skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Destruction of the Web"? This is really going to destroy the web? Though it is an issue, I hardly think that this is going to destroy anything. May inconvenience some things, cause confusion about when to link (and when to unlink) in the short term until an equilibrium is reached and the next SEO change comes along. But I think that this title itself is Link Bait (something else that might be "destroying the web" by this lose definition of destruction).
You are assuming the requests to take down links are coming from the owners of the sites the links are pointing to…
Remember the part of this whole equation where a government with access to all of this kind of information could use it in ways to convince or discourage its people to act however they wanted?
Well, yes there is. But as you should see below, the reason cant be stated here because it will get down voted and eventually disappear.

I suppose we could call it "crowd censorship".

Edit: OK, egg on face. Its now very visible. I'll eat the humble pie and shut the hell up.
Aha, looks like I misinterpreted your original comment. I knew one of us was being dense - turns out it was me.
I clicked this expecting a new release from Farbrausch : /
Sure things like these exist in academia, but you will rarely find a paper that only exists for the sake of promoting others, or otherwise extremely useless ones for that sake.

For an unintentionally humorous counterexample consider Tai's paper, which has around 100 quotations. ;-)
http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract
Indeed.

Though I was mostly surprised to see them at all, they were all been for a forum I thought I'd closed down years ago but had apparently been collecting spam for quite a while.

And they were spam, certainly. If I'd been monitoring the thing they'd have been deleted right away.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.
Before Google there was plenty of ways to find links. Other search engines (e.g. Lycos, Yahoo, Excite, Altavista), link directories (e.g. Yahoo, Netscape Directory), magazines (e.g. Wired, .Net), content-driven ISPs (e.g. AOL, CompuServe, eWorld).
It's almost an anagram: patriot -> traitoP, so replace 'p' with 'r'. So the difference is literally the letters PR.
Similar article and discussion from a few months ago:

A painful tale of SEO, spam and Google's role in all

http://scriptogr.am/slaven/post/a-painful-tale-of-seo-spam-a...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5296005
Messaging Using Clojure and ZeroMQ
Historically, football was closer to (a)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_football

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_football

"By some accounts, any means could be used to move the ball to a goal, as long as it did not lead to manslaughter or murder."
In their 2012 annual report, they say 75% (which isn't all that different than 90%, it just gets rid of the probably). The os segment is about 25% of their revenues.

It would be interesting to see how much of that revenue is from licenses that do not end up being used (My assumption would be very little of it. Which doesn't say anything good about there being a monoculture, but the unnecessary license problem is probably a narrow edge case...).
On a modern powerful laptop you can easily connect three 2540x1440 or bigger resolution displays.

Keyboard and Mouse, obviously. Best to have them at an usb hub so you only need to plug in one cable (or a docking station).

Fast is relative. There are laptops where you can put in 6 core Xeons, but they are rather expensive. A modern mobile i7 quadcore or equivalent AMD CPU is rather fast. Try it.

On a powerful laptop you can easily have 32 Gigabyte Ram. If you need more, then you need a highend workstation, yes.

Poor posture doesn't need to concern you more than on a desktop PC if you have your laptop connected to the same peripherals than you would have a desktop PC connected to.

Laptops additionally allow you to take them with you and work with bad posture.
Snowden leaks: NSA's Keith Alexander to brief Senate
Global surveillance with RFID

I heard rumors that many (if not all) citizens in the western world already have RFID chips in clothes, shoes, bags etc. so that everyone could be tracked right now.

I think that's not just a rumor. The question is not whether they use it but how far they have come yet.

RFID chips are almost invisible tiny low power circuits which send a unique digital code on request, and which work without battery via energy harvesting. RFID is the perfect tool for global surveillance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID
Machines that think for themselves
I strongly agree with this. Even if it's only ambient music (mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872706), I still use it only for situations involving mundane things like documentation. Otherwise I greatly prefer silence.

My SO though, is exactly the opposite. She just can't get any work done in silence, and needs relatively fast music with vocals. Although it does need to be music that she's already familiar with, otherwise she gets distracted by having to listen to the lyrics.
The problem is that "great content" (aka landing pages) is merely another form of spam.
You already opted for the Graph Search feature. The OP did it a bit late. My FB has been looking the same for a few months now.
As with all scientific papers, this has to be taken with a grain of salt.

The assumptions of this paper about the way speech is encoded, encrypted and fragmented are quite extensive. For example, the need for a vbr-codec for this method to work is a deal breaker. Most consumer grade voip is not compressed a lot (considering that 64kbit/s isn't a big deal nowadays) and definitely not using a vbr codec (e.g. G.711 is used quite often, a cbr codec).

