skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't forget about DDG's great bang shortcuts.

If you ever find yourself wanting to fall back on Google's results, just throw !sp at the front of a DDG search for StartPage's proxied Google service (or !g if you absolutely must go to Google). DDG has many, many shortcuts for directly searching StackOverflow, GitHub, Amazon, Wikipedia, etc.
It seems clear to me that such a confusing and scientifically-confused decision will not last long. Hopefully this decision paves the way for a more reasonable standard in a few years. Meaningful modification should be the standard. Removing introns, which is done naturally, is clearly not such a modification.
Humans are wired to see a physical item (disks, etc.) and think *mine.*

Well, yes, but you oversimplify. There is a long-established doctrine of first-sale in the US, and it's not just part of case law, it's part of the culture. The non-resaleability of Kindle books or anything else digital is still new to the popular mind, and carries with it a certain implicit devaluation.

Even though most people at least abstractly understand the non-resaleability of bits (whether due to the infinite duplicability of DRM-free media, or the practical inflexibility of DRM systems), a big reason they don't complain about iPhone apps or Steam games is likely the frequently low prices they pay.

A $60 game demands at least a bit of fungibility for most consumers. A $0.99 one doesn't, regardless of whether it came from a disc or an app store. If, as the supposed insider claims, XBO games can actually retail for half what a resale-friendly game would, then that offsets the implicit devaluation of non-resaleable media.

If Call of Duty 8 retails for $59.99 on the PS4 and $29.99 on the XBO, that suddenly makes the DRM a very appealing tradeoff. If they're both $59.99, Xbox is dead in the water.
You usually learn cursive around the age of 7, while the teacher insists that cursive is all you will ever use once after that. In high school, I was told all the time that they only accept cursive in college.

I think the movement away from cursive is relatively recent, and entirely associated with the fact that virtually no teacher or professor will accept work that isn't typed up. You learn cursive in 3rd grade, then from there on all of your work is done on computers so you never reinforce it.
> Have you ever met even a single person who's a fan of their cable company?

I am. I don't buy their TV or phone service, but they provide the best internet connection in every place I have lived. They have consistently been cheaper and faster than fios, uverse and any DSL. I can run a server, they don't block ports, and my IP is effectively static.
Yeah they could have easily reversed their PR mishap as well.

"Hey everyone $29.99 (or less) for release day games"

No one would be complaining about always-on DRM at that price. Sadly it's very unlikely since they are selling physical discs.
Don't forget about the White House petition to pardon Snowden. It now has 70,229 signatures but needs 100,000 to get a response.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snow...
EDIT: nevermind

https://github.com/bikesharebot/bikesharestats/blob/master/c...
I agree with everything you say, this has been my experience as well. UML, even a lightweight truncated version of it, is incredibly powerful. The graphical syntax is not that hard to understand.

The biggest benefit to me has been that it expresses object relationships, imo, better than code. At a high level it's much easier to visualize fundamental design mistakes or solutions when object relationships have actual shape. OOP, for better or worse, was designed to model real world objects, actions or relationships, and graphical shapes, rather than sequential instructions, express that best.

I've found class diagrams very helpful for visualizing complex domains, and sequence diagrams extremely helpful when modeling service architectures especially.

I understand why many coders avoid it, but I also think it's unfortunate that UML has the reputation it does. I read Martin Fowler's UML Distilled (and I still recommend it) years ago. It made sense to me then, still does.
Plaintext, though. I wish DDG over XMPP would do OTR.
Totally agree. We have a mix of algorithmic/automated monitor and visual monitors. I can tell you a lot more about how healthy our site is from looking at two screens in our NOC than I can from all the pages sent over the last <pick your time range>.

Computers are great at executing repetitive, specified tasks. Use them for that.

