skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would you advocate shutting down the city every time there's a hit-and-run incident?

Surely, discouraging reckless driving would save FAR more lives than discouraging terrorists.
It's a bad way of dealing with terrorism. It's in the name - it's all about terrorising, and the Boston bombers have certainly succeded in that. With this whole spectacle you've let two guys with very little resources put the whole nation into a state of emergency. You're playing their game. This is exactly what they want. They don't deserve that honour.

I wrote about it here a few day sago: http://www.maximise.dk/how-a-great-statesman-would-deal-with...
so, what's it good for?
“Everyone has a different definition for hipster. Usually, they just find a person with qualities they don’t like and say “That’s a hipster”.”

http://bearskinrug.co.uk/hipsters/
One thing I've found when documenting any of my projects -- if it is too hard to explain clearly, then something is probably wrong with the interface. So what I end up doing is writing a document that makes sense, then I go back and re-write parts of the app in order to fit the documentation. Then, before tagging a release and announcing it, get a few other people to look it over first, just to make sure that everything matches. Oh, and having an automated test suite that at least checks all common cases and various edge cases will make sure that you don't have to hurry up and push a .01 followed by a .02, .03, etc. release.

Now, that being, said, what is the best way to get a good group of pre-release testers? So far I haven't had too many people bite.
Depends on the jurisdiction. Since ownership of property, and construction of buildings on it, is generally registered with a government, there is a lot of data in existence, and most of it is public record. Alas, much of it is on paper, and possibly scattered among offices (the property deed in one place, construction-code approvals in another place, etc.).

Some governments have digitized their property registers, though. The most comprehensive one I've found is in Denmark, which has made the property register for the whole country searchable/browsable: http://www.ois.dk

Example: select "Københavns Kommune" from the dropdown box at top-right, type "Vesterbrogade" in the box labeled "Vejnavn", then click "Søg". You'll get a list of all buildings with street addresses on Vesterbrogade, one of the thoroughfares in Copenhagen. If you click on an individual address, you'll get information about the building and a listing of any subunits, e.g. that there are 5 floors, with 2 units on the 1st floor, 1 on the 2nd, etc. Click on any individual unit and you'll get information on everything from number of rooms, to when it was most recently renovated, to what materials are used in the construction.

In the U.S., some cities and counties are starting to provide at least some of this kind of information. For example, for Seattle, you can try the King County Parcel Viewer: http://www.kingcounty.gov/operations/GIS/PropResearch/Parcel...
You stole this idea from Mad Men. I hope it gets you a job.
> There's really no logical comparison between your fictional scenario and what occurred in Boston.

Care to elaborate?
As he mentioned murders happen every day in the states, so would you prefer a non-fictional comparison?

> The Boston Marathon is a world renowned event, and the apprehension of the perpetrators of the attacks was a necessary thing, because, as someone else has mentioned here, sending a message of "We'll catch you" to any would-be criminals is of the utmost importance.

What does being "world renowned" have to do with anything?
And what makes this case any different from any other criminal offence?

Don't we want to catch all criminals?
someone who had committed a handful of murders -- something that happens every day in the US.

That's extremely disingenuous. Besides the fact that a 'handful of murders' carried out by the same perperator(s) is not actually a daily event, how many regular crimes also result in hundreds of injuries, many traumatic? I'm not very freaked out about bombings, given that I grew up in Ireland and lived in London during a particularly vicious phase of the Troubles, but enough with this BS meme that there's nothing distinctive about a bombing vs. everyday levels of crime. It's an insult to common sense and the experience of anyone who has ever been near to or affected by a bombing.
> The product you are actually buying is non-existent. You are the product. People pay good money in order to manipulate your social drive to keep you as viewers.

It ought to be much harder to manipulate people this way. I think a major missing part of general education is decision theory: how do people make bad decisions? Rephrased, how do I make bad decisions every day, and how can I avoid them?

