then you've just wasted a lot of time learning 90% of chess patterns that you cannot use in EE. The time used to learn those 90% patterns could instead have been used to learn EE.

So, if all you wanted to do is learn EE then studying chess might not be a very efficient way of doing it.
Yes, the main benefit of being on the show is the publicity (as long they don't skewer you). It seems that at least once per show there is a company that has little real need for funding, and I'm sure they went on there with the specific intent of getting the publicity and little else.

One peculiar thing that I noticed in those statistics is that Daymond John was leading in terms of deals. I was sure he would be dead last...I rarely see him do deals.
I'm not sure of Kalmykia's political status, but chess has been mandatory there for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalmykia
Screenshots please. I'm not giving you my personal info just because of a pretty picture of the Earth. No offense, but you might be just harvesting email addresses for all I know.
wow... i've always dreamed of planning an exact mission like this. i've boated past the mothball fleet many a time... learned how to climb, rapel, bought all the gear, etc.. hoping one day i might work up the nerve to pull something like this off. hats off to these guys, amazing story and photos...
Who actually puts things in hierarchies, besides technical people? That always struck me as the most ridiculous thing about the "folder" metaphor--when have you ever seen people put folders inside folders?!
I suspect survivor bias. If you believe there is a billion people on Facebook (even if it's wrong by order or two of magnitude, doesn't matter), several millions of them must be gay. Some percentage of them would be closeted gay. Some of them would have friends that visited or liked "coming out" pages. So if Facebook just displayed random page which your friends liked - without knowing anything else about you - it would inevitably happen that somebody who is gay and thinks about coming out would see such ad sooner or later and would be creeped out about how much Facebook knows about him.
Yeah, but boy, they're sure going to bill you for it.
No more random tweeting or calling for blood
I got to "play" paintball in a cruiser of that fleet as part of Ship's Self-Defense Force training as a USN sailor. This was 1988 or 1989. First and last time I ever played paintball. I'll never understand why anybody would enjoy that game.

Roaming around, looking at all the old tech was fun, though.
Did they steal the Top Gun logo?
Thanks! This is exactly the sort of thing I've been looking for. I really want to experiment with some deep learning techniques for some problems I have, but the start up cost of "oh yea you have to build all the tools yourself right now" keeps putting me off.
> Every app has its own weight. Need room? Dump an app. Don't worry – nothing you do in any other app will be affected.

To put it another way: apps need to communicate large blobs of information (i.e., documents). You'd say, from first principles, that they need a nonvolatile Inter-Process Communication mechanism.

In most OSes, apps pass documents between them with the moral equivalent of "shared memory" IPC: files that both apps have read/write access to.

In iOS, on the other hand, apps use the moral equivalent of message-passing-with-copy.

Thus, apps get all the same benefits from this that, say, Erlang processes get from in-memory message-passing-with-copy IPC. The primary one being that when the process/app is removed from the system, all its resources can be released, without having to disentangle them from any other process/app that might be depending on them. This gives you the dual philosophies of "let it crash" and "just delete it", respectively.
As I replied to this developer, I think a device-level file management store and UX is very 80s.

The solution to the current trade off IMO is to maintain the sandboxes, but to fix pervasive search across apps and devices - expose more data facets, make the UX ubiquitous, ensure strong default privacy controls, and oh yes, ensure the FAST=TRUE setting is enabled. That's how you outflank DropBox.

I'm not sure if many here use iCloud search today (for mail), but it is abysmally slow and unreliable. This isn't just my personal pipe dream - apple really needs to fix search... but they could do it in a way that is consistent with their long term goal of eliminating the hierarchical file system for regular users, and really revolutionizing data access/sharing UX.
I ran into that on my first day, and a bunch of times since. I guess you've never been in an airport, and realized you left that audio book at home, and though to yourself "Oh, right, I'll just copy it over."

Surprise, unless your scp application has a built in audio player, tough nuggets.

It's infuriating when you're dealing with ebooks in other languages (particularly Japanese) as iBooks and a bunch of other apps are not very good at supporting these. With no way of sharing books between apps, you wind up needing to find a new way to smuggle your book app to app in order to find out that this one doesn't work, either.

I'm sick of all the apple apologists acting like this isn't a pain point or that inability to do these things is somehow good. It's bad, it's a major pain point, and it's not about malware. It's about limiting your choices.

I'm also willing to attribute the lack of app-app sharing of data to intellectual cowardice.
Amit you are very talented. Thank you for this!

Check out an app I'm working on. I think you'll like it.

http://kokonautlabs.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/my-app/
Again in moderation

I was reminded of some cautionary voices from this: http://www.laweekly.com/1999-03-18/news/the-go-club/full/ ,
an interesting LA Weekly article (1999) about the Korean female reporter's experience at a Korean Go Club in Los Angeles (note: Go is known as Baduk in Korean):

But Go players, regardless of nationality, are mostly men — and Korean women, particularly wives and mothers, think they’re full of shit.

"You know the people who play the Baduk," my mother answered disgustedly when I asked her about the game. "They are just the lazy people who like to smoking."

My friend Mia has a more dramatic tale. One day her mom came home to find Mia’s dad teaching her and her brother Go. She immediately grabbed the kids by their shirt collars and carried them out of the room. I will not allow you to turn my children into Baduk players, she informed her husband. "She wouldn’t let us learn," Mia explained, "because Baduk sucks your life away."

(There's lots more to the piece -- if you're interested in the game and some of its sociology, check it out).
It is a very well understood concept by everyone.

Yet the first thing anyone does when they're looking for something is to Google it, not go to Yahoo's front page, look for the relevant category, find a suitable sub-category, ad nauseam. There's a reason search won that battle.
Top 3 Apps for Scanning Documents Using an Android Device
Presefy Lets You Control Presentations With Your Phone, No Software Required
Except that it mentions several key insights that the founder used to exploit market opportunities. She clearly has solid domain knowledge that allowed her to buy low and sell high, through not just thrift stores (which is labor intensive, but certainly not a new concept), but also identifying people who didn't have her expertise and thus didn't appreciate the value of the goods they were selling.

It also sounds like she had a model that allowed her to build an engaged userbase and enlist them to help her build the business.

Granted this is all just what one article says, but this is exactly the sort of thing you're supposed to do as a start up of any kind.

Sounds like a relevant success story to me.
Yes, I agree - nginx's community feels a little strange, at least to someone who hasn't tried to really get involved. Apache, by contrast, is a huge, loud, unruly crowd. Whereas the nginx author seems to be one of those quiet, aloof, l337 h4x0r types. Which is consistent with software that is a) really fast and b) not responsive to change requests. :)