Humans are great at pattern recognition and flexibly adapting. Use them for that, IMO.
This petition has less of a chance than the one about building a death star.
Even here in the states, the cheaper games line feels empty. So much of these decisions the result of pressure coming from the big publishers who are in trouble. Historically their idea of a sale for a console game is like 54.99 instead of 59.99. The only reason we saw steep cuts from Steam is because PC piracy was at an all-time high and is so much more accessible since you don't have to hard-mod anything.

Also, it's worrisome how little MS is supporting the indie scene while they tout digital distribution as the future. With our current Internet infrastructure, they should be going after the indies first! Right now it just makes way more sense to download a bite size game over your connection than a full AAA title.
> Meaningful modification should be the standard.

This would have been a much more useful and realistic ruling. They explicitly don't address meaningful modification (they mention it to say that they intentionally do not address it), so I suppose we shall see where they stand on that eventually.
A republic is usually defined in positive terms: any government that is determined somehow by the public. That's basically equivalent to your definition that it is any government that is not private property to be handed down by heredity.

Some people use the term "republic" to imply "merely a republic" in the sense that the country in question is not a direct democracy. I am not sure whether this betrays that they think of government as having one dimension of variety from hereditary monarchs to direct democracy, whether they think that republics and democracies are incompatible forms of government, or whether they realize that democracy is merely one form of a republic and choose to simplify for effect when they say things like "The USA is not a democracy, it is a republic."

As usual, wikipedia is pretty good on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic
In part because voters don't vote for those who maximally represent their interests. It's a rare opportunity to vote for a candidate I support; normally I vote for the least-bad, simply because a candidate I support isn't there.

Voters may prioritize one (or few) cause(s) over others, leaving them disenchanted when a low-priority issue gains importance.

If the American system hadn't been successful for centuries, I'd have guessed that it wouldn't work.

The primary system, where candidates for the general election are selected, emphasizes the core/extremal parts of each party. The general election emphasizes centrist views. The usual result are candidates who will tell people what they want to hear. This makes it more difficult to predict what a candidate will do in office. Furthermore, a candidate who aspires to greater office may not do an optimal job in his/her present position in order to tune appearances for the coming election. Term limits would go a long way toward addressing this latter problem.

We get the government we vote for, and we don't always (normally?) vote for those who might do the best job.
It could also be named PRISM as a form of misdirection, to make people think that the codename referred to upstream-collection operations. (It's beyond doubt that upstream collection is still ongoing too, though.) Or it could be that spy organisations just like optical metaphors. FWIW the You Should Use Both slide seems to use PRISM to refer specifically to the "direct collection" and not the upstream collection capability.
The Totskoye nuclear exercise
He doesn't really address the issue of lending games. When my wife bought me a PS3 for my birthday last year I had zero games.

My friend at work lent me a huge stack of games — he's a gamer and had a ton of games he loved but didn't play anymore.

It was a great introduction to gaming for me and it led me to purchase many of the sequels to the games I played initially. I have purchased about 10 games since, and about 7 of those were purchased purely based on games I had played from the initial stack that I borrowed.

I don't understand why they feel the need to capture this as a "revenue stream." Focusing on great games and great convenience will surely get them more money in the long term.
So 100,000 people sleep better tonight. And if you ever read any of government responses, you know nothing changed.
That actually is kinda suspicious he picked the one piece of information that was on the Facebook page. I changed my stance and now more agree with wutbrodo that it doesn't really matter if he's an engineer or not. Just pretend he didn't say that if you don't believe him.
My take on this ruling is found here[1], discussed on HN here[2].

> "... by affirming that cDNA can be patented, it may strengthen the incentives for investing in research in this area"

If the court had been discussing meaningfully modified DNA, rather than cDNA (which occurs naturally), I'd probably agree with this quotation from Mr. Crouch. As someone who has done molecular biology in an academic research laboratory, it seems as though the Court is using the term "cDNA" to represent some idea slightly different from what scientists mean by cDNA.