News consumption is just one example from a huge class of transactions that are suspect because of manipulation. Our entire economic model is premised on the idea that parties to transactions are rational and self-interested. If there are ways in which people are irrational and manipulable, then 'voluntary' transactions are a fiction (which is clearly the case).
Naming a single cell doesn't solve the problem of accidentally using a different range of values. In a normal programming language you would define a variable such as GDP containing a list of values for the countries of interest, in Excel every formula has to restate the range, which is what caused the mistake.
"We weren't scared. We were pissed."

Please. The people of Boston were scared shitless. And you know what? There is nothing wrong with admitting that. When you have a couple of insane killers who could have hidden god knows how many bombs out there, being scared is the appropriate response.

What is not appropriate is shutting down the entire city to find those guys. I'm very glad they were caught. But by shutting down public transportation and getting all cars and humans off the streets, Bostonian authorities greatly magnified the scare-factor for Bostonians. It was an overreaction.

Now that I think about it, we are really good at overreacting to terrorism. A bunch of guys rammed planes into the Twin Towers and our response was to invade two countries. Some guy hid a bomb in his shoes and our response was to make tens of millions of people take off their shoes every time they are at the airport. A couple of guys set off bombs at a marathon and our response was to shut down an entire city.

When does it end? When do we learn to respond to terror attacks rationally rather than emotionally?
I believe his point was that the bottleneck was on the receiving side, not the sending side.
Entertaining font choice for lecture slides.
Yup, if you want to get to the Razer specific settings you need to log in. I wanted to turn the led in the mouse off, since it heated my hand and was annoying. Login was required and the servers were down. Razer never again, even though an offline mode has now been added.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121105/17594020942/when-m...
“It’s bigger on the inside”: Revisiting 50 years of Dr. Who
Controversial update to 'bible' of psychiatry fuels debate over mental health
The Great Compositions of Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt
Agreed. Any other police job, people wouldn't support to that extent. This was different, and appropriate.

America may have its share of problems but the American peoples ability to help each other in times of crisis is remarkable.
From a recent Nassim Taleb facebook posting: "Rejecting a macroeconomic idea (Rogoff and Reinhard) over an excel error is exactly like falsifying astrology over a computer glitch."
Show HN: Tweetspiration – let Twitter brainstorm ideas for you
Well, of course "it's always a people problem" as Jerry Weinberg says. But the Barclays example is interesting* precisely for its technical detail. The spreadsheet author used Excel's "hide" feature to hide some data. Had Excel given them the ability to restrict read access to some portion of the sheet, it seems obvious that they would have done that instead.

* Interesting to me at least, because I work on things like this. Not contradicting your comment at all.
Looking forward. Please cover chef and puppet, rake/sake, common patterns for shell scripts.

Automating ssh, run a remote instance on the cloud preferably with amazon ec2
It's hardly martial law, it's more like a tornado warning.
It's been used many times in the past, also.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/04/small-scale-...
Most people pay lip service to excellence, but what they really want is consistency. In a corporation, a career developer that works his 40 hours and consistently delivers uninspired but clean and correct code is more valuable than one rockstar that creates a brilliant system in one weekend and spends the rest of the month burned out.
With Google Checkout.
Didn't he just gave an example?
Very interesting then.

In fact, I was so interested that before placing an order, I googled a bit to check its internals and make sure that the Chromebook Pixel could be upgraded.

Huh, soldered RAM, soldered SSD - ok whatever, what about the mini PCIe LTE card? Can I remove it and put something more useful in there? Nope - only USB is wired, so you can't put a mSata instead of the LTE card.

And I'm sorry, but that's a dealbreaker.

I would have got one if I could have put 16 Gb of RAM + a decent ssd, I might have purchased one with only 4 Gb - just like my current macbook air, as long as I could upgrade the SSD (like I did - on the macbook air!!), but with less storage that my current laptop and no possibility to fix that? No way.

