skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does anyone else think the 2 posts about this issue here on HN have quite a bit of shills commenting? I hate to point fingers like this, but some posts I've read yesterday were so "weird" (read: "neo-con" propaganda) compared to usual HN culture that I was honestly creeped out. It's the kind of writing that tries to persuade people not to care, or to simply be ok with it, since (paraphrasing) "ATT has all the data already, so why care?".

Maybe I'm just thinking too much about some comments and HN really has a demographics made of mostly neo conservatives.

Been wanting to point this out since yesterday. Thoughts?
I think a new Stackoverflow-like site with money involved would be near impossible to take off.
comment from the author: "2) if you need a flow-chart to know what to do, I don't think you will be successful in working with structured models ;)"
No, that's just funny. If that is an attack then google has a lot more to worry about than I thought they did.

And 'Google Plus Video' sounds just good enough that it might happen.
Rare Color Footage of Depression-Era New York
Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't this been there for a while? I know classmates who have been mortified when they find out that who they Snapchat with is public.
It's trendy and easier to do an okay job with than the kind of baroque skeuomorphism prevalent in iOS.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5698352
While I think you are right that there is a difference between what people say they want and what they actually want --

I would suggest that there is also a difference between what people actually want, and what people demonstrate with their behavior, what they actually do.

What people do is not neccesarily what they want either! For all sorts of reasons. Poor self-control, costs/risks (financial/social/psychological) to doing what you really want, etc.

Just becuase someone spends money on something doesn't actually mean that, in an ideal world, they want to be paying for it, or want it in their lives.
Had an early look into this book and I can vouch that the book definitely shows everything you need from zero to an AWS working EMR.
My friend and mentor: rajeev motwani
It's satire. Pretty good satire, IMO. If someone had simply dumped the word chicken in to a document broken in to paragraphs, it probably wouldn't get many laughs, but this document is very well executed.

When you look at a lot of academic papers, you begin to notice patterns. It's very easy to get wrapped up in what you're doing, looking past how silly some of it can be. This document takes it to the extreme, but there are plenty of papers published on mind numbingly banal topics.

That's why it's funny. It's a means of poking fun at one's self.
Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Montreal, San Diego...these are the cities where you can handily make that kind of money. If you are getting paid 40k per year, it is time to move my friend.
> This has been circulating in my mind for some time now. It seems to me that Silicon Valley is so obsessed with "home run" start ups that we've lost track of caring if they make our lives better.

You're just now coming to terms with this? Jesus Christ, we're doomed.
may be start by refusing to sign contracts for anything other than what is absolutely necessary (like apartment lease, for example)? don't sign contracts for gyms, phones, cable etc? that would make it a tiny bit easier to switch between services?
Actually, in western Europe I'd expect the exact opposite reaction.
This is amazing, but I can only thing of the terrible screen glare issues from working outdoors. Yuck!
If the majority of SnapChat users are using it to have extra-marital affairs, there may be something to it. SnapChat wasn't created because we as a society were lacking in communication tools.
It is an 8 year difference...that's hardly material, especially if you consider that people from France are known to exaggerate slightly for effect.
I find Snapchat's charter fascinating. I say this as the author of a competing, and much less successful, product called Privy (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appidio.pr...).

I wrote Privy with a very simple use case in mind. It was for sending messages that you never want to resurface. Privacy, of course, was paramount.

After reading a few interviews with the Snapchat guys, I was amused that they always pitched it to be about temporal communications. They would downplay Snapchat as a secretive transport and talk about how it's more about sharing special moments. These new "un-private" features very clearly show that Snapchat is sincere about this use case.

It simply never occurred to me that people might want to send temporal messages and that privacy around sending those messages not be absolutely critical. I don't know if I'm out of touch or what. Or maybe this is more of a natural selection thing for successful mobile messaging products. Obviously the network effect of a privacy-oriented app is by definition nonexistent. Trust me.
Quick overview: They had a Nagios backdoor, which led to a leak of the customer database of their dedicated server administration console (Hetzner Robot).

They are not sure how it happened right know. External security experts are involved.

The customer passwords are SHA256 hashed (thank god!).

---

This one is really serious. With access to this admin console, you can wipe all dedicated servers with one single click. We advised Hetzer before to add more security (two-way authentication, etc.) to the console, but I think not much happened here...
Accidental Apprenticeships
It normalizes dishonesty and steals attention from truth.
> What do people expect? It's either that or open war mongering.

Or we could just stop with using fearmongering as a way to expand homeland security's budget. These agencies are doing whatever they can to expand their budgets. That is the game those players play. You aren't successful unless you expand your budget. And you can't expand your budget unless you make convincing fictions about all of the fear out there in the world.