Or, at least, their rationale for apotheosizing cDNA is confusing. If intron removal is one of the key steps, and intron removal occurs naturally in the cell before the process of cell harvesting and cDNA creation begins, it is confusing (to me) to say that cDNA creation is a patent-worthy "creation".

The essential transformation (the removal of introns) is done by nature within the cell without any instruction from the lab tech. cDNA creation–the step that SCOTUS seems to view as key–is performed largely because mRNA is not stable in most convenient aqueous solvents. If mRNA were stable, we'd probably have mRNA libraries instead of cDNA ones.

1 = http://blog.carbocation.com/post/52902698213/supreme-courts-...

2 = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5877259
Ask Kim Dotcom about how well NZ's liberal laws worked out in practice when the US copyright police showed up asking the local cops to wildly overstep their legal authority…

I mean _seriously?_ Helicopters, silenced assault rifles, security dogs, and 72 cops - sent in against someone accused of _copyright infringement?_ And then a Hollywood showreel of the raid gets produced and publicised?

I _like_ New Zealand, they talk the talk, but when it comes to walking the walk - they're lead around by the nose to do whatever the US wants.
herein lies the problem with allowing 80+ year olds with no scientific training to rule on complex scientific questions.
That's correct, blekko does have our own multi-billion page crawl and index. And we're private, too.

Every web search engine depends on one of these indexes: google, bing, blekko, yandex, baidu.
Eh, easy. http://jspdf.com/

You can create a file with javascript at the client side, without creating load on the server.
Sad news. This is why so many IT depts don't trust Google. You can spend so much time and energy trying to get something adopted in your dept, and then Google leaves you hanging.

It's good for Google short term, but I can't help but think stuff like this (and google reader shutdown) is really limiting uptake of other Google apps in businesses.
>If Call of Duty 8 retails for $59.99 on the PS4 and $29.99 on the XBO, that suddenly makes the DRM a very appealing tradeoff. If they're both $59.99, Xbox is dead in the water.

Exactly, if MS had been thinking this all along, they could have proved it with a low price game option announced with the DRM. That would have been really appealing to a lot of people.
Show HN: A Chrome extension that reveals PRISM in your browser
How the US government taps fiber optic cables for the NSA
Let's Meet Up Somewhere Other than Facebook - alternative streams of connecting
This is why it's important to look at PRISM as a political issue and not merely a technical one, like I see a ton of people doing now. The best solution to government spying isn't to tell everyone to use Linux and DuckDuckGo, it's to change the spying itself.
I can only assume you are confused by the meaning of "force". The actual application of physical force is not necessary for an action to be forceful and violent.
As I see it, DRM is much more of a problem on consoles than it is on PC. In my Steam library, I have Commander Keen right next to Bioshock Infinite. There's no "expiration date" for my games. On the other hand, consoles come in generations. They only last a decade at most, and it looks like we're not going to have backwards compatibility going forward. What's going to happen when Microsoft decides to pull support for their 10, 20, 30 year old DRM-laden consoles? Not every game is going to get an HD remake, sadly.
The NSA gathers most available data about most people.

What does it matter which server establishes the socket connection?

I wrote the backend for the exchange of electronic medical records. We used numerous protocols: scp, ftp, http, etc. And numerous formats: csv, hl7, xml, etc. We had numerous partners: pharma, labs, hospitals & clinics, EMTs, CDC, etc.

In all cases, I'd feel comfortable saying we had "direct access". Because in all cases, the audience of doctors, nurses, execs, admins knew enough to make policy decisions.

Would you drop this chew toy if the Guardian had written "near realtime live data feed"?
A New Way To Do Nuclear
Nice work. Can we rob a bank now?
We'll see how the story plays out leading up to launch, but Amazon pre-orders for Destiny[1] are currently running $59 (give or take a few $) for all supported platforms (XBox One, XBox 360, PS4, PS3).

