skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no "the power" in a system of divided government. That's the whole point of a system of divided government. Power is distributed. The people have some, their representatives have some, the judiciary has some, the executive has some, the press has some, etc. Ideally, the distribution is designed in a way that maintains a stable set of checks and balances between the various centers.

More to the point, "Democracy" has a fairly broad meaning, and encompasses a range of systems and traditions. You'd have to be exceedingly pedantic to insist that using it to describe any form aside from a pure, direct democracy is a misuse of language.
I thought the free electricity was only for people who bought the most expensive model of the Model S?
Awesome! When I was reading the article, I thought, "This was what God had in mind when she created links. Where are they?"
I was showing sarcasm. Patenting a molecule is a ridiculous idea, but you insist that it's about the process of making it. I'm pointing out that the result is not about the process, but about the molecule.
Not just the browser.

They also had pricing schemes with OEMs that made it impossible for the box builders to release any products with alternative OSes preinstalled (as it would raise the price of their Windows license). And a box builder that couldn't sell a competitive Windows machine was effectively useless.

Hitachi backing out of pre-installing (the technically amazing) BeOS is what eventually killed the company. Years later the shareholders won in court but by then Be was dead.
Didn't we win WWI? ;)
Eclipse’s Background Indexer: I Hate You
Nothing particularly interesting, and it is possible that I'm just wrong (I've never looked at S/MIME in great detail). Basically, S/MIME requires the sender to figure out which certificate to encrypt to. I'm not aware of any method of doing such discovery that, at least on first use, is more secure than the least secure trusted CA. But in the public, internet-wide scenario envisioned by OP, "least trusted CA" means that we have the same problems as for SSL.

This is not just a first-use problem, either. At least Outlook happily accepts valid-but-different-from-previously-seen certificates, and will encrypt replies to the certificate signing/encrypting the message being replied to. Thus, if I can convince BadCA to give me a certificate for thomas at matasano.com, I can send a mail "hey, $PARTNER, I'm away from my usual devices and I really need the proposal for $BIG_CUSTOMER. Could you send it to me? Please don't forget to encrypt it." Such an e-mail will appear appropriately signed, and I can read any replies $PARTNER sends.

Deploying S/MIME within an organization or within a couple of mutually-trusting organizations works just fine, of course; it's only involving public CA's that causes a problem.

(Or did I miss something?)
It would be a fair bit of work but it wouldn't be impossible. There are really only a couple of places in the main Chrome code base that are CF-specific - the automation interface and the external tab container.
I have a design question that I didn't see answered in the docs. What's your consistency/atomicity model for secondary indexes?

It seems like it would be hard to guarantee that the document and its index entries are always in the same shard, and since RethinkDB doesn't seem to support general multi-document transactions, I'm curious how you go about updating them simultaneously.
Again, getting into arguments of making molecules patentable because there are so many combinations available is bizarre. Why not make numbers patentable as well - there is an infinite amount of them.
Tunebox Is An iTunes Match-Like App For Dropbox Music Files
the benchmark still has to run somewhere :) and it takes up CPU as well.

running both the server and benchmark on one CPU reduces performance dramatically. On a 2 core EC2 machine the results are much closer.

However if you ran the benchmark from a remote node, you can really compare apples to apples.

But given that they both cost more or less the same, having one CPU still sucks just the same.
What do you mean by "forcing"? I'm running Windows XP on VirtualBox without any problems.
This looks great. When will you guys be open-sourcing it and under what license?
White hat SEO = following a search engine's rules = positive behavior.

Disparage not that which you do not understand.
I second the call for supporting books. There are already quite a few books being published on GitHub and it seems like an almost natural way to collaboratively write a book that could forever kept up to date. Not sure if anything has been done specifically to support writing a book on GitHub.
^non-american citizens are people, how can you compare them with irrelevant search results?

People outside have their own dreams, aspirations. Maybe their dreams are bigger than just building a photo sharing app.
Did the article mention that? Because I didn't see it. I'm interested in what you say, could you point me to more information?
> It's probably a bid for market share more than a bid for consumer happiness, in my opinion.

What's the difference?
WhereCloud released the AppCoreKit framework to help devs transition to iOS 7
Is the existence of the phone "metadata" classified anymore after national media debate and the public acknowledgement by POTUS? And unless this suspect is under a national security investigation, I can't see how his specific phone records can be classified in "subset".
Microsoft had all the cards back in 2008, maybe. The missteps started with Vista and Zune, and continued with Windows Phone 7, and were magnified with Windows 8, Windows 8 RT, and now XBox One. There's also the big non-step of trying to starve the iPad by not porting Office to it -- which has made it glaringly obvious how little we need Office to get stuff done.

