skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't actually advocate doing any of this, but I bought a book on "Spy Techniques for the Office" (or something like that) a long time ago (I think it was on the bargain rack at Barnes & Noble)... anyway, one of the techniques they mention for spying on a meeting when you're not in the room goes like this:

Go to the meeting, and put your phone on the table. Have the phone set for no ring, and auto-answer. Excuse yourself to go to the restroom. Then, using another phone, call the phone laying on the table. Listen to what is being said in your absence.

In this case (listening after the meeting has adjourned) you'd need to find a way to "forget" your phone, so it couldn't just be lying right on the table top. I suppose you could pitch it in the bin, ala Cypher in The Matrix, if you could do it without being noticed. Could be awkward if somebody found it though.

You could probably also build a very small, easy to conceal audio recorder using one of the voice recorder ICs meant for something like an answering machine. Leave it in your jacket pocket, and then "forget" your jacket when you leave the meeting. But the risk is that somebody notices the jacket and decides to be nice and chases you down to bring it to you.

Hmm... looking at one example of such a recorder IC setup, this one can only do 64 seconds of voice. Maybe not very useful. But you could probably use an rPi and an SD card and build something that could record significantly more. Or use an Arduino and a cellular shield and build something you can dial into...

Oh, wait, looking here[1], it looks like you can get voice recorder ICs that go up to 16 minutes. Not sure, offhand, how much supporting circuitry and power it would take for one of these things, though, so not sure how small it could be built.

Anyway, like I said, I don't recommend actually doing this. Just food for thought.

[1]: http://www.digikey.com/product-search/en/integrated-circuits...
Indiegogo Tricorder claims to simplify collection of vital signs
"against them"?

They would get paid either way.
"All you can do in life is a lot of work" -- Ira Glass

Most people simply fear us because of the way media portrays us as Zuckerberg, and our most persistent topic of discussion outside the GitHub world is Zuckerberg or surveillance, which is just another route to Zuckerberg.
What a bunch of whiners.

It's not as if you don't hand much--if not all--of the same information over to marketing departments, app makers and ad companies when using a smart phone.
Most of the advances in life expectancy were achieved by reducing infant mortality. In Miedeval Britain average life expectancy was 30. Very misleading though. If you made it to adulthood your life expectancy was 64.

I've never seen anyhing to back up your assertion. Do you have a source for your life expectancy prediction?

Source for historic life expectancy: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

Also isn't it funy how incredible things are always "20 years away"? You might want to rewatch the movies 2001 and 2010 to see where many people thought we would be technologically over a decade ago.
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I think that human sex life is a pretty fragile thing and letting people to tamper with yours for their fun or their profit is not cool.

By sex live I mean the whole mental picture. If you start drawing it from accidental porn, you'll get it distorted.

You will get it distorted anyway when you'll seek porn, but now it would be your own decision at least.
"Sophistry" does not mean "I don't like the result of this educated and rational analysis."
VCs are investing based on where they think people will actually put their money, not on where they say they will. If evidence is that people spend a lot of time social networks, AND evidence is that advertisers will pay money for web adverts to people, then it might follow that a new social network is a good investment.

If VCs were funding companies which made solid profits from customers and were therefore able to pay the VCs a multiple out of that profit I'd find this argument that money talks more convincing. As it is it seems that value for internet companies is not based on revenue or even potential revenue.

This disconnect between the money invested and the money earned completely breaks the connection you talk of - customers willing to put their money where their mouth is. Someone in the chain is paying lots of money, but it certainly isn't the actual end users or customers of most startups - often they run at a loss for a substantial period, and then they have no way to turn their free readers/users into paying ones in sufficient numbers to support their valuation or the money put in. VCs really don't care about that though, as long as they are paid more than they put in - that can easily happen if the companies are bought by larger corporations like IBM or Yahoo in the mistaken belief that the customers can be converted - the question of revenue then becomes academic as the companies are folded into a larger parent and the actual value impossible to discern.

It's an interesting time to be alive and an interesting market to be working in, but I do find the distortions created by massively inflated valuations and companies built just to be sold on worrying. Forgive me though, I must stop wittering on HN and get back to work now :)
all it takes is reading a review of OS X or Windows where hundreds of words are devoted to incremental adjustments to the Start menu and dock to realize those fluffy details aren't so fluffy after all. They matter.

Yes, they matter very much, and yes there are some things you can nail down in the UI arena; but point number two (confusing OS with UI) is very cogent, especially for computer science. Please don't muddy the waters in CS curricula anymore than they have been. This kind of stuff is CS, but it does not belong in a proper OS course. It belongs in a UI or human factors course (which I do think more people would benefit from than an OS course; most people aren't going to be working on OS level stuff, even if understanding would help them be better programmers).
Thanks riquito - I'll work on these. They show up very clearly on my screen, but I totally get that not every screen is mine, I'll try to bump up the contrast a bit.

