skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Her first statement while being interviewed was that she was performing a science experiment. That story changed under interview, and she later admitted someone told her how and encouraged her to do it. The outpouring of support from renowned scientists and legal funds happily ignored that point, and stuck with the "science experiment" angle.

So, no, this is not an anti-science campaign by the government, regardless of how really hard we want to believe that she's aspiring to science. These things will blind you and take limbs off if you mishandle them. They have blown up on police officers after being left in an alley because they didn't detonate when kids make them. Then they just leave them for other people to clean up.

Even if you buy the science experiment angle, which she herself went back on, this is a safety issue from the completely reckless way in which she performed a "science experiment", similar to detonating a pipe bomb on school property just to see what happens. Oh, how the narrative would be different if she had built a pipe bomb instead.

Honestly, guys, we have this one wrong. Here's several other cases for your consideration, showing how big this problem is (the reason arrests are picking up is because LEOs are communicating about this, now that kids are starting to do it more):

http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2013/04/grosse_p...

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=... (from TODAY)

http://www.ktvb.com/news/crime/Five-more-plastic-bottle-expl...

http://www.kboi2.com/news/local/Police-warn-about-plastic-bo...

http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/bottle-bomb-warning-goes-out-t...

This is a serious problem, not an opportunity to "win another scientist," and the narrative around this case has been disgusting. Reckless behavior and endangering yourself and others intentionally is not the hallmark of a scientist, no matter how much you want the science angle to be true.
The funny thing is that by far the bulk of commercial explosives have always been used in industry, not in war.

To add another person into the equation, consider Fritz Haber. He invented a process to synthesize ammonia on commercial scales cost effectively. In doing so he made explosives and gun powder far more economical, but also fertilizer. His work is responsible for a significant escalation in the efficiency and lethality of warfare (he also pioneered chemical warfare, as an aside) but also for feeding roughly half of the entire population of Earth at this point.

That's the nature of science, it's not easy it's not safe it's not without risk, it's not without moral quandaries. The way to attack these problems is not to try to neuter intellectual curiosity, to replace everything in a chemistry set with water, to replace tools with their nerf equivalents, to put people in jail when they venture too close to danger. The correct way is to ensure that people learn from their mistakes, and to make sure that people acquire a sense of what sorts of things tend to be dangerous and how to be properly prepared for handling those situations, or, when warranted, avoiding them.

The same lessons apply to using computers. It's simply not possible to have a robust curiosity about programming, systems, or computing in general without acquiring dangerous knowledge. And it's extremely unlikely for folks to go through their formative years of learning these things without one or more excursions into dangerous behavior.
It’s highly‐available NoSQL database (Megastore) with ACID transactions based on entity‐groups[1]. No other cloud provider has anything even remotely comparable. And it’s now available outside of the App Engine framework.

I was hoping they’d make App Engine to actually run on GCE, but this is fine for now.

I’m a little bit worried about this though:

> You should be aware that Cloud Datastore has a serving component that runs on Google App Engine, so there will be instance hour costs.

What I think is going on is they are either worried about about DDoSing their internal APIs or they’re not willing to opensource the part of the client that runs on App Engine instances behind SDK. I think there’s a tech talk coming up on Cloud Datastore that may shed some light.

[1] http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2011/Papers/CIDR11_Paper32.pdf
This is great, as I'm sure I'm one of many planning to set up a self-hosted RSS reader prior to Google Reader's final closure.

I'd be interested in a feature comparison of CommaFeed with Fever [1] (apart from price). Can anyone comment? Particularly interested in being able to access my feed from multiple devices (desktop, mobile, iPad etc).

[1] http://feedafever.com
Eclipse is a constant source of small annoyances for me, none of which by itself is a huge deal but when taken together color my view of the editor negatively.

Unfortunately, switching to Android Studio presents a different set of issues, like lack of Perforce integration (using Perforce is out of my control here, unfortunately).

I'd assume some sort of hybrid Android Studio/IDEA setup is possible, but even still the Pro version of IDEA that I would seemingly need to get any Perforce integration working is priced at a point ($499 and up) where I'm not sure I could make a justification for the purchase. Eclipse kinda sucks, but it also mostly works and the perforce integration on it is free (and also quite good, I have no idea if IDEA's is any good).

I could, of course, just eschew IDE/VCS integration, but editor integration is, in my experience, kind of a big deal with Perforce because of the rather old-school model it uses of checkouts. It becomes really annoying to merge code in if you don't preemptively check things out before you change them, and having the IDE manage this by just checking things out when you first start editing them is a huge win. Pseudo-ironically, if the VCS I used were any of the ones Android Studio/IDEA gives you for free having support for it in the IDE would be less of a big deal for me, I'd just do all the VCS stuff at the command line.
Google Cloud storage is a great place for uploaded media (it's pretty efficient at serving), and the PHP runtime integrates quite cleanly into GCS (you can fwrite() to a GCS object, for example).

https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/php/googlestora...