I'd say Microsoft's problem now is pretty intractable. I think it's quite possible there will be no victor in XBox One vs. PS4 just as there was no victor in Bluray vs. HD-DVD (Bluray just lost more slowly).
The scary word here is "probably", because the government consistently refuses to release that data.

Although I'm fairly confident we're gonna win the legal and political battle over that issue in time. The Dutch government may be no better than that of the US on an ethical level, the legal balance between privacy protection and state secrecy is very different.
I'm very interested in whether writing to Congresspeople actually does anything.

Have there been any studies done that show any correlation between number of calls/letters a politician's office receives, and how they actually vote on bills proposed?
So, I have a background in chemistry and molecular biology and I take the exact opposite opinion - there's no categorical difference between the total synthesis and PCR. There are total syntheses that are straightforward - and the synthesis of most commercial drugs are usually very straightforward (for obvious economical reasons). And (rarely) you can have dastardly PCR reactions that refuse to work except under highly fine-tuned conditions that for long periods of time unexplainably work in the hands of only one researcher.

Ease is not the question by which a patent is judged. When you do a PCR reaction, introns or not, you are creating a NEW molecule that didn't exist before. Period. If the judges are claiming that the "information content" is what counts, then that goes against the molecule-patenting precedent - it's really the "molecular identity" which should count.

Now, my preference is to not allow patenting - at all - but to be consistent with the existing patenting landscape, they should have allowed the myriad patents (except for the "method" of comparing a patient sequence with the reference sequence) to pass.
Xbox One could be ‘future of PRISM’
Erlang gproc Failure Semantics
"Report a bug that could compromise the integrity of Facebook user data, circumvent the privacy protections of Facebook user data, or enable access to a system within the Facebook infrastructure"

^That's Facebook's. Theoretically, an exposed login page "could...enable access to a system within the Facebook infrastructure", but to be fair, I doubt they had that in mind.
I can not help but read your comments throughout this post and note the obvious bias. But what makes Kim scum of the Earth vis-a-vis this case? What makes megaupload any different than Google Drive or Dropbox, where people are illegally sharing file? Ironically, it is my understanding that megauploads actually gave copyright holders far greater control of protecting their content than Dropbox and Google Drive - giving them administrative access to remove content themselves and not be subject to serving copyright violations. Just curious what your underlying issue is with this guy, because it simply can not be that third parties used megauploads to illegally share copyrighted files.
Graphdat + Python = Monitoring Bliss
Idk, but empirical evidence suggests call-ins against SOPA were successful.
Being interesting to the world carries enough power to compensate for any attention asymmetry.
Monetizing android apps.    
So, I'll be launching my first android app in about a month and am trying to figure out the best way to get some cash from it. I was thinking of using banner ads, but they seem to spoil the aesthetics of the app. Also considered a simple paid app, but I'm afraid people just won't buy it. What strategies have you guys used and most importantly, were they successful?
I believe the previous official images were for Virtual PC or Hyper-V only.
Works in Chrome, Firefox however shows the flash dialog with a large grey box around it.
Apps that Track Stolen Smartphones Are Pretty Worthless
Here are a few benchmarks I ran against DO, Linode, and Hot Drupal (another provider I've used in the past): http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/2013-vps-be...

I've been very happy with my testing on Digital Ocean; the servers are fast, they remain up as much as any other provider, and the interface/service is great, and is improving every month.

The only sore spot is that two times I've had intermittent dropouts—once caused by someone DDoSing another DO site, and the other time for unexplained reasons. (And I know that the dropouts weren't just me, since I was monitoring things with https://servercheck.in/, which runs partly on Digital Ocean VPSes).
https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/business/browser/lbs.h...
Google may be continuing with the 'Don't Be Evil' motto but they sure ain't standing by a 'Don't Be Dicks' motto. What major software company announces a deprecation with 6 months of support. I have something going out relying on chrome frame plugin going out next week, now I have to go with my tail between my legs. Well lesson learned, can't rely on Google in the enterprise.
Also, given the name "PRISM," isn't it pretty obvious how this program worked? Think about it... What does a prism do?

It's obvious a spy agency isn't trying to communicate how their program works to everyone who stumbles across their codename.
Another great opportunity to pressure IT to switch to Firefox as the standard.
I have to agree.

