skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow! I've always had a thing for dystopian literature, and the world this article presents actually seems plausible. Two ideas I particularly found intriguing:

-The idea of using an avatar to mask your true physical appearance. This seems like an appealing idea since changing your avatar on a settings panel is easier than keeping well-groomed and presentable. Perhaps citizens of the Google Glass world no longer feel the need to stay healthy and attractive? Could this level the playing field and take sexual attractiveness out of the picture altogether? Never again would someone be "out of your league." Will all our loving relationships be calculated and planned based on some OkCupid-esque compatibility algorithm? Perhaps a side-effect of this is a higher rate of sustainable marriages and a decreased divorce rate. So not completely bad and creepy.

-The way the author claims "You know you have free will, but don’t feel like you need it." I've felt for a while that the more realistic dystopian future is closer to Brave New World than to 1984, in which people willingly give up their freedom rather than have it snatched away from them. Instead of saying "You know you have free will, but it doesn't really feel like it," Pananberg opts for the phrasing "don't feel like you need it." It seems to suggest that free will in a Google Glass world is a burden, and that giving up that freedom to a benevolent intelligence just feels easier.

Either way, when I finished the article I pressed the "like" button, sending the event to my Facebook Timeline so that all my friends can stay connected with the things I find interesting and so that Facebook's Hadoop clusters can factor it into their advertising algorithms, allowing the company to more intelligently display products I would be interested in buying. I'll tell you one thing, that no longer includes Google Glass.
A two year Master where I'm from (Scandinavia) would probably cost me 400$ for the tuition.
I think he got the "You’re constantly logged into Facebook ..." wrong. It will be google plus or something completely different
We're a full node stack at http://geeklist.com One thing not being mentioned that I'd like to share is the extremely supportive and extraordinarily brilliant community of node.js enthusiasts. This has an intrinsic value that we could never replicate with any other code base. Around the world thousands upon thousands are excited to learn and hack in node. Guys like @mikeal @izs @indutny @dscape @dshaw @substack and so many other great developers in the node community jump in to help everyone else all the time. (Just try reaching out to any of them on twitter and you'll be amazed by the support. Yes we did finally just move up to 0.8.2.3 but running 0.10 caused some hiccups we just dont have the bandwidth to attend to right now so we're waiting just a tad longer. In sum node is great and you'll find developers absolutely love hacking in it which means they are enjoying working on your project/business... Which is priceless.
>"don't forget that Cuba and Venezuela are actively sabotaged by the most powerful country in the world,"

Funny thing that you claimed to have a bullshit detector and you wrote this. As a Venezuelan I even find it offensive.

How come that the "most powerful country in the world" is sabotaging Venezuela? By being its main client? There are way more convenient oil producers out there and still the business relationship is held.

In any case, please leave the politics outside of HN. We (Venezuelans) have to deal with enough politics BS and we don't need more, specially in a technical forum.
Ask HN: Can’t we define a new e-mail standard with Facebook’s features?
Features like groups, events, pinwalls, photo albums, likes, friends/contacts but also collaborative editing, versioning, chatting channels and voting come to mind.

I’m wondering what are the hurdles to define such an "e-mail 2.0" standard.
>The biophysio meter has been gauging the mood in the room, color coding them for convenience. Personally, you’ve always found that red hot conversations give you a headache while ice blue ones bore you to tears. The computer is able to pick up all the sounds in the room and sift through the conversations. You seek a color combination somewhat in the middle, a group of people not talking about sports or fashion.

Actually, I want this.
It would seem that the market is not efficient, since the average cost of tertiary education has risen a lot in the last decade(s) (from what I've read).

EDIT: in the US
I'm sorry but I simply disagree with you on his "once-in-a-century" eye for good design.

Take (for example one of my favorite) industrial designers - Raymond Loewy - This is a man who created the Shell and BP Logos, designed the Scenicruiser greyhound bus (iconic), coca cola vending machines, the GG1 (in my opinion one of the most beautiful trains of it's generation and they ran for just shy of 50 years) and the PRR S1 (which I think is the single most beautiful train I've ever seen) and just to finish it off he designed the livery for Air Force One.
why Tarsnap pricing is defined in terms of picodollars per byte rather than dollars per gigabyte: Tarsnap's author is a geek. Applying SI prefixes to non-SI units is a geeky thing to do.

I find that so amazingly annoying. To me it says "yeah, I know many people might find it hard to get their head around the units I defined, but I don't really care about that because I find it cool." We have standard units for a reason, because people can immediately get the scale of something in their mind. With this, you can't. I went to their site open to what they were selling, but I'm very turned off by this.
The thing with war is that the odds can change quickly. If you don't have any weapons and the enemy soldiers have machine guns, but you can sneak up behind one of them before anyone notices, now you have a machine gun.

