skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually think that fewer laws and more limits on law enforcement practices is the way to go. I am not that thrilled about isonomy because I think that history shows that isonomy never really is implemented and in fact merely shifts power towards those deciding how the laws are to be enforced.

Look for example at our experience in the US with mandatory sentencing guidelines. This was done to take away leeway in sentencing from judges and in the name of isonomy.

What happened however was different. The problem is that not all cases of a crime are created equal and so instead of judges having sentencing discretion, that was put in the hands of the prosecutor (who would then decide when to prosecute a lesser included offence).

The result is quite striking when you look at drug prosecutions today. It's not law enforcement that makes the difference but prosecutorial discretion. The problem is that human life does not really admit of a situation where a purely mechanical view of justice actually does justice. Total isonomy would not be a justice system but merely one which distributes injustice equally and blindly.

I don't there is a way around this, and I think further we are better just openly admitting that isonomy is neither attainable nor desirable, but instead work to ensure that we really try to ensure real justice and hold people accountable, from the grass roots, for their decisions.
This may be the clearest explanation of Ruby syntax I've ever read!

My attempt to parse the above example comes to something like this:

state_machine(STATE, {"initial" : ACTIVE}, function()
{
after_transition({"any" : BLOCKED}, function(user, transition)
{
user.users_projects.find_each(function(membership)
{
return (membership.destroy ? true : false);
});
});
});

I'm writing in JavaScript because its function notation is way better than Python's lambda syntax. From the parent's explanation, I'm pretty sure this is a valid translation, even though I don't know Ruby. But having three levels of nested anonymous functions really makes the code hard to understand. I'm guessing that this is idiomatic Ruby though, and if you program with the pattern long enough, it gets easier.

OTOH it's still a barrier to entry entirely separate from the syntax -- if the semantics of Ruby code you see "in the wild" is typically this complicated, it's almost as bad as Haskell and its monads! (I have much stronger math chops than most programmers, I've tried to read introductions to monads twice, had them explained to me three separate times on HN, and still don't understand them at all!)
I didn't say it wasn't working when offline. It's like taking your laptop in the airplane/train without WIFI. You just feel like you're very limited.
Why would NSA want to do that?
http://di.fm is great for electronic music, they've got plenty of channels. Try also searching youtube, and if you find anything you like, use the "youtube mix", it's automatically generated but usually contains a lot of similar songs.
I believe this is the relevant thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5854813

Its a bit short on specifics though. I'd like to know which laws give the US access to data held on servers that are physically outside its jurisdiction. What happens when they are in conflict with local laws (e.g. EU privacy laws)? I though there were international agreements covering this.
Why do you refer to taxes in Russia as low? Could you please provide some comparison to other countries?

I live in Russia and I don't think taxes here are low.
Good article, but the author takes a somewhat generous view of academic citations. There are spammers in academia -- e.g. editors and reviewers who block rivals from publishing or who demand citations of their own work in revisions.
If You Don't Start You Won't Finish
I don't get this pun---can you explain?
With its own set of warts.
I've been hearing about the so-called destruction of the web since the distant future, the year 2000.
Templating your Jekyll Blog with Jade
Also in a similar vein — Bluetech:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bluetech
So in what sense do you think they are spreading themselves too thin?
There are some constitutional protections on speech by congressmen in the course of their duties, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_or_Debate_Clause
Too, Lisp was described for the first time in 1958. See "Pretty Great Works", #8.
I agree with cold tea actually, at least to a point.

Robust liberties and clear restraints on law enforcement powers at the expense of law enforcement efficiency are a cornerstone of liberty and have been everywhere and throughout history.

The reason why it is only to a point though is that less efficient police driven to maintain quotas will typically focus on the poor who are less able to defend themselves. Most of the data i have seen suggests that there are not major class differences in drug use in the US, but there are huge class differences in enforcement because buying habits are different and so it takes more police work to bust the middle class than it does the poor.

I think that this is one of those cases where we have a perpetual social problem which cannot be remedied by automating the system.
> no-one can deny that the raid is simply terrifying.

It looked pretty amateurish to me. They had trouble climbing a 3 foot high gate, which after they had ‘scaled’ it, turns out was easily opened.

> such a heavily armed response

I counted 5 police officers who approached the house together, only one of them was armed with a rifle. I saw no violence whatsoever, it was pretty laid-back. At no point in the video did they point a gun at any of the suspects, and they lowered their fire arms before they entered the building (highly unusual if you think you’re in danger or if you want to intimidate someone).

