skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is more relevant in the context (i.e. RT broadcasts for foreign audiences):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC
"Though sharing some of the facilities of the domestic services, particularly for news and current affairs output, the World Service has a separate Managing Director, and its operating costs have historically been funded mainly by direct grants from the British government."

Even the TV license fee is just a tax collected and redistributed by the government.
I think the genius here is twofold. If a blog under that threshold seems threatening, they can do as you say. But the likelihood of that is kept low by the fact that people won't advertise their blog. Once a blog hits Twitter, Reddit or maybe even here and reaches a viral mass, that information spreads way too fast for a government to control - but who wants that to happen if they'll have to buy a license?
There are some startup lessons here where rates quintupled in 30 or so years but there's a theoretical limit where we imprison around 1 percent so quintupling can only continue about two more generations... so the explosive growth phase "must" end within the next 60 years or so. This collapse in growth rate will cause some interesting predictable issues in America's for profit prison system.

As a practical matter its probably too late to begin a startup focused on the prison industry. A prison-centric social network? A dating site for guards and/or inmates? A prison photo blogging site?
There are plenty of those. Here's one: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html

There's also, I believe, a CMU computer science "guide to graduate school survival" out there.

I don't think that this (somewhat self-deprecating) graduate school literature is unrealistically negative. Academia is pretty awful.

Life-wise, graduate school is a pretty negative experience. If you enjoy the subject matter and have an almost obsessive need to dive into it, it's a great time in that regard (and you will be spending 60+ hours per week on your work) because you can really study without having to deal with the bullshit that professors have to fend off (committees, tenure politics, grant-writing). The rest of your life will be somewhere from mediocre (if you don't care about the academic game, already dead-set on leaving post-PhD) to awful (if you try to play for keeps); even successful and happy graduate students experience this.

The upshot of graduate school is that, except for the money and low status-- and those aren't issues for everyone-- it's actually better than being a professor. You don't have to serve on committees or sweat tenure decisions or disciplinary hearings for cheating undergraduates, and you have a 5- to 7-year period where geographic moves under adverse circumstances won't happen.
I'm not providing a definition of evil, i'm pointing out that Singapore's achievements on the Evil Checklist don't measure up to the United States'. I don't think the US is evil either, it sets a high bar for other contenders though.

Take a look at the Roman Empire which, despite everything, made the lot of ordinary people better.

North Korea probably meets my definition of evil, but I really don't know enough. Nazi Germany, Stalin and his apparatus. Pol Pot.

Edit: among millions worldwide, I marched in protest against the massacre at Tien an men square. My mother, who has far better cred in this area than I do (having been imprisoned and tortured as a political prisoner) argued in favor of the Chinese government — she said China wasn't ready for democracy and far more people would suffer in a chaotic transition than if the government were allowed to reform at its own pace. It's imponderabe — we can only try to do what we think is right.
Bitcoin transactions are chained, that may compromise you.

But you could use an anon currency-exchange or currency-bridge like paysafecard.com to obtain some value and obtain bitcoin with that value and never use that bitcoin key again to avoid that.
That's not the issue, in general. The issue is more that a lot of hosting providers will close your account to cover themselves and avoid having to deal with the potential liability.
The Puzzle at CIA Headquarters
I did sign up for the beta (following the initial post).

So far, I've only seen overexcitment for a simple web-based viewer that displays very few data layers for a specific city and lacks a lot of useful information: for instance there are no POIs / streets labels / ... In this regard, I believe the recently unveiled WebGL-based Maps / Earth from Google are significantly more advanced. Most of the focus of your project has been on visual cuteness (tilt shift, animated cars) and wow effect (leap motion). This is combined with using buzzwords that IMHO don't really apply here (big data, platform). I'll be glad to be proven completely wrong when your beta is out.
They may well be angry at how they perceive Israel and the US is behaving towards the Palestinians.

However, it does not mean that anger is justified, and it does not justify attacks on civilians.
It sounds like they had a horrible lawyer.
To make people realize the possible consequences of surveillance.