I'll wait for a new version. If it provided ~0.5 Tb of SSD and 16 Gb of RAM, with the same hardware specs, I could spare with 2k USD - at least until the macbooks get touchscreens.

But trying to use the current model for the kind of development I do is just unreasonable. I need at least storage space, and I don't fancy the idea of travelling around with an external HD or praying for LTE connectivity.
On the one hand, yes sometimes bad things get approved in error. On the other hand, pharmaceuticals are already very tightly regulated. Plain old Aspirin wouldn't be approved by the FDA if it were invented today, it's too dangerous by their standards.
A true statesman will not put fuel on the bonfire of fear. He will extuingish it by telling us that there is nothing to be afraid of. That these acts are done by moronic twisted people that don’t deserve the attention. He will tell the people that they have nothing to fear but fear itself.

And despite this deathless rhetoric in the face of economic collapse, FDR interned 110,000 Japanese people because they had distinctive ethnic features shared by one group of people engaged in a war against the US, although there was never any attempt to intern German-Americans.

What happened in the Boston is that the authorities requested the cooperation of the public in exceptional circumstances, and got it. If they had tried to impose some sort of lockdown on Monday after the bombing, you might have a point. But they didn't. The city kept operating normally until the suspects resurfaced, got into a shootout with police, and one of them managed to evade his pursuers. Given how many people were affected by the original terrorist incident, I don't find it odd at all that most people chose to facilitate the manhunt by leaving the streets empty.
There isn't much detail on how their "Liquid Helium" tech actually
works but so far I've managed to find the following pdf and video
channel.

http://www.stremor.com/lhe.pdf

http://www.youtube.com/stremortv
1776 to 1847: Citizen America.
1848 to 1932: Producer America.
1933 to 2007: Consumer America.
2008 to ???: Cosmopolitan America.

Citizen America was an experiment in rational government that succeeded with flying colors in some ways (secularism, increasing confidence in popular government) but struggled immensely with the division-of-labor question, ultimately falling into bitter conflict (then war) over slavery.

Producer America started with the Industrial Revolution (which solved division-of-labor issues) and ran through the Gilded Age, and ultimately fell apart with the Great Depression, which taught us how bad things get for everyone if people can't buy the things being produced by industry.

Consumer America started with the New Deal and Keynesian economics, reached its cultural height in the 1950s-60s, and is now unraveling because it's unsatisfying and culturally empty. Also, the foreign policy (need to justify this hyperconsumptive lifestyle in which people eat 3x as much meat and do 2x as much driving as makes sense) has been horrid, to the point that even most Americans don't support it.

Cosmopolitan America is driven by a generation of people who see themselves as global citizens and want to improve the rest of the world through organic, democratic, and compassionate means (no more "bomb 'em till they love us"). Also, it seeks to allow more people to have involvement in production. It turns out to be a very unrewarding existence to be a corporate drone whose only real contribution to life is to consume (especially as those pointless, menial jobs get cut, thanks to technology).

What we're seeing now is the conflict between Consumer vs. Cosmopolitan America.
Yes, you pay at time of order, and wait a few months for the unit.
My impression was that Eric tried (successfully), to keep Google completely out of the picture, while only talking about issues from a personal perspective. A lot of the technical challenges JA mentioned would arguably be trivial for Google to solve, or attempt to solve (creating a name-hash network tree architecture like the one JA mentioned he'd liked to have seen become popular).

The problem I think is two-fold: 1. Google aligning with Wikileaks/JA will be seen as a political landmine for Google, since Wikileaks' agenda is very much at odds with many governments. This would obviously be something Google will have little interest in pursuing.

2. It's not in Google's best interest to propagate anonymity (as of now). Google's core revenue model derives from its ability to track people on the Internet. Making it easier for them to don anonymity will undermine and possibly destroy this model.