The thing is, drones and robots work pretty much the same way. They work much more that way, actually, because if you find a vulnerability in one, it's likely present in all of them since they all came off the same assembly line. You don't have to kill all the drones, you just have to kill the ones guarding the drone control facility, or convert the drone operators to your side.

The most dangerous thing about robot armies isn't that it will make governments too powerful, it's that a terrorist could take control of them. And the only way to prevent that is to not build them.
I think that when it comes to "the Google contact lenses dystopia" there is no better comment than a short movie "Sight" http://vimeo.com/46304267. (It starts with gamification of cucumber cutting.)
> Firing on timeout is not the ideal way as the general pattern tells us people open multiple tabs which they may or may not read.

This is what I was thinking. I do this all the time. However, I have to question your statement all the same. Yes, this is something I do. But, I'm a software developer. Assuming that the general population of internet users follows my personal usage patterns would seem to be a bad idea. Being a web analyst, are you saying that you've conducted studies verifying this pattern?

Regardless, triggering based on scroll seems like a sounder approach. Thanks for the pointer.
On academic rigor
Video games like Mass Effect have quite modern SciFi stories. However, it is far future, not "next 30 years".
Interesting: in my browser, this comment is both greyed out and upvoted to the top of the list. Does this mean that comment placing is determined by upvotes, and comment greying is determined by downvotes, but those two processes are independent of each other?
Is the FBI dumb, evil, or just incompetent?
This discussion can't be regardless of the takedown issue, that is the issue being discussed.

> I think it's reasonable to say that while this particular image may not lead anyone to rape, that doesn't mean it doesn't contribute to a culture where rape is viewed as less wrong and more accepted.

I don't think it is reasonable to say that at all, since this 'rape culture' in the US is basically a manufactured boogieman. This image is representative of an asshole going for shock value, nothing more. The intended effect is occurring, the image is making rounds and people are getting upset.
Next Browser: A New Contender to the Android Web Browsing World
"Their government is saying it's because people are eating more and thus shitting more"

I read that on Twitter yesterday but I couldn't find a source. Not that I don't believe because I had heard worse, but was it true? Who said that?
At first I made the same mistake, thinking the headline writer was referring to this future state as a dystopia.

Instead, it's a candid admission that Pandodaily is a timesuck of low value linkbait, and that from this dystopian vantage point the article views a more hopeful future.
My thoughts on the matter are affected by nonparametric and Bayesian methods. Binomial and beta rule, most others drool.

What I can say is more than half the time that people are messing around with parametric statistics they don't quite understand what they're doing and they end up voiding the warrantee on at least one of the distributions or methods that they use.
> Where was I "laughing off" rape?

I didn't say you were, and that certainly wasn't meant to be personal. What I said was that men (plural) need to stop laughing it off, and by men I was referring to the men who create these images and laugh at them.

I also believe men have a collective responsibility to educate each other and stand up to this, much as one could say that non-participating bystanders in the examples I gave earlier had a responsibility to try and stand up against those events.
High Voltage, heavy metal and geek themed songs at the Maker Faire 2013
Every primitive type is a problem. General purpose programming languages are too "general-purpose" to be useful. Java will happily let you add two integers even though one may represent a quantity in metric and the other in imperial.

Invariably you should create your own DSL-like layer to organize your code and enforce consistency and correctness.
Author here. I completely agree with you. Could have known all this before had I just read the itertools docs beyond permutations and combinations. It was only after using Scala's groupby while solving an assignment problem that I thought about finding out an equivalent in python. And thanks to having worked with the Stream class from Scala collections, for the first time the rest of the itertools also made sense. Better late than never I guess :-)
Alarm bells should be ringing for Muslims. I strongly suggest they start pro-actively cleaning up their own messes because the street is losing patience.
Right, but you're targeting the wrong problem still.

DHH is (and I use this term unironically) a visionary. And on top of that he had a keen enough political sense (and arrogance) to be able to deflect or mute criticism of Rails's early flaws.

Ruby is a slow, memory hog? Doesn't matter, developer time is worth more than machine time. Buy bigger machines.

Rails concurrency model sucks? Doesn't matter, fire up more processes!

These were real problems, which have been subsequently addressed in Rails (by and large, by other people in the community who cared about those subjects). But what was important about what DHH did was define a vision and aesthetic for what web development should look like (and please note i'm no DHH fanboy. I jumped ship during the Merb/Datamapper split), and kept on pushing on his priorities even in the face of legitimate criticisms of things he thought were less important.