The fact that you still cannot do side by side diffs on pull requests makes it a less than useful code review tool.
Caffeine withdrawal is now listed as a mental-health disorder
Udall, Wyden Call On NSA Director to Clarify Effectiveness of Data Program
The hackers I know who work in activism full-time include Seth Schoen, Jake Appelbaum, Richard Stallman, and Zooko O'Whielacronx. Are you suggesting that these people would be more effective if they hadn't devoted their lives to activism? Or that they'd be more effective in the future if they did it only part-time?
depends on the patent. Usually a drug patent will claim "molecule scaffold with substitutents X can be {list of substituents}, Y can be {list of substitutents}". Then they will claim a very broad list substituents. It may not always be enforceable, if you can claim that your derivative substituent is "non-obvious" but most people won't bother because the litgation will be a PITA.
It would probably be seen as anti-competitive if they licensed between business units for free.
Legacy Browser Support - Chrome for Business
Great question. In Rethink we guarantee that the document and its index entries are always in the same shard, so any change to the document that affects secondary indexes is consistent and atomic.

There are tradeoffs to this approach -- to read a secondary index the db has to go to every master/shard for the table, but there are lots of tricks we use to minimize the impact of this tradeoff.
> We now use our vendor-controlled computing devices to go places. All of these places are owned by someone.

What's so different about that, compared to 20 years ago? We used AOL or Compuserve. Internet sites were almost all owned by universities or a small number of companies.

> I can't delete cookies on my iPad or ensure that files are securely erased. Updates on my Kindle happen automatically, without my knowledge or consent.

Again - you couldn't erase your history on Prodigy or MSN. If you didn't update your dialer/client you were eventually locked out.
Bullshit. Being able to remotely nuke my data when my phone was lost (and found, but not returned) was an immense load off my mind. I don't care about the phone, I care about my data.
Well, except the entire dashboard and game purchasing system on the actual console. It's incredibly terrible. The cycle of update and reboot (I've watched my Xbox360 reboot 3 times for updates after turning it on once) is silly. The dashboard is extremely slow. You select something like "download game", and you can count several seconds between the rendering of every element on the screen that pops up. It's terribly half-assed.
Oh indeed </Omar>!

I've always straddled the line between both worlds. Obsessively programming as a kid/teenager, then studying communications and psychology, and now a web developer. And there is so much space, generally speaking, between the two worlds that any connection is a Very Good Thing.
The Italian Wikipedia has some images of the stamps they issued - before and after the dynamiting of the platform!

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isola_delle_Rose_%28micronazion...
If you wanted to legally run multiple versions of IE without having to have multiple Windows licenses for every combination (e.g. IE8/XP, IE8/Win7, IE10 Win7, IE10 Win8, etc...) you had to use the MS-provided virtual machines. However, these were only ever made available as VirtualPC images. So there was no way to run them, even on Windows, without all sorts of machinations (some of which may have violated the ToS).
Soylent have mentioned world hunger. Here's how the World Food Programme tackle it: (https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/how-wfp-fights-malnutrition)

Here's the list of WFP food products (https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/special-nutritional-products) - especially look at the price. I guess they're making full use of charitable status and economies of scale.

Here's Plumpy'Nut, a fortified food product for starving children (http://www.irinnews.org/report/83124/malawi-cheaper-recipe-f...)

EDIT: And even here micronutrient powders are nothing new. See the link to DSM embedded in WFP page above. Here's their corporate page (http://www.dsm.com/corporate/investors.html). They're pretty big.

Note that an important part of Soylent, which is offloaded onto the consumer, is a source of clean water. Much of the world, especially in the target hungry world market, does not have access to clean water. I think people would criticise Soylent for that, so it's something for them to be thinking about.

I have no idea how Soylent is in anyway "disruptive" to that market.

Ignoring the "fixing world hunger" bit, liquid foods are not new. Here's a list:

(http://ensure.com/) Ensure

(https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//) Fortisip

(http://www.complan.com/) Complan

(http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/abbott-brands) Abbott Nutrition Brands

(http://www.medifast1.com/index.jsp) Medifast

(http://www.optifast.com/Pages/index.aspx) Optifast

(http://www.slim-fast.com/products/) Slimfast

Again - I have no idea how Soylent are disruptive.

Selling into other markets is interesting. I hope they've put disclaimers on some of the more outrageous claims, or they may find resistance. For example "For anyone who struggles with allergies, heartburn, acid reflux or digestion, has trouble controlling weight or cholesterol, or simply doesn't have the means to eat well, soylent is for you." contains medical claims which are treated very differently in the UK than they are in the US.

I see no evidence that Soylent have done any research at all.
I genuinely don't understand your point.