If there is a consequence of surveillance that would make these people change their mind, then publishing that information is hypocritical by somebody who thinks it is ethically wrong to expose information that a person might want to have kept secret. If there is no consequence, then the act is useless. If there is a consequence, then these people are using the precisely the mechanism that they argue is the reason we should have privacy.

I wanted the person I was replying to spell this out so I could make the point clearly using their own words, without them getting hung up over how I phrased it.
The article was about shellfish. I'm sure most people wouldn't have an issue with fish.
You need to normalize to nutritional value rather than weight.

But the whole point of this thread seems to be that such an analysis is hard to do.
I'm really getting sick of my favorite people dying of cancer. I hope he had some fun.
Ask HN: How to Transfer Photos from Google+ back to Flickr
A long time ago http://www.flickrtoplus.com/ allows you to transfer all your photos from Flickr to Google+. Now with all the extra storage for free I would like to move everything back to Flickr. Does anyone know of a similar web services for the other way around?
The page itself notes, curiously:

> A related program, a big data or data mining system based on cloud computing and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) technology known as "Boundless Informant", was disclosed in top secret documents leaked to the Guardian and reported on June 8, 2013.

(my emphasis)

So, after we've had licenses claim (in one way or another) "do not use this software to wage war", will we see a rise in "do not use this software for secret intelligence gathering or processing" licenses?

Still, both are rather pointless when the entity you're trying to subject to the terms of your license has a standing army and heaps of nukes. Seriously. This is why we can't have nice things.
There are many beautiful aspects of Vagrant. These are true whether you work solo or with a team.

* If your machine is OS/X, but you deploy to Ubuntu then you aren't developing in a realistic environment. Using Vagrant you get to work with OS/X tools, but run your app on an Ubuntu(or whatever) OS. I use NFS file share, edit on the Mac, run in the VM.

* Keeps your machine clean. If you work on multiple projects, perhaps running different versions of Node, Ruby, MySQL, Reis, PostGres, etc, you keep them isolated to their VM.

* You can experiment. Want to try your app out in Arch, a different version of Ubuntu, etc? Spin up a new VM or clone an existing VM.

* Have a new machine? Copy over your VMs and start working right away.

* The environment it setup as a script. Have a new developer for your application? Just send them the scripts to spin up a new VM. I use Bash scripts to configure my VM's, or you can use Chef or Puppet.
i wondered if it rang true for others?

(Black male American citizen here). Yes, that was pretty much the the reaction I had (you can look at some of my posts in the Swartz submissions). I've spend most of my adolescent, teenage and adult life being subject to extra scrutiny by police and private security, presumably due to the combination of my gender and skin color ("presumably" since I didn't do anything wrong) and whenever I point this out on various geek/tech sites like Reddit or Slashdot, posters respond that this scrutiny is justified. Welcome to my world.

The other interesting thing I notices is that in response to all the various privacy intrusions that may be possible with Google Glass (and Google's possibly futile attempts to limit these uses but banning facial recognition apps and requiring the camera light to be on when recording) the techie response is basically "resistance is futile, technology will find a way, get used to it." The PRISM program is an example of the same thing - technology will find a way. The obvious difference is that in one example it's corporations or private individuals creating the violations while in the other it's the government, but in terms of the disruptive effects it can have on my life (and my recourse in light of those effects) to me it's a distinction without a difference.

This is the brave new world for some of you. Get used to it.

(btw, has Stallman spoken publically about Glass?)
But you would maybe eat meat if the flavor/aroma were OK, no? I realize this is getting into a 'duck typing' sort of question but I don't think "I just don't like the taste of meat" is really what most people think of by vegan/vegetarian.

I don't eat mashed potatoes, but it's not because of some reverence for the humble potato or concern about industrialization of farming, it's just because I don't like the taste.
> For example, any user could ask for content weighted towards an arbitrary date, like “Show me content to the taste of people who registered in December 2008” or “What do the 1,000 newest users like?”

That sounds like an incredibly interesting way to navigate a social news site.

