skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sometime you are:

"I think my favorite colour is blue."

"I think I prefer brunettes to blondes."

"I think creamy pasta sauces are better than tomato sauces."

"I think Facebook works just fine, at least for me."

I'll give you evidence for things I'm claiming/quoting as _facts_, but ask me for evidence about my _opinions_, and yeah - you're being obtuse.
U.S. Is Secretly Collecting Records of Verizon Calls
Why did you join such a mess in the first place? Didn't you get some intel before making a decision?
Yes, first time we saw the user.

It counts as two, since by default we identify users with first-party cookies. We offer a heap.identify() API call that can be made to associate multiple devices with one identity.
Chart of the Day: Student Loan Debt is Skyrocketing
Seems very susceptible to cheating...as in player X, who sucks, can record superb (but fake) stats on this app. Correct? Or is there something to block this?
Huh, interesting! Will keep that in mind.
Yes, I have that situation too, with 2 other guys I develop some government's application from scratch, this 2 other guys don't understand anything about software development, there's no solid foundation, messy database structure not even have standard code convention and yes in business level changes is inevitable, the development itself running for almost 2 years, this is hell for me, I value best practices in any level, but reality is cruel, even my boss quit this project and replaced with other mediocre boss.

Until now, I still in this toxic workplace, hope for changes always came everyday, then again reality is cruel, I'm thinking to quit, surrender, find other place and I will.

So, my poor friend, if there's no good progress at all, please get out, you and your talent deserve better.
> In before michaelochurch.

heh.
Yea i posted a project on here[1] and got completely ignored, i then posted the same project on /r/gamedev and spent all weekend as the top post with a steady steam of thank you so much this is awesome comments. I really would like the validation of the HN community, but that seems super hard to achieve, if not impossible. Doesnt mean im gonna give up, just gonna keep working hard and hope to get a little lucky.

[1]http://calhoun137.github.com/animator
You are right. When I first joined HN reading comments was my favourite part. I would be in awe of all these intelligent and insightful people, I would often skip entire articles and read the comments first. Things have really taken a major turn for worse in the last 6-8 months. Almost every single thing posted gets picked apart to bits and not in a good way. It has gotten so bad that I have actively started avoiding the comment section. My rule of thumb these days is only read comments in threads below 20 posts as these low comment threads are the ones with the highest chance of reading something interesting rather than just typical tired criticism of the of the article. I don't even consider threads with over 50 comments as these are almost always a complete cesspool of negatively.
if you can't beat them with performance and features, go the green way,
Hey, how's it going?
Yes, C.R.E.A.M.
To me the missing values (and nearby spikes) seem like they could be aliasing due to a bad rounding/scaling algorithm.
The answer is yes, Wikipedia is specifically a place where the worst biases can flourish. It only takes a couple of cranks to keep the biases in, and there are more than enough cranks around.

I don't know that it can be fixed.

The good news, though, is that there's enough transparency to in most cases make it clear to the careful observer what's going on. On any politically-sensitive topic, the experienced wikipedia user eventually learns that you need to check the talk page and see what points of view are being deliberately and actively excluded from the main page. Checking the page history helps too - bad pages tend to have a lot of reverts with angry check-in comments.
Startups: OPM with other people's servers (cloud) with other people's code (OSS)
on a comic note, <big company site> as in Lehman Bros. in late 20s or as Google in early 90s
Just draw the frames to a 2D canvas, without clearing it, then back to the background buffer.
Not a lawyer, but have some experience.

1. No, that is not true.

2. No idea.

3. No, one LLC is enough; if you ever need to create multiple companies, you'll know why you're doing it.

4. Use a separate business account; insulate your finances from the business.

5. Shorthand: In both a sole proprietorship and an LLC, you can lose your house if sued for negligence. But in an sole proprietorship, you can also lose your house if you're sued for failing to fulfill a contract. Moreover, my freelancing and consulting friends who have tried to operate as sole proprietorships have regularly reported to me that their clients refuse to deal business- to- business with them, but instead demand arrangements where they deduct taxes; not being incorporated can also cost you deals, or make it trickier to get insurance.