> But from a security perspective, I understand the need for better information...but it's naive to expect your government to provide you safety, lifestyle, freedom, without having to play behind the scene

How do you call this safety or freedom? Our own gov't is more likely to harm us than terrorists. How many people do you think die from terrorists in the US a year versus innocent people being prosecuted (or molested by the TSA)?

The false positive rate is way, way, way higher than than the number of terrorists in the US.
The interface is very nice. Clean and modern, and not looking like yet another standard-issue iOS application. I like it.

Might consider removing the phrase "last chance to get fit" when you cancel an exercise, as in fact that particular instance of running the program is unlikely a user's last chance to get fit, and they could be closing the program early for any number of reasons.

Thanks for sharing! Now I just need to persuade myself to do the exercises instead of just watching the app countdown...
Ancient Athens was not mob rule, as far as I know.
The whole "pizza case" phenomenon is hilarious. ironic but hilarious.

I'm sure there are tons of ethical implications, and the NSA has its share of shady activities, but part of it seems to be akin to that final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the government loses the powerful, dangerous artifact in some nameless Army warehouse filled with tons of beef jerky or whatever it was.
“The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.” ― George Orwell
Google Penguin 2.0 - Data Centre Fluctuations
Ask HN: Is it possible that Bitcoin saves the answers to Crypto problems?
So I have never read the code for Bitcoin, and a little while back pg asked why a government would create Bitcoin (since the authors are anonymous), but people are going out and building Bitcoin mining hardware. Really what we have now is the most powerful cloud based code cracking system ever created, as far as I know.

As I understand it the problems are random, the system distributed, but is it possible someone somewhere is storing these answers?
Please don't feed the bots (or web scrapers & crawlers)
Made me think of Racket's custodians:

http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/eval-model.html#%28par...
If you want to check out an alternative, our nCryptedCloud iOS has a secure camera that would encrypt the image (in memory) before it even gets to the device. Once encrypted, you manage access rights. You revoke access to anyone in the future that even if they have the image, without the privilege, the file is useless. You could also send a quick share (time-controlled SnapChat style) with anyone--pdf files too! It's free, check it out: https://www.ncryptedcloud.com/install/ios/ (for non-us regions, just add: ?region=non-us to the URL). If you have question, just ask!
The other thing :) Much as I seriously considered treating my cow-orkers at the time as valid sources of protein.
The clear and obvious question here is if it's "just metadata" and isn't really spying, then why is it secret at all? In fact, why don't we broadcast to the terrorists that we do this and wish them luck attacking us without the aid of electronic communication.

The secrecy only makes it look like something illegal. (And there is no doubt in my mind that it is against the spirit of American law, if not the letter)
"I think we all agree that Twitter plays an important role in society today"

Uh, how does Twitter play an important role in society?
For a GET or DELETE request maybe, try doing anything else of substance and you pretty quickly need a dedicated REST client.
I really like this author's writing style. The prose flows and is fairly tight yet colorful.

That said, his angst seems to be misplaced.

When younger, he seized upon Sagan's rules as though they were The Way(tm)... and now he's disillusioned that they haven't made him invincible. Then he tries to use mostly logical argumentation to explain how the Baloney Detector Kit is flawed. That's ironic.

Looking at his other blog posts, you can see similar angst at a lack of comfort being completely absorbed in a specific ideology: http://plover.net/~bonds/nolongeraskeptic.html#jump

I guess he has a brain that wants really badly to see everything in black and white - but at least he's smart enough to reason past that.

I would argue that the baloney detector kit, his skepticism, and similar logical mechanisms are all that has kept this individual from going over the ideological cliff into unshakable belief syndrome.
The excuse that "relationships suffer" when using a different communication method is ridiculous. Now more than ever as people use it to justify whatever they want.

Face-to-face is better, my relationships suffer when I communicate via phone.

Phone calls are better, my relationships suffer when I communicate via email.

Email is better, my relationships suffer if I communicate via FB.

Maybe the problem is you, not the communication method.
Ask HN: Whats a job as Product Operations Team Lead like  Facebook?
Would appreciate it if any Facebookers could give some first hand experience into Team Lead roles at the company, specifically this one:

https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?dept=grad&req=a0IA0000006cQhcMAE
Really good write-up (I've built myself a syllabus coincidentally similar to what you've described, which gives me some peace of mind). However, I'm assuming hiteshtr was specifically asking about the (ZURB) Foundation framework and how it compares to the Bootstrap framework (I would attempt to answer myself, but have little to no experience with Foundation).
I got the impression that NYC's objection was less about revenue and more about the city's management of housing. New York has a pretty severe supply/demand discrepancy when it comes to housing, and they've taken pains for a long time to try and keep what housing there is available and at least sort of affordable. Having a service that de facto converts long-term residential housing to hotels seems like the sort of thing the city would object to regardless of the revenue implications.