If a group of people synthesize and test many synthetic DNA sequences and then patent the useful ones, that seems fine to me. You might even call them "synthetic biologists". They have invented new things, which are not found in nature, by the process of their own skills, knowledge, and labor, and which are useful to other people. It seems perfectly reasonable that those inventions should be protected by the patent system.
It's a free event!
I learned this when they killed google gears.
http://redis.io/topics/latency : Redis is mostly single threaded since actually from Redis 2.4 we use threads in Redis in order to perform some slow I/O operations in the background, mainly related to disk I/O

Could this affect the benchmarks then? I don't know if it does, but if the benchmark is also writing to disk, wouldn't a dual core machine perform better?
Some are complicit. The ones in the know can't say anything without becoming leakers themselves.
What were you paying for Chrome Frame?

Sometimes, it makes sense to retire products. And if you're not making money on the product, then it can be expensive to keep supporting it. I think six months is still a reasonable amount of advanced notice. No matter what, a small minority will be unhappy.

I think the real lesson here is: don't build something serious on top of a product you don't pay for and you don't have any guarantees on support.
Barsy — fully functional animated barcodes
I create new droplets from time to time and I've never had much of an issue provisioning new instances.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=1157...
Nothing to see here, its kinda funny to see the 1% be outraged by the fact that there is a 1% of the 1% that 99% of them aren't part of.
Hey, we'd actually really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes and share your thoughts on what Mongo is better at. Beating Mongo in everything isn't our explicit goal (we're forging our own path), but if there are things we can fix, we'd love to hear about them.
Wow, cool. You have a national severe thunderstorms center there?
What an utterly useless post. I had to double check I was on ycombinator and not reddit after reading this.

Isn't this a general behavior of typical sterotype (you can't even speak english correctly) european? Most them believes europe as theland of the law and anything else is savagery.

Why even bother making posts like these? We get it, america and therefore vicariously all americans are horrible people, the devil, and should be wiped off the face of the earth. We get it, europeans hates americans. Can we all move on with our lives now?
I like DroneZone from SomaFM. It's my go to music for loud neighbors or lots of distracting noise. Very calming and allows me to concentrate.
Apparently, even the NSA has a FOIA process:

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/foia/submit_foia_request/foia...

If they don't have to respond to discovery, they certainly are legally required to respond to this.

If they play the "national security" or "privacy" card, this defendant has a strong case to appeal any conviction considering that the existence of this database has been essentially "unclassified" by POTUS with his public acknowledgements.
A terrific feature would be to have the same in gist, embeddable everywhere.

Want to show a place or some directions on your website/blog/... ?

Just create a gist with geojson format and embed it on your blog, as programming blogs embed code gist right now.

Congrats!
I like the site, and participating in project comment threads. I haven't posted any of my own ideas, but I like that I can earn credit to post it for free by commenting enough.

The value of the site depends on having critical mass of knowledgeable people discussing the pitches, but they are slowly increasing the number of projects and the people participating, and it seems like most pitches have at least some worthwhile discussion.
It's loose use of language, but given that we are a democratically elected representative republic, which has Enlightenment ideals baked right into the founding documents, I think using "Democracy" to refer to the US is "correct enough" in most contexts. Certainly we aspire, at least nominally, to "liberal, democratic ideals" where "liberal" refers to the "classical liberal" mindset, not what passes for liberalism today.
Ask HN: good blogs & websites for Objective-C development?
I'm new to Objective-C development and am working on my first iOS app. What blogs, websites, and web-based resources would you recommend for Obj-C developers (of any ability level)?
I think the hacker problem is that we're too damn happy to solve a problem successfully, no matter if it is a problem of consequence or not.
This is going to be a great event...and for free?!?! It's a no-brainer!
This looks like what a good web designer with little knowledge of actual accounting requirements would do.
Not what I would expect from a company specialising in accounting software.
It makes me seriously doubt that they can actually fill my accounting needs, so instead of creating a lead, I can't help having doubts about their capabilities.

The first thing I would expect from such a tool is either to explicitly point out the limitations of the free offer (eg 'only valid for retail in the Netherlands!'), or, if you expect users to believe you are capable of fulfilling their invoicing needs, you have to ask which business sector and which country you are creating invoices for, and actually update the template to suit the legal requirements of the user's domain (taxes, legal mentions, display of business registration, etc).
200 requests/s with Ruby on Rails 4 on a 5$ / month server
Calling the US a "Democracy" suggests the power lies with the people. It doesn't.

It's supposed to, and if it doesn't, that only tells us that things have gone very wrong. But you don't have to have direct democracy (as opposed to representative democracy) to adhere to the idea that the ultimate political power rests in the hands of the people.
Fincen to virtual economy: "Ensure integrity and transparency"
Interview: Today's Java with Cay Horstmann