You should incorporate.
login / log in
That's a very strange interpretation of Aphyr's posts.
Thanks for the detailed comment! Do the remembering for them -- I like that. I'll implement your suggestion asap. I'll checkout Mailgun too!
And the presentation version - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL_-1d9OSdk
Thanks for the breakdown, I agree with these things, and it does blur data and function, which I have seen in some code segments. And I'm not without thought on the subject, I mean I know it pairs super well with C and there's a reason I deal with so much legacy code in it.

It just sorta blew my mind that people still want it around enough to have conferences about it.

The first time I left an unbalanced close brace in a comment, I started to dislike TCL (I mean, it's not the worst thing in the world), maybe I was hasty, but if other languages can solve that problem, it seemed hard to fathom why TCL hadn't solved or at least patched to fix it yet (maybe also the version we're using is outdated)

And no, not Cisco, but a more-hardware-than-software company
> Echelon (probably) existed

Probably?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
A note:

6 x 6 = 40

I was taught to read 40 at 4.0 * 10^1 which has two sig figs. 4 * 10^1 would have 1 sig fig. I can not a web reference which uses 40 as a one sig fig notation with only a few minutes time. You might want to add to your explanation why 40 and similar numbers are to be considered one sig fig if you are using a different style of notation.
I've noticed that it redirects when I use a largish amount of data (100mb?) with a desktop useragent. It redirects me to the "upgrade now" page for the rest of the month.
This is what i thought too, especially since it is visible among all the subjects.
Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans
he didnt hack it he just scraped it. it wasnt something illegal. read his blog post.
> Carriers are also allowed to do it to Android phones, but choose not to do so. Why is that? Do they make more money from Android phones, and are incentivised to make them appear better performing?

Studies have shown that iPhone user use far more data on average than Android users. Carriers would naturally throttle iOS devices first.
The way we get sulfur is pretty intense - for about $13 a day unprotected workers risk their lives and health to haul hundreds of lbs of the stuff out of volcanos.
How I set up Cloudinary to replace Amazon S3 for image management
"This app is incompatible with all of your devices."
"This item cannot be installed in your device's country."

Does anyone know why would they set a geographical restriction to this?.. At first I thought it could be lack of language support but it says "Dictionaries for 26 languages" in the feature list..
Welcome to the Internet. On here people act different because they are semi-anonymous.
Treehouse, Codecademy, and Coursera are great tools to teach fundamentals. Books can be good. There are screencasts that can be helpful as well.

Disclosure: I work at Code Fellows.
Sites like Elance are a race to the bottom. Real clients don't haggle over the cost of HTML design; they're not spending "their" money, and the only two metrics they have are (a) not spending so much money that they look like idiots and (b) a successful outcome for the project. Those clients can find (a) on Elance, but not (b), not reliably, and a failed project that costs $1 is much more harmful to a real client than a successful project that cost 2x what it could have.

So my point is: your Elance reputation doesn't matter at all, because you can't sustainably freelance on Elance, and nobody you want to work for gives a shit about your Elance reputation.

If you want the money, deliver what the client asked for; otherwise, write this one off as an inexpensive education.
I like the idea of sites implementing humans.txt to go with robots.txt. Doesn't need to be linked anywhere, but it's a place for crediting the people behind the site (or company, or product .. or anything).

robots.txt is for reading by robots so has to be structured

humans.txt is for reading by humans so can be anything a human wants to put in there.
This is a pretty bad article. The NSA wouldn't violate the constitution? Give me a break. They violate it every minute of every day. They're using it as toilet paper, as they attempt to store every piece of digital information on every American they can, in their mega data center in Utah.

You'd be better off starting from a list of big Federal agencies that aren't violating the Constitution every day of the week.