For the simple button, I don't disagree, it's more of a base to build on top of. I am seeing more buttons that looks like the in production these days though, and the lack of affordance is a little weird to me
One of his first tweets says how it's funny that Twitter only recommend journalists to follow. He clearly is a new user, as he had his son set it up for him.
Example of generics: In Delphi, you have TList. It stores any TObject, but it's not type safe, so if you store something like TPerson in it, you have to cast it every time:

List := TList.Create();
Person := TPerson(List[0]);

With generics, you would have something like:

List := TList<TPerson>.Create();
Person := List[0];

The TList<TPerson> class would be compiled at compile time and offer the same kind of type safety as, say, an array.

In C++ it would be something like (simplified):

template <class T>
class TList {
private:
T[] elements;
public:
void add(T value);
void remove(T value);
T operator[](int index);
};

This extends to other declarations. For example, in C++ you can have generic functions. So you can have a functon max(a, b) which works on any type, for example.

Generics is essentially about enhancing compile-time type safety and reusing code. By giving the type system more intelligence, more checks can be performed at compile time, and code can use the same logic across multiple types instead of having to be reimplemented for each type.

Incidentally, Delphi has had generics since 2007 [1]. I haven't used Delphi since version 5, so I haven't tried it out, but it looks fairly similar to the generics in C#.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_programming#Genericity_...
Same to my 2012 MBP.
Snapchat, You've Made a Huge Mistake
It's a much larger and more comprehensive library, most of nib is included in it, and it's actually developed, maintained, and documented.
Here's an example that immediately sprung to mind: http://akinator.com/ . It's a game that guesses what person or character you're thinking of by asking simple questions.
Your language of "audibleness" clearly refers to the importance of abortion versus privacy as issues, not any sort of long-term tactical battle. I'm not addressing the rest of your post, just the first sentence.
Ulithp/src/lithp.rb at master
I'm a left winger, I even shook Gus Hall's hand.

But for me the people on proggit are too communist. If you show the slightest bit of evidence that you're (at least somewhat) in it for the money, they hit the downvote button hard.
Not sure I understand why we shouldn't have another facebook - sure it's not disruptive anymore - but facebook needs competition and social it is a massive market.

I don't hear anyone saying - don't bother making a smartphone unless you are Apple or Samsung (of course this might have been Motorola or Nokia in the past :-) )
> There was an article on HN a day or two ago about
> how asking people to bet on political propositions
> affects their stated beliefs ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5819272
> The Danube River reached its highest level in 500 years.

Yet the world seems sure there is no chance we are witnessing some sort of human induced climate change (or at least that seems to be the opinion here is Australia)?

The climate change sceptics say it's only natural variations in climate, nothing to worry about.

The thing I never understand is, if I'm wrong and the climate change turns out to be natural, the worst that can happen is we end up with a cleaner world and in any case we still have to deal with a naturally changing climate.

But if the climate sceptic (wins the debate yet) is wrong, we end up doing nothing and the planet suffers decades of man induced suffering and misery, as we desperately try to fix the issue we ignored for far too many years :(
I read the original and his style is impressionistic where he'll readily exaggerate something for effect. I'm French from France and these exaggerations put me in trouble here in Quebec where people are way more literal.

I'll give you a few example: "Can I steal this from you?" => "I'm certain you are OK with me borrowing this for 2 minutes.". "Buy enough beer for 3 dozen people" => "We're 6 but we really want to have a good time."
I am very curious to know how often and how smoothly claims for damages happen with AirBnB. I admit I was very lazy on this front and I did not verify if AirBnB discloses the number of claims filed versus paid or the amounts or at least the average amount of claims.

As far as the "leveraging of under monetized assets/sharing economy" goes I think this type of transparency would be very important to the asset owners - so really in a sense I would be surprised if this information was not disclosed but I would equally be surprised if it was disclosed...is that a paradox or what.
Is the NSA truly autonomous? I believe the director reports to the Director of National Intelligence, who is a Presidential appointee.
More than that though, the robots only win when they're fighting panicked human traders who try to maximize and fire blind (or at least a few seconds slower). Speaking of intelligent programs, they failed to achieve equilibrium with their natural environment, as Agent Smith would say.