Why do we have to be afraid to simply admit that, in a social news setting, the majority community gears content toward their own likes and interests? I actually wholly agree with the premise you dismiss as "semi-sarcastic".
iMessage is not PGP-like. Its centralized and Apple-device-specific nature is practically PGP's antithesis. It also fails several key feature checks, like the ability to encrypt or sign arbitrary files.
Didn't know about that, cool feature. For more discussion on this, also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607271
In the Monkey King Legend the heroes are warned not to overwhelm the monster by a reference to the Art of War by Sun Zi.

If I remember correctly, the translation is "even a rat will fight if cornered", though today we might mutter something about "asymmetric warfare" in response to "full spectrum dominance".

Sun Zi wrote in about 500BC. So it's not like you were warned yesterday. You've had 2500 years of warning.

Expect kamikaze attacks. They happen. Especially from people who feel they have nothing to lose, and feel under attack from very, very strong opponents.
>>> I think they should have only been charged with the trespassing, and instead the management of the facility should have been been on the hook for some serious negligence charges.

Exactly. I find it outrageous that the manager of that facility claimed that "their acts had an impact on nuclear deterrence" - their acts did not, his did and IMO he should rot in jail.

Don’t blame the mirror for your ugly face.
Canada is rapidly changing under Harper (Canadian Bush). I wouldn't trust anything in Canada either. I wish someone woukd start looking at places in Europe with stronger privacy laws like Germany. Or if Iceland had better connections to place it in Iceland.
Ask HN: Good design critiquing sites?
Besides /r/design_critiques, Google hasn't revealed any that seemed respectable/functional: anyone with experience in this area have a few links to offer? I'm looking for feedback on my redesigned personal blog.
Exactly.

There are so many confounding variables here that it's really hard to tell. Everyone pretty much chooses to believe whatever data they like best. For example, cultivated land is probably less environmentally friendly than pasture land.
And NYC please :)
I do wonder though whether the benefit achieved by the action stfu suggests might on balance overcome any detriment.

Yup, and that's precisely the argument the government is making- the benefit of catching terrorists outweighs any detriment to privacy that people might have.
It looks straightforward, but actually it isn't
I've loved most of his books since I first read The Wasp Factory in 1987. A sad loss. I hope someone does a faithful and sympathetic movie version of one of his culture novels.
RIP
I just hate cancer, and I can't believe we don't have the cure yet, but I guess there just isn't enough money in it.
Time zones are not code, they are data in a defined format that the code is already equipped to handle. Updated time zone data is not a reason to change code.
OK, this is a pretty ridiculous claim. Other people have already pointed out, "There's actually evidence" requires some evidence. You have none.

Why would modern fruit contain "more sugar"? More sugar than when? How much more sugar? Who miraculously put the extra sugar in the fruit? The fact is, even if we selectively bred fruit to be sweeter, we're not going to get it much sweeter than it already was. Nobody's going around injecting apples with extra fructose with a syringe.

Getting all your vitamins from meat is ridiculously inefficient; you can do it, but you're creating a tremendous ecological burden. All of that meat has to be raised, fed, watered, and pastured. Fruits and vegetables cut out the middle man; they use much less water and land to get the same nutrients into your body.

It's fine to say that 'magical thinking' is bad, but you're not doing any better. If anything you're ignoring facts based science in favour of 'what some people say'.
Good Morning

Today's HN Sunday School Surveillance:

"The Meaning of Morning"

The weighty and by now quite sad:

Alas, Atlas, aka Descartes, descending heavy and exhausted elephant's privacy:

I am ~ I am therefore(... (I am therefore(... sigh ...) ...)

surveillance ~ meaning of ( meaning of ( ... meaning of ( )))

meta^(n)(meaning of meaning) ~ meta^(n)(meaning of life):

with:

d^(n)/d^z exp^z = exp^z, or iter_{n} \ints e^(n)^= e^z,

e(z) ~ e(n)'(z) ~ ... ~ e(2)'(z) ~ e'(z) ~ e(z),

kernel of all Taylor series, Lapalace and Fourier transforms, optimum nos base, signature tell-tail of organic and non-carbon life