> Dotcom never posed a physical threat to anyone

When you’re dealing with a rich suspect who loves expensive toys and has a large staff, you have to be prepared for anything. In the US, they would’ve sent an army to surround and comb through that enormous mansion. Given that Dotcom is morbidly obese, I doubt the agents saw him as a physical threat, it’s his staff and the presence of weapons they needed to worry about.
Even though I would rather like to see them invest more in C++11 than C++/CX, Microsoft is not alone in this as all compiler vendors have their own set of extensions.
"You'll be able to link other Xbox Live accounts as having shared access to your library when you first set up a system and will also be able to add them later on (though specific details of how you manage these relationships is still not being discussed). The only limitation, it seems, is that only one person can be playing the shared copy of a single game at any given time. All in all, this does sound like a pretty convenient feature that's more workable than simply passing discs around amongst friends who are actually in your area."

That is nice. Just wondering how it works, hope you can lend a game to someone. Not that if your library is shared any one of you 'family members ' can play just any game form your library at any time, would totally suck since only one can play the game at the time.
Develop Node.js applications inside Visual Studio
As an avid GO user, no ... no we do not.
I'd love to work there, though it'd be an evil commute for me (I'm in Ede). I'm even subscribed to their jobs mailing list. I haven't seen any software developer jobs come up, though. :(
It may help that this requestor is a US citizen. This gives him certain rights that the Polish government did not have in the case that you cite.
The free SSL certs are maximum 256bit keys. As pointed out in Cloudflare's blog post yesterday, a 2009-era PC could crack a 512bit SSL cert key in 73 days. Todays machines would make mincemeat of such weak certs.
Datasets for practicing hadoop
Ask your teacher why you would be stupid enough to use a widely recognized template if you were trying to get away with actual plagiarism. My opinion is it is okay to use a template if you fully understand all of the functionality it brings to the table. It is no different than using a calculator if you've memorized simple arithmetic but just want to ensure accuracy, precision and speed in your math work.
Facebook copies Twitter yet again, launches hashtags
This precise statement is easily verified (just google it). But I thought I had a source for the "listening to music hampers your creative ability" statement, and I can't seem to find it.

You could reason that if you engage the brain with something, then it cannot do another thing at the same time. So if you engage the areas responsible for creative thought processes, these areas will not be available for other tasks.

Obviously this might not be the same for everyone, I'm just cautioning people and urging everyone to do some testing.

Another example is that many people (including myself) can't dictate, for the same reasons. In my case, whenever I use dictation, I later go back and re-read what I wrote and it is always disappointing. It seems the areas of my brain that process speech are also needed to form thoughts into sentences and I just can't do both well.
When I started getting emails from companies asking for the spam-links from my sites to be removed I assumed it was a good sign. If they're cleaning up their spam-links then presumably Google have found a way to make those spam-links not pay.

Hopefully fewer spam-links and robot-comments, no?
my brian works the other way around:
i cant be creative in silence. I need to listen to music but the music has to be without vocals. if there are vocals that i understand i to much focus on the vocals.

I talked about some other Coders about that. About 20 People.
The strange thing was that 7 need music that pump them up like rock or something like that. 7 need relaxing/chillout music( iam in that group) and 6 of them need silence.

So i think there is no general way of what you can listen or not to.
Can you elaborate a bit? I have not used either and would love to know what is different between the two and why you prefer one over the other.

Edit: I saw a few comments about original commenter being a MS employee. To be clear, I am a Google Employee (and ex-msft employee) :). But who our employers are is really besides the point. My question about pros and cons still remains.
My suggestions:

Billow Observatory - Billow Observatory

Nuojuva - Valot Kaukaa

Global Underground 24/7 - Danny Howells (Day Disc)

Willits + Sakamoto - Ancient Future

Nils Frahm - Felt

Bersarin Quartet - II

The World on Higher Downs - Land Patterns
From this perspective, "if you're not doing anything illegal, you have nothing to fear" isn't half daft; fear is not in the activities themselves, but, rather in the State's asymmetric access to recorded public history: they get to selectively choose what part of this history is presented during prosecution, while its Citizens are forbidden access and a chance for an equitable defence.

If there's a world where all these interactions are truly not subject to privacy protections... why not remove the illusion privacy entirely and have it a publicly accessible dragnet? Or, at least, provide full access to the dragnet machine to public defenders.
I guess the masterminds behind this whole fiasco wanted to impress their friends from the US, but they tried too hard.

A behaviour one would expect from adolescents, not leaders.
All of your comments have been duly noted. ;-)
I wonder if US laws would apply to foreign corporations entirely owned by US corporations? E.g., if Amazon set up an Irish corporation to own and manage a data center in Ireland, even though Amazon still exercised control, wouldn't that data center be outside the scope of US law?
> If this would have been my own company there would be tons of wiki pages.

Ah how naive :)

> The world outside is not known here a lot. I bet you’re reading what sort of latest technologies and tools are out on blogs, Reddit or Hacker News every day.