Whether Google's/Eric Schmidt's ultimate goals are good or evil is anybody's guess, and I don't think I gained any new insights into it based on this interview. It does appear that Eric/Google do have an interest in seeing freer access to information, as evidenced by them pushing for faster Internet, more secure/private browsing (https, 2-factor authentication, fighting official requests for access to user accounts [2]), access to the Internet in North Korea, etc. The more people are on the Internet, and the more they browse, the greater Google's revenues.

Google's upper management have also allegedly (and secretly) played a part in the Arab springs, which I would hazard a guess was a altruistic move, rather than a purely political one, but that's speculation [1].

Oh, and BTW, the timing of this 'leak' a few days before Eric Schmidt's book is highly suspect, no? :)

[1]: http://thepassionateattachment.com/2012/03/23/stratforleaks-...
(sorry this is not the best source, but Googling around will get you the actual Wikileaks cables and analysis)

[2]: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2259557/google-figh...

Edit: formatting
Their competitor Avalon sells the units for "the first 30 days profit of the device". So whatever the current price of Bitcoins and mining difficulty affects the price.
Microcontrollers currently supported by uClinux cost >$5.

One interesting option to reduce the cost is to use a new microcontroller , the psoc 4(starting $1, 32 bit) which includes programmable logic, which might enable implementing the dram interface in hardware and to achieve good memory performance.
You actually get a choice of having both SSD and HD at the same time (not sure if this is what you were implying) -- since the X230 (and 220 I believe) has an mSATA slot under the palm rest. I've got mine booting off the mSATA (128 GB running Fedora), and have the spinning disk left with the factory installed Windows 7 (plus a large partition formatted ext4 for my VMs).
INPUT: pressure cooker and household chemicals

Actually, I don't keep any gunpowder under my sink. Why are you deliberately mischaracterizing the inciting incident, and omitting the rather significant context that it involved multiple detonations at a public event?

OUTPUT: front page headlines around the world; whole city gets shut down

Front page headlines - so what, we should censor the news now? As for a city shutdown, that could just as easily be interpreted as 'whole city cooperates to catch bombing suspect.'
"World renowned" is a bit much. I, for one, had never heard of it before the tragedy, whereas for instance I have heard of the New York marathon many times.

(I hope this doesn't offend anyone - I think Boston has enough going for it that the fame of its marathon around the world is of little importance.)
I don't know about games, but cheering when murderers die is right and just, IMO, especially on the scale of OBL.
The next time you see a premeditated hit-and-run incident that critically injures 130+ people and involves TV-style shootouts with the police, people might consider it.
If you want to take this stance, you need to be criticizing psychiatry (and a psychiatrist actually is a medical doctor).
So, an Excel to Java converter would not be on your list of to-buy items.
Ask HN: Should I use AMQP RPC for simple requests?
I really like the idea of setting up a service such as RabbitMQ to handle my larger jobs and have n workers scale and process those requests. My question lies in if I should also handle 'quick' actions a user performs in the UI, such as saving small changes in a form, through the queue.

When I read about AMQP RPC it sounds like this would WORK for this kind of task, but is it the smart thing to do for such a use case? Am I making it more complicated than it should be and should use REST + AMQP depending on task?

Any comments would be greatly appreciated!
Just to play devil's advocate: sometimes the dangers of a drug aren't evident until many years after exposure. The FDA tries to balance the benefit of the drug with the dangers. Otherwise, many beneficial and lifesaving drugs wouldn't hit the market until decades after the initial trials.
Which, by the way, doesn't mean they are betting against BTC. They just elected to take sure profit up front, over less certain profit of potentially greater value long-term.
Comic Sans is the font of choice for CS class lecture slides.
Well, there were surely a few prospectors who made out like bandits- but on the whole, yes.
I had never heard of Upcoming.org until a day ago. I had heard of Posterous, but never really used it.

Why do these sites need to be saved? It appears that they have been shutdown due to lack of widespread traction or apparent value.