Method of `exhaustion( original_thought_crime)', until:

Subst iter-expon into error_function non-imaginary trench warfare real moonscape enfilidating fragmenting shells terror:

\int_{0\to\infty} e^(n)x* ... e(2)xe^x *
e^(n)(-x/2)* ... e(2)xe^x *
... e(3)xe(2)xe^x
dx

rose \def:= A rose is a ...(A rose is a ...()...)

lambda umbric brill: till finally, boundary recapitulating invagination named Utah:

In the beginning was the word,
and the word was with (' ()),
and the word was ((' ())):

"Sure is, She rises, She is, Surveillance"

Privacy Information Exaustive Total Awareness (PIETA)

* find /root/mtAthos/russianNavy/1922/prism/nsa -name 'name_worship'

* bediger4000 1 hour ago | link

> The "cyberwarfare" will be the new war on terror, 5-10 years from now. Yes, just like the war on terror is the new war on communism. By 1990, all the defence contractors figured out that without a boogey man to scare people with, the US government has a lot of things it would rather spend money on than billable hours.
Doesn't the incarceration rate actually begin climbing when prison privatization was implemented, rather than a decade or so earlier WRT gold standard?

Always following the money is good advice, and we're both doing that. I'm just doing a little more Occam's razor.
I don't dismiss it, I actually wrote the text so that would be a bit harsh on myself :) I find it truly interesting as well, but at the same time want to express that some internauts are at times overly conservative about these things.
> By the way, it's a really crappy air force that can't do an air strike with sleeping-gas bombs.

I daresay that would be a lot less effective than you might expect. See the Moscow theater hostage situation[1][2] for what happens when trying to use it on a fixed target with ground level access. Imagine how much harder that would be from an air-drop, and the concentration gradient you'd end up with. Individual dispensers, cluster-bomb style might help a bit, but I still think you'd end up killing anyone close-by if you wanted it strong enough to permeate buildings.

Calling in a heavy smoke/CS drop and then retreating might be a sensible option, although I don't think there's nearly enough (public) information for anyone to judge definitively on the correct course of action in this instance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisis
As another commenter mentiioned, that tool just automatically switches to HTTPS sites if available (on the same domain name)

FYI: there's https://pay.reddit.com/ but it doesn't work with HTTP Everywhere because its on a different domain.
Thank you yareally, would this be considered a spam if I repost it with Show HN?
Just in case you're not being facetious...Cancer is a label that groups a huge variety of diseases that involve "unregulated cell growth" (thanks Wikipedia!). Curing "cancer" is extremely difficult because it isn't one thing.
I had to use "-f2" instead of "-f1" because "ps ax" showed " 3156 ? Ss 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd" with a leading space character, probably because by chance my sshd PID was below 10000 and therefore indented
http://www.awwwards.com/
I think he just made the case that they aren't above the law.
Precisely. And that's why the managing director of that facility should be the one charged with 35 years in prison for not protecting it well enough, and thus endangering the safety of the United States of America. These people should be only given the original charge of trespassing and spend at most a year in jail.
Indeed, Quakers, who opposed slavery before anyone else and were probably the group most instrumental in ending it. (Unlike Southern Baptism - formed out of a desire to theologically justify slavery)

Also - Smedley butler
I hope our galaxy's version of the Culture are good guys and backed him up, so he can have a very enjoyable and long life. RIP.
That doesn't matter, since the changes of your endpoints ip are available from your ISP.
why not just
find|grep <pattern>
I haven't done much research, but is there a way to share a running instance with others? Can I configure/setup/tinker-with an instance, suspend it and share that with someone?
Well then the idiotic vengeful angry US response to 911 is also unjustified, and also does not justify attacks on civilians.

Particularly drone "signature strikes" against first responders, which have killed MANY more people than 911.

Decide which standard you want to have, and then realize that it applies to your favoured side too.