So, Rails succeeded because DHH has sensible enough taste in terms of prioritizing concerns, and a strong enough user base to fix Rails's shortcomings.

I'm not as familiar with the specific battles over Gnome (partially because i'm on OSX, and also because i find the interlocutors in the Gnome discussion to be so furiously inarticulate), but the conflict really only comes down to two possibilities. Either the leaders of Gnome genuinely are shit designers and aren't meeting the needs of their community, or they're really terrible at politics.

That's a really important distinction to be mindful of. I'm not amongst their target userbase, so frankly I can't say one way or the other, but all of the complaints I've heard against Gnome's leadership are things that I as a user have never ever cared about (granted I haven't used Gnome in a while, but all the times i've used systems w/ Gnome installed by default in the past, i've been satisfied).

And really, if Gnome's leadership is so inadequate, i'm puzzled why a critical mass hasn't risen up and forked the community. That's really the ultimate vote of dissatisfaction.
>The problem is not the cult of design dictatorship, the problem is bad design and bad designers

Which is precisely what the "cult of design dictatorship" describes.

Your correction amounts to saying "the problem is not crime, it's criminals" -- it's obvious and it's already conveyed in the original phrasing.

>That doesn't mean that being a designer or a dictator is a bad thing inherently

There's two ways to see this.

The pedantic ("is it true 100% percent and for all persons?") which I find useless, and the pragmatic ("is it true for most people that try to play Jobs/37 Signals that they are not fit for the role?").

The second, I believe holds. And that's why the idea of "being a dictator designer" is an inherently bad thing. Because it gives the majority of people the wrong idea about what they should do.

I don't care if the same thing works for a tiny minority. We should not perpetuate memes that only work for a tiny minority.

If that minority has the talent and stubbornness of Jobs/DHH, they will do it by themselves anyway.

The memes ("be a dictator and force your opinion to your team/users") only serve the mediocre, those that do harm.
Positives sound great, but how about negatives?

Kind of like modern food is toxic and unhealthy, but hey it's cheap, there's lots of it and well... It doesn't taste that bad! Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick to lean meat, fish, seeds and berries even though it costs me twice/thrice the money let alone preparation. And it can't be preserved as well. But whatever, fuck the dystopian future. :)
Comment placement is by both new-ness and upvotes. So a post that is downvoted immediately sinks faster, but doesn't immediately go to the bottom.
Billion dollar companies are still staffed by humans, as far as I know. "Companies" don't do anything. Their employees do.
The Cool New Blogging Platform You Haven’t Heard Of.. Yet
Eric Schmidt interview: 'You have to fight for your privacy or you will lose it'
11 Dead in Philippines Clash
I've been using http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html for a while and it is as reliable as you need.
I'm particularly disturbed by the notion that I'll be a pariah if I don't have some form of profile for people to check.

That sounds very plausible to me, and we're already seeing it on a significantly smaller scale.
“Fake it ‘til you make it”, or, as they say now “MVF, Minimum Viable Feature”
We know some things for (a-d). For instance, a string is (in every case I've seen) a monoid, you can append to either end and there exists an "empty" string which turns appending into an identity.

For (e) this may not be true if we want to treat the string as semantically equivalent to whatever its representing---you cannot always arbitrarily append represented objects. That said, a string is not that represented object unless there's an isomorphism. In Haskell types, you'd want to have a `String -> Maybe a` function to capture failure-to-translate. This case includes things like `SQLSanitize`. Also HTML header parsing whenever the headers have an interpretation in the current level of the system.

Note also that this value of (e) does not depend upon a representation of strings as any kind of character-based thing. You can make a monoidal representation of a regular expression from a star-semiring combinator set (and see http://r6.ca/blog/20110808T035622Z.html for a great example).

The remaining semantic troubles seem to be around ideas of mapping or folding over a string. Length depends on this representation---do I want character length or byte length?---as do functions like `toUppercase`. And then there's the entire encoding/byte-representation business.

So they should perhaps be instances of an abstract class of "Monoid" plus a mixin specializing the kind of "character" representation. Or, the outside-in method of Haskell's typeclasses where String, ByteString(.Char8), and Text each specialize to a different use case but all instantiate `Monoid` and each have some kind of `mapping` and `folding` function which specialize to the kind of "character" intended. Finally, there are partial morphisms between each of them which fail when character encoding does.
> This is like an argument against integers because integers can express so many things: age, number of arms, days of the year, and so forth.