We're working with a couple of Wordpress developers on a plugin to integrate Wordpress media uploads with Google Cloud Storage.
1- you're not the boss of etsy, it's etsy who's your boss: you're working to provide something etsi can sell to THEIR customers.

2- so the real question is why do you and all the other people who go thru the centralized and censoring etsy entity did so to communicate with other people, your potential customers on the Internet?

The Internet is designed to be a meshed network, with N-N communications, not to be a star network with N-1 communications.

The problem is with you people who sumbit to Etsy, ebay, youtube, facebook, skype, etc.

Set up your own servers in your garage! Set up your own connections with your neightbor and the neighboring towns.

Do not pay with your money or your time for those centralizing and controling entities to develop centralized and controling server software. Instead, pay developers to write freedom software (GPL) that works in a distributed way, on your own servers, and which YOU control yourself.
No, it's actually pretty silly of Microsoft. They're blatantly disregarding YouTube's TOS by allowing users to download videos within the app - I'm just shocked this made it past Microsoft legal.
I mean I remember reading about this a couple of days ago. I guess "outside the cloud" is what I missed.
This is disgusting. Is this really how Florida treats its own? I grew up in Southern California and I blew out the circuits on my junior high's science building once. I got a firm talking to, a two-day suspension, and a uncool nickname out of it, but that was it.
Adsense "users" are actually business partners with google. You share revenue, pool resources, etc. In my mind, that arrangement should encourage a higher level of service than most customers.

I'm saying that the poor service offered Adsense partners isn't excused because they're not customers. If anything, it indicates that customer service will be worse based on this totally made up hierarchy that I've just made up (partners more important than customers, should have higher priority service).
This is a very good point. I think a lot of people tend to greatly overestimate the degree to which technology has the keys to their social life.
You are correct about the probation portion, but she did not plead guilty to enter diversion, it is typically no contest to the charges until she completes the diversion program (probation) then the no contest is converted to either a "nolle prosecution" or "withhold of adjudication". Otherwise I agree with you this is not the same as the State dropping the charges, but this is not the same as a guilty plea or conviction.

Additionally, the record is not erased, but she would have the option to seal or expunge her record after a period of time governed by Florida Statute. Of course both military and Feds can always see sealed/expunged records (not that the public will not generally remember this name for some time to come) and if she ever wanted to join a bar (despite being interested in science now, this experience may encourage her to become an attorney fight this kind of injustice on a daily basis), they generally make you unseal your record.
From what I understand, the hyphen was introduced to last name of Spanish origin because spaces were not allowed in databases.
even from radical libertarians

I have never understood why having my rights denied, trampled upon and generally treated as nonexistent is considered a great evil when done by "government", but a great and necessary moral victory when done by "the free market".

I also do not understand how anyone can look at, say, the first few stages of the industrial revolution -- when, for example, in the United States any attempt to protect the innate rights of workers was viciously struck down in service to the great "freedom" of contract -- and believe that markets will solve problems on their own, or that government has no place beyond a bare minimum of defense of property.

But then, people also don't read Thomas Hobbes anymore, because even though he was right about the state-of-nature thought experiment, his ideas on its consequences are no longer fashionable.
As duaneb below points out, her intentions were not sinister. Negligence can be a crime, but do we really charge minors with crimes of negligence? Isn't that part of the problem of being a minor?

Given that it wasn't done with malicious intent, this is a matter for school disciplining, not court time.
It would be really cool to see a secure JavaScript API so you can query the datastore from a client-side JavaScript page like you can with Firebase.
They dropped caldav too.
I don't know what you've experienced. Maybe you've been unusually lucky. Perhaps I've been unlucky. But everything I've seen convinces me that shitty experiences are the norm in this industry.

I enjoy programming and solving hard problems, but I hate this industry with a passion. I'm sick of the terrible legacy code, the bad decisions made by people dumber than a crocodile's fecal product, and the lack of respect and autonomy for the people doing the actual fucking work.

Even Google turned itself into a closed-allocation shitpile at some point. What a fucking disaster.

We've failed to make ourselves a real profession, and it seems like the norm is for us to suffer dearly for it. Most programmers live in an environment where they have minimal autonomy and don't even choose which projects they work on. It's fucking disgusting and if we had any collective self-respect, we'd demolish the assholes who built these horrible work environments.