So, at least for this method, encrypted VoIP data is usually secure.
Prism Revelation: EU Weakened Data Protection at US Request
"I wouldn't want any American to go through it".

Indeed, Americans should be shielded from any unpleasantness. Fine for everyone else though...
http://gitolite.com/the-list-and-irc/deploy.html
Facebook introduced Hashtags, Twitter got angry
It is a resolution, not legislation. In practice, almost any legislation with significant effect would have to occur at the European level.

It is still a big story, because it is a motion supported by all parties in the German parliament except the "Linke" (who don't like software patents, either). That would at the very least indicate that German interests seem to be pretty strongly aligned against software patents.
Secret life of the cat: What do our feline companions get up to?
Why is this even news?

> the company hints that hashtags “are just the first step” in a series of features that will bring conversations about public events, people, and topics on the social network to “the forefront of people’s Facebook experience.

So in other words, FB is making it clear that they are going to continue to try to play catch-up to Twitter and G+?
If you want to show your support in America, you can join your local protest on the 4th of July. You can find the details here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/rtforganizers
It would be absurd to expect Apple not to be influenced by the rest of the industry, but the scale of the similarities by Android (compare pre- and post-iPhone Android) and especially Samsung (the Galaxy S with TouchWiz was essentially a 3GS clone) is much more than just skin deep.

While iOS 7 may look more like WP and Android, anyone who uses it can tell it still feels and works like iOS. Apple harp on about how design is more than how it looks, and it especially applies in this case as it doesn't work anything like Android or WP. But use a Samsung Galaxy S, and you can immediately tell that their apps menu is a wholesale ripoff of the iPhone's Springboard with next to no effort put into differentiating or improving the original design.
What you're telling me sounds reasonable, but I thought about it some more, and these rules are so syntactically ambiguous, writing a Ruby parser should be just plain impossible!

If you can call 0-ary functions (functions which take zero arguments) without parentheses, how does Ruby know what a statement as simple as "a = b" does? It must expand internally to something like this (in Python notation):

a = b() if b.is_function else b

But then if the b() call itself returns a function, then is that function auto-called as well? So we'd have something like this as the Python translation:

a = b
while a.is_function:
a = a()

This can't be right.

And then you get syntactic ambiguities. For example, is the Python translation of the expression x = h-3 (in Ruby) equivalent to (in Python):

(A) x = h-3

(B) x = h(-3)

(C) x = h()-3

(D) x = h()()-3

(E) x = (h-3)()

(F) x = (h()-3)()

Maybe different whitespace, different compile-time definitions, or different run-time values will change the answer! And since the talk says you can monkey-patch Ruby's integer data type, you could even presumably make integers callable so things like "x = (h()-3())()" would be possible!

And then the overloading of the colon and question mark.

Is the expression "k:v" in Ruby a dictionary containing a single key, "k", which is mapped to the value "v"? Or is it a function call of a function called "k" with a single argument, ":v"?

And the ternary operator uses colons too! "a?b:c" could translate as a function called "a?b" being called with a single argument, ":c". Or a dictionary with a key "a?b" which maps to value "c". Or of course the ternary operator! And that's assuming none of the sub-expressions involved are 0-ary functions which are automagically called!

And then what if you want to disable the automagic calling and pass a function object around? Do you have to decorate it with an initial ampersand or something every time you use it? What if you have code like this that puts either a function object or an integer into a variable:

h = flag ? (&my_function) : 5

Then you want to copy h to the variable y. If you say "y = h" then it does the wrong thing when h is a function, because then h would be auto-called. But if you use the ampersand, you do the wrong thing when h is an integer, because then you would be taking &5 and (in C notation) this would change y from being of type "int" to type "int*". Good grief!

Which all reinforces my original point: Ruby syntax is aggravating! This language is impossible to deal with!

(Sorry for the double reply, but I feel like this comment is different enough from my other reply to merit its own space.)
Congrats & well done guys :) Flask was the last major block preventing me from seriously moving over to Python3 so I guess that means it's time to begin porting! (there goes my weekend...)
Reminds me of this extract from a Simpsons episode: http://www.flickr.com/photos/giddygirlie/2987270819/
pure ad hominem. the "fact" he's an former/current MS employee doesn't make his personal claims any more valid or invalid, and thus is irrelevant for the discussion.

on a side note, people on hn are outraged by NSA spying on us here, but perfectly happy to search, collect, process, organize and publicly disclose "data" about other people here.
Show HN: Invoice-o-matic – a free online invoice tool
I've seen a suggestion to disambiguate by referring to the American game as "handegg".
I had huge issues with swing fonts. Bad enough that I bought a couple jetbrains products that I wasn't using at all. Then when the Android Studio came out I installed it just to look at it and noticed it looked good. I fired up my other swing stuff and saw noticeable improvement. This is on Fedora 18 (64 bit if it matters, KDE is my desktop) with the Oracle JVM.