Yes, and just like the strings case it shows how useless most primitive types are from a program correctness and documentation standpoint. Languages like C++ and Java encourage programmers to treat them as mystical bags-of-holding and forget about their limitations or relation to the data being processed.
It's been great at http://geekli.st and we run a full node stack. It is true error handling is an issue sometimes, but that's over shadowed by the quality of engineers looking to hack in node. Most common reason I hear for someone leaving a company... "I wanted the opportunity to hack in node at work" - not once, twice but dozens of times. In an age where finding top notch teams to build your stack is really hard, what code base you use is really important to attracting top talent.
Take a Jog Through Your App, In the Real World
As an alternative, I use Arq continuously on all my computers and I highly recommend it (Sorry I'm on my iPhone and won't be able to give a link). It lets you use your own AWS credentials for backup and you can encrypt the data before it is sent to AWS.

The issue I have with Tarsnap is that the data is still at the hands of a small operation, as far as I can tell, and honestly I'm afraid we won't get our data if something happens to the guy. This is fine of course for many services, but data backup is inherently as mission critical as it gets. The whole reason for it is reliability, assurance and redundancy. It is not a nice to have, it is for many people the only place they fully trust to keep their data forever.

I wish Tarsnap had an innovation that made it possible to use it with one's (or an organization's) own AWS credentials. An on-site mode, if you will. Otherwise it has always seemed to me like a great piece of software.
Also average comment score of poster.
>A huge number of the examples are encouraging raping, beating to a bloody pulp, and/or murdering women.

Is this "encouraging" in the same way "Call Of Duty" (or any other FPS with lots of guns) is (supposedly) "encouraging" kids to take up weapons and kill people?

This whole "encouraging rape culture" is bullshit, you either had the education to respect people (not just women, all people with no distinction of gender) and know that rape is bad, or you don't. No amount of 4chan browsing will ever make you suddenly "snap" and decide that "rape is cool". If a picture with a "witty" caption on facebook is enough to make anyone change its mind, then we should worry about all harmful action, from aggression to murder, not just rape.

By the way, Q: what's worse than a baby in trashcan? A: A baby in two trashcans. Now does this joke encourages infanticide or is it just a piece of black humor that may or may not be to your liking (and will clearly hurt some people who lost a child, sorry if some are among HN readers)?

What's even more saddening about this debate is that YES, something NEEDS to be done and some people who may one day resort to rape or sexual aggression NEED to be educated. Instead people are still losing time here, fighting with people who are just doing these jokes "for the lulz" and would never resort to rape. Don't preach the converted, stop alienating them, and go help educate the teenagers who need it!
You mean.. hive minds.. like the Borg?
All the data is encrypted before it ever leaves your machine. Not even cperciva should be able to read it.

You can also create a write-only key. If you run tarsnap from a server which gets pwned, the attackers can't touch the existing backups. Don't be the next Astalavista[1].

[1] http://joncraton.org/blog/49/analyzing-the-astalavista-hack
The thing that amazed me in that piece, was the throw away fact about Apple at one point holding more cash that the US treasury. OK, Im no economist, but, well, wow.

And after the nearly sensible point, my imagination wished Jobs had decided to become an Evil Super Villain, and set up a volcano base, with a moon based super weapon, preferably a "LASER"....
7 Reasons Why Fun at Work Makes Winning Startups
"They are just to close to the metal and too far from the users." That is bull.
How far they are depends on company policies.
Some sweatshops keep their developers away from their clients.
A secure online backup service for Minix -- FINALLY!!
> The funny thing is that the NYers in finance or law will often tell you how much they'd rather be working at a startup. (Or, well, anything else.)

Yuuup.

I can't even count on two hands the number of people I know who left finance and went on to physical jobs they thought were more satisfying. Bike messengers (like I did) were common, but so were roughnecks, delivery drivers and all sorts of other odd jobs.
>"Because facebook isn't a government entity it should be able to decline to publish whatever it likes".

But facebook isn't "pubishing" anything, which implies some sort of editorial process and an endorsement of the content. Service providers specifically go out of their way to avoid being seen as publishers, as that would make them liable for the content they authorize. So when facebook does take the extraordinary measure to remove content after the fact, they are actively censoring rather than not publishing. It must be that way.

My gripe with netrus' comment was that his wording implied that because facebook wasn't bound by law not to censor, that they necessarily should censor.
>While I love sci-fi featuring white male protagonists

It's interesting that Star Trek was actually quite progressive:

>Beyond Star Trek's fictional innovations, its contributions to TV history included a multicultural and multiracial cast. While more common in subsequent years, in the 1960s it was controversial to feature an Enterprise crew that included a Japanese helmsman, a Russian navigator, a black female communications officer, and a Vulcan-Terran first officer.

You would expect a little bit more now. The latest Star Trek film is basically about two white dudes battling two other white dudes plus "hey let's find an excuse to get this blonde chick in her underwear."