Personally, I won't be happy until the people who instituted calibration scores and closed allocation at Google commit seppuku. They destroyed billions of dollars worth of economic value, they ruined the lives of hundreds to thousands of highly talented people, and it's the only decent thing for them to do after that.
>Maybe I can try one out on my school's football field? No malicious intent,

I blew up a bag of Oxygen/Acetylene on my school's football field. No malicious intent, can you think of a safer place to do it? I couldn't.

>Or perhaps I could study the inhalant properties of anthrax powder at my desk at work,

That's not even close to the same thing, but perhaps you should.
You are correct there is no admission or guilty plea involved.
You are exactly describing the Apple philosophy, UI responsivenes over all.
Ask HN: How do UX designers work?
I'm a software engineer gaining interest in the design side of things. I've made a small questionnaire to gain (and share) insight into how it is UX designers work.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1TRcrzeWHwSmdokPnDm6CNYirnn2XFdCBAW3ReobqssA/viewform

Please let me know if my questions totally suck and that I'm an idiot.
I can't believe that with all the outrage and coverage this matter got, she will still face expulsion from school. Isn't there anyone sane there? Could this prosecutor drop the case by any chance.

I don't consider her completely innocent, but still this was nothing that would require such severe penalties.
GreenQloud is pretty neat - Renewable Energy-powered IaaS
http://greenqloud.com/
Let's take a simple example. A soldier deployed overseas sees this link, sets up Tor, and sends some confidential information that includes evidence that the US government is up to some shenanigans.

After Manning and some other fun, the military is not really a fan of this happening, but realizes that it would provide an excellent way to identify seditious elements who don't have other channels to work out their moral dilemmas (or just their annoyance at being an expendable cog in the bureaucracy).

MilInTheMiddle proxy rewrites the page, replaces just that link with one that is under their control, then waits. People outside the military see the normal link, but a kid in Iraqistan sees the honeypot. When s/he sends secrets to the New Yorker (it's not even the NYT), the operator has a lead not only on what information may be flowing to the media, but is able to stop it and investigate the sender.

The same case could be made for financial institutions, government agencies, people in foreign countries with national firewalls, etc.

The only reason I'm not particularly concerned about this is that I strongly suspect that a) the organizations don't really have their sh*t together enough to do this in a fashion that wouldn't create immense blowback when (not if) discovered, and b) there are easier methods to get similar information already in place.
Why? It's already an ISO/ECMA standard, and there's an existing high quality open source implementation in Mono. Microsoft has open sourced several of their more recent frameworks and languages, including ASP.NET MVC, F#, and TypeScript, and released free-but-not-open-source tools like the express editions of Visual Studio. How would open sourcing the CLR help?
I really like the idea, but it seems like it would become pretty intrusive injecting text after every large number on the page. It's especially uncool with headings and titles (http://i.imgur.com/T3yj1ZD.png), I think in those instances it should support a hover+click to expand so it doesn't ruin the look and feel.
Hacker News removes users' ability to flag articles if they abuse it. Just for shits and giggles I am going to perform an experiment: every time someone shrilly declares that MS articles are being mercilessness flagged by upset Google employees, I am going to flag the article as well.

My money is on my flagging ability not remaining intact for very long.
And that's only half of it. Users that are likely to request an invite are more likely to be technically savvy and provide better feedback than "maps is b0rked. plz fix!!11". If you are going to have to deal with feedback, it's much better to not have to sift through low quality feedback during the early days of launching a new product.
I'm not really familiar with the specifics of what's going on at the high tech campus, but I know there's a lot of stuff happening there.

Some other startups based in Eindhoven:

- http://www.filedropme.com/

- http://www.redefinestudio.nl/

- https://www.jibr.com/

- http://www.studyportals.eu/

- http://www.izooble.com/

And of course Shapeways[1] which recently raised $30M from Andreessen Horowitz amongst others [2]. Although their HQ is now in NYC they started out in Eindhoven and still have an office here. Their BV is also still located in Eindhoven.

[1] http://shapeways.com/

[2] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases-test/shapeways-annou...
Can google selectively pick which partners will get access to their service?

I want to understand the legal answer and the ethical answer.
hangouts was cool at 1st. Now it's kinda cool in that you can hang out w/ your favorite computer science academics but that is about it...
The fatalism in this comment disgusting. But more importantly, it is wrong.

I haven't been here long, but I remember hearing about the inevitability of SOPA and PIPA and CISPA and every other misguided attempt at regulation. The "inevitability" was a lie then, and its a lie now. Its a lie perpetrated by people would rather believe they are persecuted than accept the burden of trying to make a difference. They cry "The world is bogus! I give up!" and retreat because it is easy, because it is safe.

This quote is important:

“Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.”

Your cynicism is a giant middle finger to anyone who has ever fought for anything and won. Read a history textbook and you'll find every page has the name of someone who took on forces greater than themselves and won. Do you think they were so different? Do you think they had some divine authority? Do you think they were successful because they won a lottery?