Sure, they are someone's "baby", and it's natural for some people to take this personal. But is there really truly anything of value in saving these sites?
The recent sequestration doesn't affect anything that led to the current standards. It may affect the regulatory environment going forward, but we're in the current situation independent of it.

I agree that food safety is a concern, but believe the source of the problem lies in the American relationship with food. More, bigger, and cheaper lead to the conditions we see.
That's the most unlikely line of argument I have heard today. Do you really think most terrorists expect to get away with their attacks? Haven't you noticed how many of them make suicide a part of the plan? It's as if you've been living under a rock for the last twenty years.
I didn't say it would be fast, only that it seemed like the right place for the specific goals of multipath TCP in order to minimize code duplication and overcome the various "smart" devices (a marketing word, not an accurate description) that pierce layer boundaries (like smart switches that look at IP headers, and routers that look at TCP/UDP flows) and have effectively rendered it impossible to develop new protocol semantics in lower layers (because they won't make it across the Internet; IPv6 could be depolyed by now if lots of ISPs didn't have "smart" devices blocking everything but IP+TCP+some special types of UDP). I blame such devices for making it unnecessarily complicated to develop multipath semantics over the current Internet.

The rest of your comment is pretty insulting. :)
Excel is a challenging tool to learn. It's not necessarily Excel that's the problem - it's called "human error". It happens everywhere.
And all this time I thought that post hoc ergo propter hoc was a fallacy!
Of course I read the article. I think the author is wrong. It's not just about these two guys.
How do you know that is the case of Apple, and how do you know that is not the case of other companies?
The heat is of course a byproduct of the higher wattage, but I wonder what on earth happened to make them miss the wattage target by 6-7x?
If the Vietnamese were invading the U.S. and about to eliminate the U.S. gov't from existence, they would have been nuked.
Reads like someone was upset their train was canceled.

Pretty damn clear why some airspace needed to be closed isn't? Fool.
Without reading the article... "correctly"? As in, I should just accept the author's conclusions? Do you ever think for yourself?
https://github.com/pate/chessmate/issues/new?title=Please%20...
Color Photographs of Russia from ~1910
You can also have first-person games with no shooting at all, like Dear Esther or The Witness.
Some time back I created my own ZSH prompt as I wanted something fast and minimal, where most others were too feature rich. It's also a good base if you want to create your own. https://github.com/sindresorhus/pure
From your first comment, I thought you were talking about public safety and deterring criminal acts. But it's clear now that what's really got your blood pumping is the sense of spectacle.

I guess I should congratulate the terrorists for putting on such a good show.
There's clearly two types of terrorists. Some may even hope to die as part of the attack, but if what I have read is to be trusted these guys had a flight booked to Russia, and tried to rush their car out of the shop very shortly after the bombing, which was in for repairs.

I could be wrong here, but I personally associate suicide terrorists with the operations out of the middle east. To my knowledge, terrorism from other sources isn't usually suicidal.
> Exactly. The MIT/BSD/Apache 2.0 licenses are about trust and cooperation, not force.

I see it rather the opposite. With the GPL, you make a piece of software free precisely because you trust anyone downstream, in perpetuity, whether you've met them or not, to make modifications (or not) to the code, to forked versions of the code, to branches of forked version of the code, whatever. The assumption is that each person can decide for themselves whether the software should be modified, and if so, in which ways. They can check with you or with someone else if they'd like, but they don't have to check with anyone before making modifications.

Companies that insist on MIT/BSD seem to be at least contemplating the idea that they don't trust downstream users, and don't want them to be allowed to further modify the software that was originally open source, at least not without separate permission. Hence they appreciate that the MIT/BSD licenses reserve them the right to use copyright law to keep downstream users from making modifications.
reducto ad absurdum isnt just something harry potter would say...

If the mother killed her children by using home-made explosives in crowded places frequented by innocents, of course. A (perhaps more tempered) version of this response would still have been necessary if not a single person had died.

don't discount the dozens of people who were injured or maimed by the original bombing.
I hate Peyton Jones for that.