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Destiny-Xbox-One/dp/B00CX9T598/
Glad you are here. Thank you so much for doing this. Just wanted to let you know that I found out about this via a twitter sponsored tweet. So whoever decided to do that as a marketing idea probably is getting their money's worth.
I had to look up what cursive was, for me that's just what you call handwriting. Are you saying that there's a move towards non-joined up handwriting?
Btw. here's a link: http://www.duetapp.com/

Personally I wouldn't ever use a SaaS for my core business!
With Duetapp or other opensource project for example, I am able to modify the source it. (opensource!=free)

Regarding duetapp, I think commerce and organization should be seperated. But no other invoicing app does that atm. anyway. However I feel that this is the last bit required to make it almost perfect. Basically I would create a clean and modular and payment gateway, so that I can be used by any other app too. Write a little duetapp plugin and voila. Much better than integrating every single payment method manually into system A, system B etc.
> That brings us to the next point: do class diagrams have a place in an increasingly dynamically typed world?

I think so, at least in environments where OOP is the base metaphor, like Ruby or Python. I can't think of any major impedance to creating meaningful class diagrams for, for instance, a system of ActiveRecord relationships. RubyMine (last time I used it) actually will generate a nice class diagram for you based on the given ActiveRecord/schema definitions.

For me these days, since not many coders use it, I find UML mostly helpful as a personal tool I use to understand a new codebase or a complicated design/data modeling problem.

I also find sequence diagrams really helpful, particularly in complex async, service-oriented environments where many times there's just too much state to track and too many moving pieces to really see the essence of the problem.

UML is not everybody's cup of tea, but I continue to find it a valuable way to visualize complex code relationships, often times surfacing problems/solutions that would not have been as transparent just from reading the code.
I agree -- harder to be successful in self-publishing for fiction.

(1) There's less "need" for your book. People aren't saying, "gosh, I wish I could find a book on zombies from Mars attacking Earth. Let's see what my options are!"
(2) You can't differentiate yourself as easily.
(3) To be successful as an author, you need a platform / promotional strategy. It's harder to build that with fiction books (at least until you are well-known). In an "informational" space (business, reference, technical, etc), you can build up a following by starting a business or a website that provides assistance in some area.
Well, what stops them from displaying String.titleCase(fetchRealSearchQuery()) ? ;).
I had a similar experience. I've found a good happy medium is Graphviz. It's a bit different in that rather than drawing boxes and arrows on a canvas you edit a .dot file in your text editor and then have the tool do the layout and rendering. Having the layout happen automatically leads to some not-so-great looking graphs, but it ends up saving you a lot of time. Simply putting arbitrary text in nodes and connecting them via labeled edges gives you a lot of flexibility. When a graph gets too big and unwieldy (20+ nodes), I just split it in two. I'll color a node red to indiciate that there is more information about that node in another .dot file.

You do have to learn the .dot syntax, but it's nothing too crazy. A nice bonus is (at least with the OSX version of Graphviz) every time you save a .dot file via your text editor the renderer automatically re-renders the graph for you -- so you can make quick edits and get that instant feedback.
Not even a summary of the feedback? Or was the staff chief basically running the show policy wise?
FBI chief Mueller says spy tactics could have stopped 9/11 attacks
Actually you will be surprised by how many do type in Title Case. I have seen many non-techies do that. I have also noticed they do this in almost every movie and TV show, when someone is using a search engine.
Is Forced Fatherhood Fair?
What happened to that police officer should have triggered mass firings and jail sentences. Every time I post a comment on HN speaking negatively of unionized government organizations I get mercilessly down-voted. I don't know if this is because there are a bunch of union thugs reading HN (doubt it) or brainwashed liberals who support unions out of pure indoctrination and without much thought. The truth is that these organizations are nasty animals with unprecedented reach, power, rights and immunity. They almost operate under their own laws and it is nearly impossible to go up against them. Case in point, bad teachers ought to be fired mercilessly without pension and those who abuse children should suffer the same fate. There was a case here in Los Angeles of a teacher who sprinkled cookies with --don't barf-- his own semen and fed them to the kids. The teacher's union actually protected this animal's rights for as long as they could. If the teacher's union is that ugly, imagine what police unions and even non-unionized government groups must be like.
Thanks for the tip. I'm working on a short non-technical book so I'm hoping to do it in Markdown following the format of The Little MongoDb Book. That book is hosted on GitHub with the Markdown text output to PDF, mobi and ePub. Seems like the simplest way to get to a pretty nice looking book in the major formats.