Besides, most of the money that cities get from tourists they get through sales tax or indirectly through property and income taxes on tourist-supported businesses. I would be very surprised if losing the tax revenue on the hotel stay is enough to convert tourism into a net loss for the city.
It doesn't sound like "balance" when all three branches are on the same side of the seesaw.
$500 million botnet Citadel attacked by Microsoft and FBI
I've built a tool to create arbitrary rigid 3D surfaces and support structures from laser-cut-and-perforated folded tyvek panels. It's probably never going to be commercialized, but it is fun to tinker with.

The use case is 3d shapes where the volume makes 3d printing cost-prohibitive, for example this 4 foot long tyvek dolphin: https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/102064314320177820526/alb...

If you're in boston, stop by the collision19 show for a look: http://collisioncollective.org/show/collision19
A number of sites do this to varying degrees of success:

- Skyscanner, as David says
- Adioso (YC W09)
- TripCommon - you can also set up alerts 'SF to Europe for less than $Y00'
- Getgoing (YC S12)
- Kayak explore

I've always found Skyscanner has the best results, but I'm curious to see how newcomer Getgoing compares.
A Visual Tour of Erlang (video)
Hetzner.de got hacked - customer data copied (translated version)
> The net, basically, is that privacy is nobody's 'hot-button' issue because even while somebody can espouse the inherent ignorance of the "If you have nothing to hide..." argument, we, for the most part, don't have anything to hide. So while we don't acquiesce to these intrusions of privacy, we let them fall by the wayside in the wake of more important issues

Perfectly stated. Not sure what the solution might be other than removing layers of influence from politicians hands. What should they really be doing?

Perhaps we ought to hyper-compartmentalize their jobs. Te US Constitution is great, but it was written centuries ago. C'mon folks, a lot of it does not align with modern reality.

For example, healthcare laws ought to be in the hands of a team with relevant domain expertise. Why are we allowing ignorant representatives to have any say at all? Why is it that we dump it all on the laps of the Senate and the House. Most of those people are lawyers. Patent law is an example of the shit they can create. The House? Holy shit! Have you seen the kind of people who land those jobs? Why do they have so much power?

Te problem you allude to would be resolved if we divided-up decision making along domains. Now you can publish basic qualifications for each domain and create prerequisites for each position. Then people, if they care enough, would be able to vote for domain-specific representation.

I could then vote for someone who thinks along my lines when it comes to healthcare, gun control, budgets, building bridges, social programs, military spending, etc. different people, each with less overall power yet far more understanding and command of their chosen domain.

I want doctors to set healthcare laws, not lawyers or politicians. I want engineers and entrepreneurs to create intellectual property laws, not lawyers. I want qualified financial experts to set fiscal policy, not lawyers, politicians or the President. I want infrastructure experts to manage our infrastructure, not some politician who owes union thugs for their votes. I don't want unions nearly anywhere and particularly not in education.

It simply makes no sense to have the same person have rule-making power over topics ranging from encryption, surveillance and healthcare to education, defense and social concerns. They can't possibly be good at making decisions in all domains and they keep getting voted into office by catering to large groups behind major causes who they become prostituted to.

Perfect? Nope. Nothing is.
Why AnyPerk (YC W12) might be the best Japanese import since Ichiro
If the JSX inline xml looks vaguely familiar, it's probably because they did the same thing with php (xhp [1]).

One criticism about facebook, google, etc is that the greatest minds are being used to make people click more ads. But they're open sourcing some interesting things so it's not all bad.

1. https://github.com/facebook/xhp
About the value of blogs, what is the best way to blog in a way that gives you a decent chance of being read by "the people that matter"?

It feels like technical blogs are 10 a penny these days.
I'm glad someone posted this. My immediate thought after reading the breaking news about the massive phone surveillance was, "wait, did people not think this was happening?" I'm really not a conspiracy nut, but that Wired article and the NYTimes reporting made it pretty clear that the Gov't is pretty much collecting everything they can get their hands on.

Glad to finally see some outrage though.

Legitimate question: what's new about what is breaking in the news right now? Merely confirmation that the NSA is conducting indiscriminate phone-taps?
From Wall Street to Bitcoin
1-800 CONTACTS vs. DITTO, Patents, and What it Means for Your Startup
MOST of the planets population? Really?

I think the actions or desires of most of the planets population, who don't have computers or internet-enabled phones, have virtually no impact on the market for rails developers.
Yes, new advertising innovations have power. Partially positive, partially negative.

But most new startups don't invent new advertising techniques. They don't grow the amount of attention. They just fight for the piece of the current attention pie.