I don't know what changed - if it was something in Fedora, Java or what - but I'm pretty happy with how things look now, whereas before I couldn't stand it. I tried all the java switches and what not to no avail - but now it just works.

All that said, KDevelop has made such great strides I can see it becoming my primary environment for all my development.
Here is your pitch:
Babloo is a Mind bedingly superior startup that is a complete game changer. I founded Babloo after realizing that there is an untapped 10000000 billion dollar opportunity in Rat Traps.

I can't tell you the details about our platform because we are currently in stealth mode, but we are the only player in Rat Traps which we will completely disrupt in 2 months. At Babloo we believe that everyone deserves A World without dirty filthy rats. Our product will bring together Cloud, green energy and mobile to introduce synergies that will democratize, and revolutionize Rat Traps.

This idea is so potent yet so deceptively simple that it has the capacity to produce an unlimited amount of profit.

We haven't created our product yet, so we are looking a real Ruby Guru to join our team so they can build it for us. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for you to be a part of the next big thing. We have free food, unlimited vacation, generous equity compensation. Also each week we give you a new Iphone just for being amazing.

If know Ruby and 'want in', just tweet me and you'll be on our uber game-changing, revolutionary, disruptive team in no time, helping us change the world!
Frame is a technical term that has a precise meaning in this context.
You sir have just restored my faith in comment systems. Thank you for an awesome reminder from history.
Flask is about the most beautiful Python code you can write. Check out any other Python framework and they may have a decent api, but on the inside it is messy and confusing. Reading Flask source code on the other hand is a joy. There's no crazy stuff and few convoluted pieces + lots of comments so it is really easy to hack something if you must. Any Python coder who wants to improve their game definitely should study Flask because it is such a great piece of software engineering.
Yeah, because if the foreign Muslim, communist, probably Martian, Obama says it, it has to be evil, and against god and nature.

Obama could introduce a right to cash, oxygen and water bill and the nut job Republicans would oppose it. Frankly, I'm surprised that Rep. approval is 32%.
The reasons why Microsoft fail seem so petty. They are technologically probably the most advanced company, but ruin it by dubious politics.
What would your answer be?

At what point do you think a company should be required to forfeit all knowledge to the government?
His net worth prior to the raid was estimated at $200M.
With a Tor hidden service, the NSA cannot necessarily find the service provider. Of course, neither can I, so there is a whole different set of threats (and it could be the NSA providing the service in the first place) but it does help a little with this specific problem.
Is Android development tougher as compared to iOS development
I am iOS developer, when ever I try to implement it, it implemented easily without much efforts. While Android people always struggle to make that design. Is it like Android development is tougher than iOS development. Also why every app first comes on iOS platform?
Back when Windows 8 was announced I used to wonder why didn’t they choose the path of Apple, thus making one operating system for the desktop and a different one for mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). I think that they invested too much on the Surface tablet, hoping to produce a tablet that will have comparable capabilities with a desktop PC. In such a device the traditional Windows OS is not enough because we need gestures and a mobile OS is also not enough cause you need the file-system support and all of the facilities you’ve come to think as fundamental in a desktop OS. That’s where Win8 fits. If Surface had succeed I think Windows 8 would have justified its existence. But now it looks like a product without a context.

Why did they chose a path of an enhanced tablet? Probably because they didn’t want to compete with Apple in the $500 price tag. Or because they thought that there is market in the high end of tablets.

The thing is that their tablet strategy has failed and along goes a line of products designed for it, namely Metro, Win RT and Windows 8. Add their inability to penetrate the smartphone market and you begin to realize why Microsoft is considered irrelevant these days.

The only aspect where I read interesting news from MS is their development platform. Perhaps they should stop jerking around and return to their core, aka make software for the enterprise.
From a Gallup poll.

> Democrats are more likely to approve of the surveillance programs (49-40 percent), which Republicans (32-63 percent) and independents (34-56 percent) largely disapprove.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/305181-gall...
Agreed. (The Sims 1 Build Mode Tracks/Skyrim OST/Skyrim Atmospheres CD) + RainyMood. Done and Done.
AFAIK you don't pay a Windows tax on most laptops. All the adware, crapware, trial software and whatnot that are pre-installed pay for the Windows license. This is why the few Linux laptops that do exist are not really cheaper.
can you point out the part where I attempted to discredit his point because he's an MS employee, even discussed his point at all?

because I can't see it.
What we have is this:

"Inverted totalitarianism is all politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash."