The takeaway:

HFT also lacks the two things it needs the most: trading
volume and price volatility. Compared with the deep,
choppy waters of 2009 and 2010, the stock market is now a
shallow, placid pool.
There is nothing more intellectually childish than saying "x isn't working in this case, therefore x never works and should be totally abandoned." I agree 100% that 99% of people don't care about politics enough and vote blindly. Look at the turn out rate for primaries and years where people aren't voting for president. Libertarians like you are all talk. There plenty of places in this world with no government but you would never go there because they are 3rd world shit holes. Ask yourself, "why aren't there any first world countries that are prosperous that have libertarian governments?" You love government. You love roads, infrastructure, safe food, safe cars, you take things like electricity, water, and internet for granted, you bathe in government funded projects that have made your life better in every way. The answer isn't no government, it's better government. In some areas that means drastically reducing it's power and I think even the left most progressive could agree with the right most libertarian on many things. However it's just childish to say "no government". It's been tried before in the past, and it's being tried now, it never works. We do better when we work together.
If google really wants me to move to google+, now, or current, where is the big shiny button that says 'load feeds into x'? Incompetence seems to be playing as big a role as strategy.
Because that's much higher than average life expectancy. A male 58 year old in 2009 could expect to live to 80.

Source: http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
Big Data startup Icimo offers visualizations for big data
yahoo pipes can provide you with pipe/merge/filter. Twitter part might be more difficult.
That would make it among the most closely held secrets in the federal government seems to be an overstatement when you consider that millions of documents are marked TOP SECRET each year.
Well, I have seen few times in user's profile that write "If you think I was helpful feel free to send something from my Amazon's wishlist."
Because we aren't 5. You may be okay with being treated like a child by your government but the majority of people here aren't.
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How to Lock and Load the Right CEO for Your Startup
Just saying that it is strange. When I set up twitter for my mother (about the same age as this guy) the first thing that I did was show her how to follow somebody, and that person was me. Why doesn't he follow his son, or anybody else other than journalists? It just seems off imo.
"viewed themselves as unable to disclose what they learned in secret briefings"

That is because it is illegal to disclose classified intelligence, even for a Senator.

The reason why these Senators could only warn about things, instead of passing legislation to change the law, is because the majority of Congress supports this type of legislation.

The checks and balances are still there - the problem is that the body that passes the law agrees with this type of power.
For me, fallacies are a great tool for recognizing bad reasoning, which then provides pointers about how to expose it as such using a real argument. The fallacy itself doesn't constitute a counter argument. In a good debate, the fallacies themselves never come up but you can see how they have influenced the flow of argument.

I really liked how it was put in the book Logical Self-Defense: To be valid, an argument has to be relevant, sufficient, and acceptable. All of the fallacies (that I know of) fail on at least one of those properties. Recognizing the fallacy tells you how to go about attacking or shoring-up the argument (depending on which side of it you're on).
Nieman: Watchdog reporting is a social activity, not the work of lone wolves
The problem is that if NONE of the candidates adhere to my principles and I don't vote, SOMEONE wins by default.
As one of the greatest logicians of the 20th century once said: Logic is a little tweeting bird chirping in a meadow. Logic is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell bad. Are you sure your circuits are registering correctly? Your ears are green.
There already exists an Ask HN tab that aggregates the Ask HN and Show HN posts.
valar morghulis
"Nudity and sex are normal"
That may be true, but internet pornography in general is definitely not normal.

I don't support any censorship. But if you were a parent, you might want to think twice about giving your 12 year old free reign on internet porn.
Open funding, free software crowdfunding
Yeah, the reminder scheduling piece is definitely a challenge. I think the site will need to maintain that and do notifications, but I feel like to do it right I'll need to integrate with as many calendar providers as possible to make sure I'm not scheduling over someone's meeting. I have the Google calendar part about done but that probably covers less than half of small tech companies out there.
Guiding Software Development with Design Challenges
President Obama transparently extended the Patriot Act.
Who's talking about whining or getting personal?

If the company was badly organised, behind the times and resistant to change, I don't think there's anything much wrong with saying it. IMHO.
Do you realize there is actual back breaking work - and coding isn't it? And that making $100k after 5 years is still about twice the median income for a family, and goes a lot farther in places with a low cost of living than it does in New York or the bay area. And that if you want a higher paying job, it is on you to find it and get hired?
The Low Hanging Fruit of Link Building
The entrepreneurial adventures of a coder living in a tent in the forest
Hip Hop and the FBI - History of COINTEL
Prototypes That Last: Simple Tips for Making Durable Parts, Part 1
It's funny how some people can produce walls of text attacking Google at the drop of a hat.

If you've actually read that post you'd have noticed that the author is misrepresenting her assumptions as facts by repurposing out of context comments.

The person she was quoting wasn't even speaking about Reader nor was he granting her an interview (the author doesn't specify in what context did she hear all that) it was just another serving of the generic "news in the mobile era" spiel.
As someone involved in the medical field I am a bit blown away by claims that this can measure blood pressure, pulse ox, ECG and a questionable emotional stress just by being held to the temple. (I have a really hard time in particular in believing that BP can be measured with any accuracy by holding some device to the forehead)

On the one hand this is great and helpful if it is both highly sensitive and specific to all of the measured claims. It could, for instance, be very useful (with >95% sensitivity and specificity) for patients with chronic diseases.