It's not speculation that Echelon existed, it's an openly admitted fact that the program was not only developed but live. It was used to help catch, as two examples: Pablo Escobar and Carlos the Jackal.
just take your salary and do side projects.
You're very welcome. It looks like you've got something people are interested in. Get everyone's email addresses and keep it rolling. Congrats!
I recall that the only ISP that refused Carnivore being installed in their systems was EarthLink - then there wasa story that EarthLink was founded by Scientology and they already had deep packet inspection and full traffic filtering/monitoring.

When the AT&T closet fiasco was revealed, it was a short-lived outrage.

The fact that the library of congress has signed a deal archiving all tweets is extremely odd.

The amount of ex-intelligence employees at facebook is just astounding.

The fact that .ir and .us cointelpro agents have built duqu and stux is amazing - the capabilities of those sytems is crazy.

We live in a cyber WWIII - and its largely invisible to 99% of the world.
Mitch Kapor in car accident
Just because what they are doing is legal doesn't mean it isn't shady. You can tell they've gone far and wide to push the boundaries slowly as far as they could. It is like they can't slice your throat but they can surely wave the knife a inch away from your head while claiming they are still following the rules.

Then perhaps some will wonder, how come people mistrust the government?

The Constitution was written centuries ago. Before internet, before phones. And I guess for a long time people trusted the government to keep up with the spirit of the Constitution. It seems the opposite is happening. Those who one expects to know, respect and defend it are the ones chipping away at its edges, bit by bit.

This leads to trust issues. It is like entrusting someone with a job, and then they find a way to screw it up then come back and say technically I didn't do anything wrong because "I followed all the rules". Yes they followed all the rules, but they also managed to lose the trust. Now the relationship is adversarial as opposed to one of mutual support.

Now I always wondered about the peons. They ones working in the trenches who have implemented all these technical "features" . One or two have come out and revealed it. What about others? Will there be death bed confessions, 20 years from now? Don't anyone of them care or see what they are doing or what they are enabling? Just wondering what goes on in their heads.
The Simple Interface
Since Microsoft started asking puzzles and then everybody influential (google, apple, amazon, facebook) copied it and making it main stream. The result is you either get puzzles for interview or the other extreme where they ask you questions on obscure API methods and functions.
Don't get me wrong, I can go all day on what I don't like about Tcl. In 1997, the startup I was at had me design and implement a programming language (long story); in '99, the cofounders at my next startup convinced us to use Tcl, and I still vividly remember that the language parsed freaking comments; you could get a syntax error in your comments.

It's not a great language. It was, though, at the time, a pretty good tool for building some kinds of programs.

Tk is pretty gross; I'm always weirded out when people say that's the reason they like Tcl.
(Hiding from newsfeed, it should be noted, is different from unfriending — they’ll never know.)

Well, they will know, because you never, ever like or comment on their stuff, like ever. :-)
Thanks for link, will forward next time someone complains around the water cooler
Are virtual goods inherently unethical? I think it's hard to judge how someone wants to spend their money and to assume that the value they derive from a game is not worth the money they are spending. After all, are they not entertained and is there not a price for that?
Great, thanks for the thorough feedback!

Re: your first con. We offer a heap.identify() API call that associates activity with one canonical identity. For instance, if a user logs in on a new separate device, you can call heap.identify({handle: 'DenisM'}) to associate all activity on that device with the existing user DenisM.

We hope you reconsider and give us a go. We're always down to talk more in person and better understand your use cases. Just ping us at team@heapanalytics.com.
After seeing that I've hit a soft spot with you, that you refuse to listen to common sense, that you assume distribution platforms operate like record companies in the 90s. I'm going to take the high road and apologize. I'm sorry if I made fun of your economic situation and I hope you find peace in whatever you are going through. The truth is, I am on the side of the reptilian shapeshifters and I really do hate freedom. We've been trying to destroy it for several decades. We've tried everything from wars to assassinations but in the end, the answer was right underneath our scaly noses. The paywalls.
Am I easily impressed or is the instant play when you navigate back and forward impressive? Feels like switching TV channels.
I thought it was just random goofing off for demo silliness. Was that a serious effort?
The U.S. is openly storing any packet that traverses any wire it can field signal from.