What we need is this:

The Theory of Communicative Action has three interrelated concerns: (1) to develop a concept of rationality that is no longer tied to, and limited by, the subjectivistic and individualistic premises of modern philosophy and social theory; (2) to construct a two-level concept of society that integrates the lifeworld and systems paradigms; and, finally, (3) to sketch out, against this background, a critical theory of modernity which analyzes and accounts for its pathologies in a way that suggests a redirection rather than an abandonment of the project of enlightenment.
And since you asked for a specific figure, it seems as of 2011 they were making $444 million annually [1] just out of their patents on Android.

That's just out of the Android patents, a mere fistful among the more than 10.000 patents [2] they hold.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-microsoft-android-201...

[2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/11/microsoft_10000_pate...

edit: Also, are you seriously asking me to build my own laptop?
> half of them think this kind of shit is perfectly fine

Did you read the article all the way through? At the end it mentions that only 6% of all Americans think this is perfectly fine.
According to US law, US law applies to any company with a presence in the US or that does business with US companies or serves US customers. Yes, that means pretty much every major corporation in the entire world.

How effective the US gov can enforce its laws depends on how much leverage the US gov can apply against the specific company. For example, it can bar other US companies from interacting with them. It can potentially seize assets. Or it can arrest company officers if they happen to enter US jurisdiction. All these have occurred in the past.
What kind of assurances would you like from the NSA?

I imagine people would like assurances like these:

That the NSA is not allowed to lie to its oversight committee and congress

That the Court decisions which govern NSA activities are public

That the interpretations of laws which govern NSA activities are public

That the president and administration, and the NSA itself doesn't decide what the NSA can and can't do - that should be a matter of law, publicly debated, not a matter of policy, and overseen by lawmakers who are given the facts, even about details, and certainly about the overall picture.

That the broad scope and coverage of NSA activities are revealed without revealing operational details - this is essential to prevent abuse, and follows from the above requirements.

Snowdon and Greenwald claim the other slides contain operational details that would be damaging to release, but what has been revealed is bad enough - complete collection of all phone records (this is simply astounding), a huge program of surveillance involving US data (3 billion records on the US alone over 1 MONTH), and collection of data from all top US service providers on FISA requests (which could easily be automated, perhaps contributing to the huge total above). I think he is owed the benefit of the doubt on other claims and they should be investigated by those with the authority to do so (i.e. members of congress). I'm not sure releasing all those slides on a particular program would be the best move for Snowdon (opens him up to charges that he caused damage), or for the US public (knowledge of exact details of this surveillance are not as important as the broad scope of it).

There has been no proof that Snowdon lied so far, only some ambiguities between his claims and the curiously legalistic replies of US corporate executives, who may well know far less than him if (for example) data was collected at the boundaries of the google network. It is worth noting that he has been corroborated by other NSA whistleblowers who say the NSA has been breaking the law as the public understands it (even if they claim they are not on technicalities):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/12/snowden-...

I certainly would prefer to know what data American agencies have been collecting, which I suspect is far more than those detailed in this particular slide deck - as a foreigner and unperson with no rights as far as the NSA is concerned, my communications are being recorded with impunity, a situation I disagree with and which makes me question using US providers, visiting the US, or doing any business in the US. It's easy to forget that US surveillance policy now affects other nations almost as much as it affects their own, and that reactions to it will affect the standing of the US in the world, already at a low ebb.
In the vein of "90% of everything is shit", 90% of political supporters are sheep -- the important part to remember is that this applies to your own team as well as the opposition.
100 Questions Every Founder Must Ask Themselves
Programmable Magnets That Change Polarity And Strength On A Whim
> pure ad hominem. the "fact" he's an former/current MS employee doesn't make his personal claims any more valid or invalid, and thus is irrelevant for the discussion.

The possible existence of personal bias for/against a particular company/technology/person is useful. I don't see how implying that the OP is an employee of a competitor of Google is an ad hominem attack, unless you consider disclosing association wich can cause bias/preference in the topic at hand an attack. I see it merely as a framing device.

> people on hn are outraged by NSA spying on us here, but perfectly happy to search, collect, process, organize and publicly disclose "data" about other people here.

Do you really fail to see the difference between an individual using information that has been made voluntarily public too check somebody up and the systematic monitoring of all public and private communications of people around the world by a single entity?
Show HN: Helper - World's First Real Shot Video Comic Book for iPad