There were people who fought for things when it meant death, when speaking your mind meant being killed. But I can go anywhere in the world and say "Barrack Obama is a piece of shit" and sign my name to it. The most powerful man on the planet is, in many ways, no more powerful than me.

Your understanding of humanity is fundamentally flawed because it assumes the past is our destiny. If you believe that, you don't have a single thing to offer the world.
Surely the only people who care about this sort of story are savvy enough to realize that both parties are being petty.
It is called func.
> That's just not the reality I experienced, and I never saw the ecosystem through that prism. shrugs

I agree. Did you go to a small high school?

I suspect most of this labeling happens in large high schools. When a grade has more than 150 or so students[1], it becomes impossible for them to all interact with each other. They get divided up into different classrooms, take different classes, each lunch at staggered times, and form small, non-overlapping cliques. At least, that's the impression I've gotten from talking to people about it.

My high school was small and homogeneous: everyone knew each other, took many of the same classes, had the same teachers, etc. So the world described in pg's Nerds essay[2] is pretty foreign to me.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
> You say things like this a lot. I'm willing to accept that I may be naive, but do you think that those of us who have had primarily positive experiences (and I know a few, not only me) just incredibly lucky?

Do you live in a major tech hub? Because here a lot of the jobs suck and we take the only gigs in town and most of us are the victims of the "two body problem" with more successful spouses anchoring us to undesirable areas.
Bingo. Or you send documents that are traceable to a small group of people, including you, and everyone else has protection and/or an alibi. General, General, Colonel, Colonel, Short Bird, Corporal...wait a second.
Yeah, that was called for. Thanks for the rational, objective discourse, there, by telling me I should kill myself with anthrax because I disagree with your opinion. Just reminds me why I love the Internet.
Google+ Gets a Major Makeover
> Public commentary on this issue is completely ignoring that.

No, lots of public commentary is condemning her for what she did but not want to see her entire future destroyed by federal conviction. Even if she's acquitted it's traumatic and destructive.

It's the kind of thing that could have been dealt with entirely within the school.
I don't know about your or your friends' coding skills, so I can't comment. I see a huge difference in the code I write in my language of proficiency versus code my friends write in the same language (my friends are mainly scientists, so their code tends to be ad-hoc modelling to get to a specific point, then discarded).

My code is much better architected, much more reusable, cleaner, and, if you're going to be using it in the long-term, it's going to be much, much cheaper. Not to sound arrogant, but I sometimes marvel at how easy it is to add more features or change features just because the code was written properly the first time around.

This is what the client pays for, the years of experience that have taught me how to write clean, maintainable and extensible code. If you're going to throw the code away after your MVP, you obviously shouldn't care if the code is maintainable, but code written by inexperienced and experienced developers is nowhere near similar.
It depends on whether you want someone to grant you rights, in which case, they're privileges.
Maybe it sounds like condescension. I was in the same place at the beginning. No exceptions? No generics? Heresy. How dare you Go people ignore my many years of experience? I wrote a few rants to the mailing list, which were basically ignored.

The reason I assume you haven't used Go much is that your examples of problems with checking stuff in aren't examples of problems happening in Go. It's an analogy with other languages and other environments. Such arguments don't seem to get very far.

Maybe it won't scale and something will have to give. I expect the Go maintainers will find their own solution when it happens, and it won't look like Maven or traditional shared libraries. (If anything, it might be by replacing Git/hg with something that scales better.)
I was referring mainly to Hacker News and similar communities. Everybody condemning her has been downvoted to oblivion on these threads.
Will You Welcome Your New Silicon Valley Emo-Choad Oligarch Government?
"If PG does not want to stop this blatant and continuous moderator abuse, he might as well declare HN a Google and Linux fiefdom so that the rest of us using other platforms and who can think for ourselves and are not Microsoft haters can stay away."

I think an interesting project would be to reverse engineer the flag scoring and karma decay, scrape and offer an "unskewed HN" and something that shows most flagged topics or articles (maybe a flag weighted word cloud for last x days idk).
Transparent mode is great but invasive, and mitmextract is fine for non real-time analysis.

Sometimes you might want to analyze traffic on production systems and changing routes is not an option.

What I would love to see is a way of doing a non-invasive, realtime processing of http traffic, eg when a specific post request is made, trigger some job.
I wonder what you would say when you personally experience a $15,000/mo sudden AdSense account shutdown in a bootstrapped startup, with confiscation of $30,0000 earnings already on the account. The email will be just a template to accuse you of "fraudulent activity", and there will be no human at all that you can call. Speaking with the first hand knowledge of the matter.
Fascinating. It's like the Harlem Shake of Turing Drawings.