In the grey space between meeting the sensitivity/specificity of current devices (thermometer, BP manometer, full rhythm strip or 12 lead ECG) I tend to think that this device is mostly hype - data for data's sake is not beneficial to health. Derangement of none of these measurements (or, indeed, any of the measurements it makes) are going to drastically change how you manage either your own health or anyone else's.

In the tail end of the spectrum, if it can't measure these stats with reliable specificity and sensitivity then it's worse than trivia - it's useless noise that could harm health.

will be very interested to see how the device pans out
You're right about life expectancy statistics, but I wasn't talking about that. I was talking about research into aging.

"Do you have a source for your life expectancy prediction?"

I can't get to it now, as I'm sitting on it. In other words, I'm not a biologist and I was making a wild guess. I was trying to make the point that our life expectancies may be significantly longer than we think because they are partly the product of medical knowledge that does not exist now but will be created during our lives. But I should not have used a specific number.
To be fair, "I have thirty days to live" is, unfortunately, hardly an exceptional claim.
I agree strongly with this. I worked as a consultant on a zombie project where the out-of-his-depth PM held a 2-3 hour phone call every morning with a team of 15 as his way of moving development along. Needless to say, that didn't work. I was billing a pretty great rate for myself at the time, and for a while sort of enjoyed just reading HN or a book on someone else's dime every morning, but eventually I realized it was sapping my will to do good work of any kind -- either paid or for myself. I found a good stopping point and left.
Uses of Tmux Explained
Moped 2.0 Messaging for Business With Rich Content, Integrated and Open Platform
Yes I found this a pretty ironic place to make this complaint, also given that this UK newspaper has a lot of content which it gets for free, and pays a pittance for the other work featured on it (which as a result is now of a similar quality to this article).

This section of the online paper (I don't know if they even bother to print this stuff) is a good example of the gradual decline in quality when you don't value good writing and instead value page hits.
On the one hand, OCaml is a very interesting language and I welcome a good book about it in the vein of Real World Haskell. On the other hand, it is the height of treason for O'Reilly to make a book with a camel on the cover that isn't about Perl :v
> I'm surprised the compiler goes straight to assembly, rather than targeting LLVM (most native programming languages)

Most native programming languages historically don't, and OCaml predates LLVM by a good 7 years.

> or C- (what GHC does/did)

Cmm is an intermediate language specific to GHC before the backend[1], GHC's default backend is a native generator.

[1] or more precisely "an other" intermediate language, since there's also Core.
They likely talk about the things you'd think they'd talk about. Ultimately, if they think they can get their money back and then some by investing.
Nice anecdote about Knight Capital:

"When the market opened on Aug. 1, a new piece of trading software that Knight had just installed went haywire and started aggressively buying shares... By the end of Aug. 2, Knight had spent $440 million unwinding its trades"

I'd love to know more about that particular launch. A hole in somebody's test suite!
The difference is that in a youth hostel everyone in the hostel signed up to be staying there. In an Airbnb hostel, all the neighbors signed up to be living in a condo/co-op/residential rental building and one guy decided on his own to turn his unit into a hostel.
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I think there are two types of users in this case - "consumers" and "researchers". Social news are good for "consumers" with their usage pattern "Read-Like-Forget". They consume to feed their hunger and nothing more. "Researchers" carefully select trustful sources and follow them, they need a tool that allows to keep track and never miss important info. "Researcher" pattern is impossible in the "social" noisy flood of news.
As I understand it, for this to work, Amazon (to use the author's example) would have to be paying Facebook specifically to show these domain sponsored stories. The author is essentially leveraging off Amazon's advertising budget, correct?
Another key point: "the SEC is sharing information with the FBI to probe manipulative trading practices by some HFT firms" and now has the infrastructure to detect anomalies.
A bit off-topic here but I am not sure where folks find these mystical $100,000+ web development positions. I am paid $40,000 a year with virtually no benefits to be a web developer.
this guy's a moron. the price of content hasn't gone to zero -- the price of quality content has gone to the moon, and the price of the bs he writes is going to zero as it should.
I think the story goes that something not ready for production made it into production. I obviously can't say anything about their test suite, but it sounds more like a mismanaged merge/deployment process.
I've live in France and in Quebec for a good portion of my life. Couldn't the "plan pension" be a contraction like "plan cul"? I agree that "plan retraite" would sound more French and "plan pension" would sound more North American French but it doesn't sound like an anglicism to me and the rest of the tone is clearly not North American French to me.