Quantum Tapping:

The loophole is that they are not 'tapping' any communication until the moment when they actually observe/listen to it.
Mars Rover Curiosity to Begin Trek Towards 3 mile high Mount Sharp
Results get published in news paper in India. Anyone with your registration number could get all your marks. Its easy to go back one step and know who is the owner or the exam registration number. In our state(Kerala) they publish a ranking of top 15 rank holders in the state for 10'th and 12'th classes and the kids are treated as celebrities with newspaper and tv coverage.
It'd be a false dichotomy if you said "people who are too busy to date are too busy for falling in love" or something similar. People are busy and online dating eats up more time than any other type of application, including social networking.

Matchmaking is already going on and successful relationships have been established that way, we just make it more affordable and transparent. Linx Dating charges $30,000 for 11 dates spread out over 2 years, and they charge $500 just for the screening process.

Online dating has a higher frequency of use than social networking sites. It requires more time than you'd think if you haven't tried it before.
Good 'till the last cluck.
What happened to this being the most transparent administration "committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness"[1]?

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOp...
Earthlink wasn't founded by Scientology. The founder of Earthlink - Sky Dayton - who did not have a controlling interest in the company by the point of the IPO in 1997, was/is a Scientologist. Earthlink was backed by a myriad of capital sources, from traditional VC to people like George Soros; Apple even put $200 million into them.
Previous discussion (5 hours old, still active):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5829442
What next? This [1], of course.

Of all the electronic device you own that are capable of being exploited for automated surveillance, your PC or Mac is probably the only thing that is not actually being used for automated surveillance (not counting your web browsing habits, and provided you don't have any spyware on your computer). How dare you use a computing device that (hopefully) does not have any backdoors built into it, is not locked into any vendor's monthly payment plan, is not locked into any vendor's proprietary OS, and even supports "terrorist" techniques such as full-disk encryption?

Fortunately for Big Brother, key hardware components of general-purpose computers are only produced by a handful of corporations such as Intel and AMD. Don't be surprised if they agree to build all sorts of defects-by-design into their processors, graphics cards, HDDs/SSDs, etc. There are already plenty of excuses: I have popcorn ready for the day when graphics cards finally implement security systems to prevent them from being used for bitcoin mining or password brute-forcing.

The FSF should change their name to FCF, Free Computing Foundation. We need them badly, more than ever before.

[1] Cory Doctorow, "The Coming War on General Computation", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
I am talking about the press to unlock fobs. Which is what the thieves seem to be using, based on the description of how they open the cars.
No checks and balances here... at least any that aren't classified and are transparent to the public. A Tyranny, as Thomas Jefferson might refer to it.
Awesome video, but somehow I don't think most of the audience here has the attention span to make it past the first few minutes.
Interesting. as I recall the last President to reign in the intelligence services was Jimmy Carter.
There seems to be a new Behind the Scenes video (unless I missed it before)
If you live close to a major city (SF, NYC, LA, Chicago, Austin, Miami, Seattle) we can do it. If you don't, I would suggest waiting until we grow the user base out more.
Ask HN: what kind of pages (automated) can I create to make money from Adwords
What kind of pages (automated) can I create to make money from Adwords? Is there a name for this field/domain that I can learn more about ?
Spintronics enable new quantum technologies
Holy crap! I'm not sure I've ever heard an audience react that hysterically before. That is infectious.
Original HTTP White Paper
*Edit: nevermind.
A little hiding goes a long way. I only hide if I notice repeat offenders (happens about every other week), and signal to noise ratio hovers around 1 to 1 for me.
That's great! Wouldn't it help to highlight these on your website with a 'In the News' or 'As Featured on' section.
Entanglement in a flash (w/ video)
Before you down vote, maybe try it: I bet if the pros and cons were written down, people would actually find the aggregate magnitude of each to be similar.
Nice! I like the ones that have this London local theme. Thanks for the good pointers.
Fairly serious question:

You really think that actually has any significant probability of working in the US?
Not a bad idea to mix some traditional games :-) Thanks!
Cross-posting from the other comment forum:

Everyone should realize one thing that makes this news slightly less scary, but still scary nonetheless: the order only applies to "Verizon Business Network Services", which is not the entirety of Verizon Communications.

While this still means that the metadata from millions of phone calls by random people, possibly from phones not even on Verizon who were simply calling VBNS phones, have been vacuumed up by the government, it also means that not "all" Verizon phones are meta-tapped as the article seems to insinuate (tagline, picture caption).

Glenn has done incredible commentary and reporting for many, many years; I hope this story will be only the beginning of his contributions and shake-ups to the discourse and activism against the U.S. surveillance oligarchy. Anyone who hasn't been reading his pieces whenever they come out are missing a phenomenon in human history.

And as another user noted: "Although this only means that the order for VBNS was released - for all we know every telco could be under a similar order that just hasn't been leaked."

Edit: not sure what here is getting the downvotes exactly; I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade, I just see "leaked court order shows all Verizon call metadata is seized" all over WaPo, Forbes, EFF etc and it's really a factual error. If we're exposing government corruption and authoritarianism, do we want to be credible or sensationalist?
As I recall reading, there was an article naming a lot of the direct investors of EarthLink; all Scientologists from hollywood: Tom Cruise, Whoopi Goldberg and others...

I don't know where that article is now - but I am sure it may be available online...
Do you work for the VA by any chance?
Photons Can Communicate From Beyond the Grave
I personally love this game too!
I would presume that "openness" refers to actions initiated by the administration itself. Already-established, long-running initiatives of autonomous sub-departments, even if they do fall under the purview of the executive, probably aren't included, since the administration isn't actually making any choices in how these programs are run, just letting them continue to run as they always have.
$15k a month. 90% through Adsense. Could make more with AdExchange if hey accept me. Difference of 68/32 vs 80/20 is pretty major.
That's very cool. He's got some serious kit on that truck. How much is all stuff that worth? Cant you like, strap a camera man onto the end of a big plank of wood or something instead?
This sounds like almost every nonprofit I've worked for as a consultant. There are very few that are actually technology driven, moreover they're often driven by mediocrity.

That doesn't mean they're not nice people, and that they're stupid (well ok sometimes it does), but it usually means they're working poorly. Often the organizations lack leadership because people with leadership skills tend to go for money.
I acknowledge that life, society etc is changing the expectation of privacy is changing as well. Perhaps Facebook is changing it too fast.
Well, they HAVE managed to create an unprecedented level of openness and transparency.

Perhaps in a different direction than we were assuming, but still...
That logic is flawed. Those numbers indicate correlation, not causation.
I miss his Dominion client daily.
http://siliconbayounews.com/2013/06/05/major-music-festival-...
Munk Debates
Don't forget about the penguins.
Also, dont forget the HW backdoors provided to the NSA by Cisco for over a decade...

And the NSA chip fab...

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/10/29/1456242/hiding-b...
Ugh.

Ratatouille was the first Pixar movie I saw that was an utter disappointment (no, I haven't seen them all, but I've seen a fair number of them). It was so far from "feel-good" cartoon flick for me. Much more "I'll never get that two hours of my life back" movie. Not sure how close to two hours it actually was, but it felt like about 10 hours.

Not sure what they were smoking when they made that one. I realize that tastes in movies vary widely, but I still find it hard to believe that people actually like that movie.

To each his own, I guess.