Not reading any tech news sites at all? That is odd, so many developers do.

> Not everybody is fond of latest versions here.

Must be a Windows culture thing. I don't know many Linux users who aren't using the latest version with all programs often or even automatically updated. Except some university computer labs using ancient Linux distros like Mandrake.
> True, but so what? that's how things are in a democracy.

Using fear and emotion of a recent disaster to push an otherwise controversial law really has nothing to do with democracy. Any type of government would use this technique because it's so easy.

And you should demand your government to be better than that. I know I do. Even if you don't believe they'll listen (fair enough), the moment you stop complaining and bitching about it, is the moment you're saying "well, okay then, if you persist, I give up".

Additionally, I expect human beings to be bound by more than just laws or constitutions, but also by ethics, a will to stand up for what's right and against what's wrong. That's why governments and corporations are not persons. But you are, and as soon as you say "I'm okay with this because it's legal/constitutional", without being able to argue why it is also right (in your opinion, we can still disagree about this, but that's another matter entirely), you fail that test.
I don't really, they need the verticals to maintain their current position.

They can't really "hunker down" on a few core products in the same way that Apple does.
Maybe tell everyone you're in Hong Kong when you're in fact somewhere else?
Interestingly, though much of the content is the same, those domains resolve to different IP addresses, not just the same server tweaking the page for different domains as I thought.

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:	www.spectaclecases.co.uk
Address: 83.170.88.134

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:	www.aglassescase.co.uk
Address: 83.170.70.106

Presumably they have two different webservers, perhaps connected to the same ordering system/db server. I guess they could be using a virtualisation service and found this easier to set up.
It "gives" quite frequently, and between the size of the system, and some policies therein, it can absorb a significant amount of "give". There are actually hundreds of protests each day. State media control is of course the largest reason you don't hear about them often, but far from the only factor.

When discussing China from a Western perspective, and not simply using "culture and history" as a catch-all/cop-out for differences, I would say two points need to be kept closely in mind: Scale and Paranoia.

No Western country operates at "China Scale". Entire societal functions operate less efficiently, or break down entirely, when you reach a certain size. You often hear bewildered statements, wondering "Why China does X instead of Y?", where X is an unsustainable notion for them. Sort of like how on HN we talk about "Facebook Scale" or "Twitter Scale" to emphasize sets of problems that most other companies don't have, and likely never will.

But size lends something else: Momentum. Things will continue forward tomorrow in a manner similar to today, if only because it would take a huge exertion of effort to change it. And in this case, 500 protests per day with a few dozen people each is not a huge exertion of effort relative to the population.

As for paranoia, I'm sure some of China's leaders agree with your "They can't keep it up forever" statement (at a national level--local is a different matter). They worry about this regularly and it colors much of what they do. Does a US Senator wake up in the morning and ask themselves "Is today the day that everyone decides democracy is a terrible idea? Is today the day it all crashes down?" Of course not. But many of China's leaders worry for their system.

Of course that paranoia is probably of a different flavor now than 20 years ago. China's economic success and continued upward trajectory has to help some leaders sleep easier at night.

As for the Illuminati: Please don't go there. It never helps.
About iOS icons
I've received a fair number of these, dating back to late last year and continuing to this day. I'm not sure when Panda came in, but I wouldn't say they've increased or decreased since they started.

The sites I run are all based around user generated content, and the links are all genuine instances of people sharing information and linking in the process. None of it is backlinks provided to benefit some third party, and we've never participated in link swapping or anything like that.

We think the link removal requests are dodgy.

Suspicion is that by and large the requests do not come from the companies actually associated with the linked site. And that when challenged those senders of the request have then squirmed, apologised and claimed the request was sent by accident.

Example: http://pastebin.com/P9tsWL0x

Basically: I believe that a fair number of these requests are from SEO companies attempting to get competitor sites a lower pagerank so that their properties fare better.

Only a minority of requests seem to come from the companies linked, and in part I wonder whether other SEOs are cargo-culting the phenomena by copying it without understanding it.

I forwarded an example to Matt Cutts a while ago thinking that this whole area feels spammy and dodgy, but I understand he's busy and must get a lot of mail.

I've not removed a single link as a result of these bizarre notices.
The pace at which the Orwellian behaviours are coming to life is quite astounding.
What were they even looking for? It was a copyright infringement claim - no reason for any of this.

Did they worry that Kimble had a Dr. Evil escape pod?
NSA chief drops hint about ISP Web, e-mail surveillance
Thank you for suggesting Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works. I'd never heard of this before. Loving it :)
I used the html5 boilerplate a few years ago for a course when I was an undergraduate without issues. This was for a course at a large, well known university. It didn't even occur to me to ask for permission, but html and css were just secondary to the class material, since it was about server side development.