And In similar fashion to reality TV relative to game of thrones, they offer crappy but addictive products.
Hi, it would by great if you could send an invite to lobstersinv@inboxee.net. Thanks.
Seems like the site is being DDos'd, or has just coincidentally gone down at the same time this hits the front page.
the pizza case thing reminds me of the scene in Arrested Development "Nope... you're looking at balls"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsgOzLdWdgU
Debian-multimedia.org expired, registered by an unknown entity
While building respect is a great attitude, it is not the only thing that help you land in networks. The network connections of your family and the posh kids you went to school with also play a role.
I'd agree with the OP here. Stylus may be "very open and flexible" but I don't know what stylus is either. I came to your page because I wanted to find out about roots, not about stylus.

Open with a statement saying "Roots is a css framework that does X". Maybe have a follow up statement saying "Roots is based on the stylus language".
Not much to tell; the person who had put himself in charge of building this Android based sensor for NASA wanted to build a little empire, and kept asking for more funds and personnel and insisting that all communication go through him.

There was me and one other person doing all the work, so we just tuned everyone else (four people) out and forged on (to the extent of ordering parts and PCBs on our own dime, etc.)

The higher ups were getting two sets of reports, one saying "we are stuck and need more resources", the other showing progress. Eventually the final recipient of the sensor called a meeting, at which we just showed up with three working units from the first production batch (we had gotten the PCBs printed and I had hand assembled them, but it wasn't really fair to call them prototypes anymore).

That caused quite a bit of cognitive dissonance :)

Mesh management is a WIP.
You might be surprised to learn that there are languages that are agnostic in what they target.
The Space Between the Notes
Lobbyists - I agree serious repair/surgery is needed. Ideas?

Tort reform - Why? What, other than torts, provides a counterbalance to corporate and executive power? What, other than torts, protects the weak from the powerful? Most tort reform seems to be an attempt by a group to wipe out oversight.

The Fed - needs to be restricted to a smaller role: control of inflation.

But what about the TSA, FBI, NSA et al? What a miraculous event it would be were these agencies reduced to their pre-9/11 levels or better, to a level 20 years prior to that. IIRC the various states' attorneys-generals issued a statement that the Patriot Act was completely unnecessary, but here we are anyway.
So, post them on your blog then.
The minute slice of opinion represented here is just not representative of anything approaching a real life market. Even in tech, HN is a special case. You're as likely to reinforce your own incorrect group think as you are to get genuinely good advice, and sometimes it's tough to tell the difference.
Engineering the plumbing systems for the burj requires a different set of skills, but it's not done by plumbers. The actual plumbing part is pretty much the same as in any structure.
If you raided a business and confiscated all their files/servers you would also be facing charges. There are a lot of things the FBI can do that you cannot do.
Tralev the world with Tralev
Tralev the world with tralev. Tralev collects geolocation photos of places worth seeing around the world.
E-Mail: Not Dead, Evolving
If you are surprised a "free" service is collecting data, please lookup the word 'gullible' in the dictionary.

Nothing is free kids.
LIFE IS GAME OF CHESS DAMN IT.

why am i so lonely.
Show HN: (Android) Redbox titles sorted by Rotten Tomatoes & IMDB Ratings
I do this same thing, only with org-mode. Every little idea, snippet, project or todo that enters my mind? Capture it and get back to what I was working on. Sure, I've got a zillion things I will never get to, but I can always filter or archive them, and text is cheap! Synchronize with git, and you're done.
Four Key Startup Sales Tactics
Snapchat has had the leaderboard / friends page since launch. How is this new? This has been like this for ages. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what OP is saying, but I don't understand why this is being addressed this late into the app's life.
Your last sentence explains it all.

Basically, the majority of people cannot appreciate art. Abstract ideas and brilliant commentary are simply not valued by the majority as much as a working system, even if it's as obvious a concept as Facebook. When you hire someone to write something, it's almost impossible to predict the audience's reception to it. When you make a website, a logical machine, you at least know you have something less abstract. A website is more tangible than a piece of prose. Words indeed have no value in themselves.

You would expect the people who make the software that facilitates web publishing to be paid more on average, no? Developers get paid more because they make the stuff that people want -- stuff that does something or solves a problem. It's that simple.
This is not correct, and Liz Krueger knows it since we showed her the specific demographics of who uses our site in NY. Greater than 90% of hosts are renting the home they live in when they are not there (primary dwelling). Simply type NYC in search and see for yourself who is renting. You wil notice most people with just one property. The few property groups we have switched to 30 day rentals long ago. Liz Krueger is the author of the 2010 bill that has been the cause of much of this controversy, so she is trying to protect her legislative legacy.

Most of the city officials we have spoken to are actually supportive of Airbnb, but there are a few that matter like Liz that do not.
Yeah citations would make this more reputable, and as it stands it's just a claim. But I prefer to trust that they have done some studies on this topic. I'll verify it later, but trust for now. Also, I can't imagine a vet saying that this kind of data on a dog would be "bad" in any way. And it's usefulness will be found through time and trials. Just as most studies are backed after peer review and being open to the test of time.