https://github.com/karlseguin/the-little-mongodb-book
Seamless is down
Despite that the US newspaper industry alone makes more revenue than the US video games industry. So you are indeed both the product and the consumer and will continue to be both far into the future.
Hey sanj, can you email champsweeps@gmail.com? I want to discuss something with you.
First off, the project is only two weeks. How many milestones can you fit in two weeks? For some clients, dealing with billing more than a couple times a month can be a pain in the ass. Additionally, you are working on this project as a side gig, so it's probably not a lot of hours. In this case I would be fine with taking the whole payment at the end. Just have the client put the money in escrow. The client could still screw you over, but at least you know it won't be because of a lack of funds.

On the other hand, since this is a side gig you probably aren't on the same feast / famine cash flow cycle that most full time freelancers are on. You can probably afford to be picky. So, if you don't feel comfortable with the client, just look for another project. For a two week project, I would just do half down and half on completion.

I don't bother with giving partial work based on the payment schedule. At any given time my client has access to everything I have done. However, most of my clients are also developers (or have other developers working for them,) so we may be committing code to the same repo.

I have never been screwed by a client in years of freelancing. I have had clients be way late with payments, but they have always been responsive and sincere when asked about getting a payment. If you are getting screwed, then you need to look at your process for selecting clients.

Don't get too caught up with it. These payment schemes are meant for managing cash flow and risk. You probably don't have to worry so much about cash flow, so your main focus would be the risk.

Personally, I'm not concerned about the risk of losing billable time. My concern is the risk of my business going under. If I lose a few days pay, I'm grumpy, but this won't register on my risk radar. Losing out on a payment sucks, but it's a normal part of most businesses. As long as I'm committed to the long term of my business and learning from my mistakes then I can accept the risk of losing billable time. I might hound Joe down the street for that $10 he never paid me back for the rest of my days, but I can accept losing a few days of billable time because my client went bankrupt and can't pay me. So, be flexible and keep your risk management in perspective.
I'm using Ghostery on Chrome. Seem to do the job.
I'd prefer they became more competitive on search first: I try DDG a few times a year and it's a pretty big self-handicap when everything takes minutes rather than seconds to find.
A number of people have pointed out that this method probably wouldn't hold up in courts because you are, in effect, communicating the existence of a NSL by ceasing to update the canary. And when courts consider the legal rights of a government body charged with fighting terrorism against the ill defined rights of a server owner to control the content of their server, the rights of the former are likely to trump those of the latter.

But since the purpose of this method is to effect civil disobedience, maybe the same end could be realized via different means. Hypothetically speaking, if a service provider kept a database of all NSLs received, but failed to strongly secure the database, leading to its access by an outside third party, this shouldn't constitute "communication". The database could perhaps be made accessible via a URL ("to enable remote workers to view and process NSLs" or some plausible justification) but protected by a weak password. An employee of that service provider could then secretly leak the password to a third party. Bad network security is not a crime, and unless the third party revealed that the password had been leaked, there would be no way to prove that it wasn't guessed or brute forced.
As no reasonable police officer would execute a paramilitary operation over copyright infringement, no reasonable person can be expected to believe that the armed thugs busting down his door are police, no matter their claims.
U.S. Is Said to Plan to Send Weapons to Syrian Rebels