What was the focus of the course? I don't think you make it clear if the website was front-end code only (html/css/js) or if it also tied in backend code and a database.

Pretty much, every professor I ever had told us we could use whatever libraries/code snippets we wanted on projects (as long as the snippet/library wasn't a drop in replacement for the purpose of the assignment of course), so long as we cited where we got them from and if asked, could explain exactly what they did.
Yep, just about, although if you look closely, the `any` in the original code is not a symbol, but is actually a variable or a method (could be either, we can't know from the sample).

Also, the return in that block would cause an exception, because it doesn't do what the original programmer thinks it does. I guess he never tried out what happens if destroy returns false (which would happen if destroy fails, e.g. because a validation failed).
comment history and a bit of googling would suggest he's an MS employee...
"The CIA is not going to disappear him now that he went public."

I won't be surprised if they already got him.

When they make him disappear the world would scream horror for a week and the week after that nobody will even remember him.
Probably fiction. The NSA might use its black budget to fund tough guys (paying the payroll and overhead), but they'd probably be trained and managed by the CIA and / or military, as part of some joint operation.

It's very common for public officials to get too much money, and not be able to spend it. So they find another agency which wants the money, and organise some kind of joint operation. It keeps their spending nice and robust (so the bean counters don't realise they don't need all that money), and the other side gets the resources they need. It's win-win (for everyone but the taxpayers).
As soon as you go that route though you have to admit that the purpose of the law is to punish people for the crime of being infamous and nothing else really matters.

Maybe that is a tradeoff we should make. I am not yet convinced. My concern is that as soon as you say "let's make this flexible" you ensure that we can find something to charge people with if we want.
For the lazy, here's the song mentioned:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QspuCt1FM9M

This was created using paulstretch [1], a program to transform normal audio using extreme stretches. I've tried it on a few songs I liked and it does really an excellent jobs of creating extremely fluid ambiances.

The triple parentheses on the first video is a nod to Sunn O))) [2], an American drone / noise / ambient metal band which features super long songs with droning saturated guitars (playing on vintage cranked up to 11 Sunn Model T amps) and usually no drums. One of my favorite songs from them and perhaps one of the best introduction to their music for the non-initiated is titled Alice [3], though perhaps it's not as representative of their music as, say, Ra at Dusk [4]. (Sunn O))) was heavily influenced by the pioneer drone metal band Earth, and their mindblowing album Earth²: special low frequency version [5]).

[1] http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunn_%28band%29

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8Djdi6z0m8

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buA_xDQQg74

[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls1OYn_xGzM
I'm pretty sure that in most countries if a police officer turns up with a silenced automatic weapon then the police action is no longer "laid-back".
Show HN: I made a PostgreSQL GUI for the Mac: PG Commander
Yep, the logic text book that I learnt it from. Just google "inductive logic prove negative" to check out a few articles on it.
The Flask docs have a small write-up on the things to look out for before jumping ship to Python 3. http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/python3/
Honestly if you use gtalk/hangouts you'd be crazy not to use Trillian. It's far more intuitive and user friendly.
Google will allow you to "disavow" links from spammy sites that are pointing to yours, so there's no real reason to ask people to remove them.

Another problem that seems to be on the rise is corporate shills. In the past these were easy enough to spot, they were people who would go to blogs/forums and spam them with blatant attempts at promotion.

Now they seem to be getting much better, they will come to a site like HN and read the comments that people are posting and will write their own comments in a similar style, not embed links and fly under the radar as legitimate users.

There are marketplaces for selling aged accounts for these purposes. This makes me very skeptical of any type of product recommendation from a website user.
Prism-break not for iOS, no spy-free alternatives in their ecosystem...
On the website of http://prism-break.org/ you can find alternatives for certain products, where the American governement has access to.

While for Windows, they suggest Linux alternatives, they should mention that no alternatives exists for iOS...

As many default applications can't be changed (unlike on Android, where alternatives like Cyanogenmod at least make you feel safer).

Also, recommendations for other mobile OSes could be shown, instead of just ignoring it...
I'm confused. I thought StartSSL only supported 256 bit certs, and their website does mentioned that, but the linked article mentions generating a 2048 bit key which gets signed by StartSSL.
I don't think so. I would have heard otherwise.
Fun fact: if you believe the title, he wrote some of the tracks when he was 14 years old.

Personally I don't believe it for a second.
The problem is this opens up the possibility of negative SEO. Just start making random links to your competitors' sites instead of your own and it will negatively affect their ranking as google have admitted recently[1]. This just puts us back to square one - at least it seems to be the case that no matter what Google do, spammers will find a way to break it.

[1] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...