Which by the way started most of the problems in the first place.
Did North Korea massacre its indigenous population? Has it nuked or firebombed any foreign cities?
What I trust even less than NSA and US intelligence is Israel's. We will have even less control on which entity or agency will have access to, what places or whom I'm visiting.
Obama I think should be a wake up call for many: there is a vast gulf between Obama the candidate (eloquent and compelling) and Obama the president (who seems to have doubled down on Bush-era policies and launched a war on "theft" at the behest of the intellectual property industry).

Is there really such a great divide? One of the main things that struck me during the primaries was was Obama's willingness to change his views based on arguments from other people, and his desire for compromises agreeable to all parties. So it seems straightforward that if you put him on top of a bureaucracy that's full of people convinced that all the Bush era policies were necessary, he wasn't going to rock the boat as much as many hoped.
I was tempted to reply saying something similar, but he's a troll, and I don't think there's much point feeding it.
The problem of HTTPS is that you will need certification from some CAs which may be working with government agents.
No such thing as a movie, but there's a short fan film called Something Real: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET8IFxPo61w If I remember correctly, Banks wasn't opposed to someone making a MMORPG based on Culture, I don't know how he felt about films. Maybe it's better Hollywood didn't touch it, the feel of Culture could probably be pulled off only in anime form.
Lifelogging and Digital Immortality
Ask.fm, the troubling secret playground of tweens and teens
Curing any cancer is extremely easy. The hard part is the host surviving the cure :(

RIP. Never read many of his stuff but what I read was very good. I do hope he hadn't suffered much at the end.
I really dislike the unit test and integration test analogy. It is based on the assumption that the human body has something in common with a computer program - or anything man-made for that matter. This is clearly not the case. We tend to think of ourselves in terms of whatever our current lead technology is. It has been like that before [1]. While it is certainly psychologically comforting it becomes dangerous when we act based on what really is somewhat of an arbitrary model.

[1]: http://webadventures.at/2007/06/17/der-mensch-als-industriep...
Then at least the cure for one type of cancer. I am okay with there being different cures for different types. What I am not okay with is that is that I haven't seen a cure for any type of cancer that doesn't boil down to lets kill a ton of cells using methods that are slightly less likely to kill normal cells than cancer cells.
I recall reading an article by him (about a month or so ago), shortly before reading an article about a new possible cancer cure (sadly still untested on humans). A sad loss for the literary world (amongst others). I hope he got the opportunity to make "an honest widow" (as he joked) of his girlfriend before he left.

Safe travels Iain, you'll be missed by many.
I'd say that rule of law has mostly been damaged by the increasing number of every vaguer federal statutes that let prosecutors find a felony for any person they set their sites on. And all the tools prosecutors have to force persuade defendants to plea bargain, meaning that criminal cases very seldom come to trial any more.
Rollingdebian is looking for authors
> I point this out on various geek/tech sites like Reddit or Slashdot, posters respond that this scrutiny is justified

I think on HN we might all agree that type of scrutiny is racist and pointless.

If the Aaron Swartz story were not about a white person using the MIT network but instead about a black person using any other network, no one would have cared. Additionally, if he were black, there's a decent chance he would have died the day he ran from authorities.
>Yes. Instead, you chose an ad hominem attack, which is pretty much the definition of feeding the trolls.

Are you really claiming that saying "don't feed the trolls" is feeding the trolls?
A third of people in rich countries die from cancer. There's plenty of money in it. It is just that unregulated cell growth is an extremely difficult problem to solve.
When google maps came out, it had noticeably worse data than MSN Maps and Mapquest, bit it was fast and slick. Don't compare 4 months of work by 2 people against what Google has accomplished in a decade.
Presumably this is defense against Apple (or Samsung) getting it.
Convergence: Meatspace crossing into Cyberspace
Here's a strong recommendation to anyone who hasn't read yet The Bridge by Banks, to go and read that wonderful novel.
Not to mention his classic and highly imaginative Sci-fi novels: The Player of Games, Feersum Endjinn, Use of Weapons, Excession...