skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Burj is a joke. It also seems to be mostly empty, because it priced itself out of the real estate market after the receession. It is so 'prestigious', no one can afford to use it. There are miles of empty lots starting just a few hundred yards away. If the Burj toppled over to the east, the top of it would land on empty ground. It is a temple to the vanity of the rulers of Dubai and their property developer lackeys. It is also an embarrassment, because Sheikh Khalifa of Abu Dhabi (the one with all the oil) had to bail them out to get it completed after the property bust of 2008 - that's why it's called Burj Khalifa, not Burj Dubai, as originally planned. And not to cap it all, the observation deck is only half way up!
Obama, together with the Fed, pulled the US back from the brink of financial disaster in 2008. If the banks and AIG hadn't been bailed out, we'd be in a great depression now. Luckily we learned something since 1930 (although people like you didn't, apparently).

Obama pulled us out of Iraq and Afghanistan more or less on schedule. And he kept us from getting sucked into Libya and Syria, except for extremely minor aid like the 2011 no-fly zone, and arming the rebels in Syria.

Obama has used executive orders to promote policies like reducing allowed federal standards for carcinogens, promoting open data standards, and much else. http://blog.okfn.org/2013/05/10/government-data-open-and-mac...
One idea I keep returning to is a "laned" system for elevators/lifts. Two shafts for going up, and two for going down. One of the two in each direction is the "passing lane"-- and you fit dozens of elevator "cars" in the whole system. For very high altitudes it may even make sense to have a third, high-speed lane.

Obviously this would require a completely different mechanism as you can no longer have cables attaching each car to the roof. In fact I have no clue how it could work! This is what I keep pondering...
I went as well - i don't have much to add and my questions were certainly not as insightful as yours - but i will add that i was told that six balloons had launched, and the real balloons are larger than the demonstration as it's pushed down to fit into the demonstration hall. They didn't have a demonstration of the building antennas.

Multiple balloons in the air form a mesh network, allowing you to put your uplink only where it's convenient for you - which i guess is the key to making this a viable solution somewhere inbetween 3G towers and satellite internet.

It was a fun event, i hadn't been to the airforce museum before - lots of kids with helium balloons, poster giveaways and folded balloon animals. Someone was wearing the first Google Glass i've seen and lending it to people to try (that must get old pretty quickly).
Look at the issue a different way. What functionality needs to be removed from SQLite in order to add more comprehensive alter table? SQLite is defined by being "lite" and that involves a lot of saying "no". You can use other database solutions.

SQLite is also public domain. You can cause this code to be written and have complete freedom to redistribute/keep private as you see fit.

So what is actually being demanded here is that the SQLite core developers spend their time on the feature. SQLite used to have no table altering functionality at all. The ability to append a column (which had few technical risks or ambiguity) was paid for by AOL.
That is slightly different?

Well coached PR person for the purpose of making us all aware of how scared we should be, to spread public fear is not just slightly different from courageous whistleblower.
Fear, I believe, is a core component why American (and generally any) people want to shut their doors and not hear any of this scary stuff. More often than not, myself included.
Has anything ever been shown to not affect brain function.
The Guardian reported what the NSA documents claims PRISM does.

You keep implying that The Guardian is making unsubstantiated claims, but their article is full of "NSA claims" and quotation marks, and it would take someone intentionally trying to read something else into it to ascribe these claims to The Guardian.

Are you claiming The Guardian is lying or mistaken about what the NSA documents says?

Because if you are not, then your beef should not be with The Guardian articles, but with the NSA documents.

It's possible the NSA documents are technically incorrect, but if that is what you believe, then complain about the NSA rather than attack the reporting, as in that case attacking the reporting just seems like a weak attempt at making your arguments seem more credible by attaching the claims about "direct" access to the reporters rather than the NSA.
oof, this by passes the confirmation to allow access to your webcam...
GNU/Linux really isn't an option for laptops until the battery life improves. Yes, yes I know PowerTOP helps, but 3 hours under even the most minimal distro vs. 8 hours under Windows is unacceptable.

(Note: I know it's the hardware manufacturers fault for not releasing power related drivers, but as if the end user cares!)
I admit, my economics knowledge is limited. But if the repeated bubble/burst economy of US has taught us anything, having economics knowledge in the grand scale amounts for jack shit. Its really hard to predict, precisely whats going to happen with the economy when your country is as big as USA/China. You can only have good guestimate. Having said that, my problem is with this kind of sentences:

>China's bubble is about to burst.

What does "about to" means, when you have been reading about it for the last10 years? Is it tomorrow, next year, 10 years from now?

One things I understand about economy of developing country (and yes China is one despite being second largest economy) is that, there is always some scope for growth. Unlike matured economy like USA/European countries where almost every aspect of the country's economy is tied to each other. If something goes belly up, it usually affects other parts of the economy. This is not usually true for developing countries like China. They don't depend on a single source of market to survive, there is always some scope for growth and something else to pick you up from the slump.

Developed nations are like almost full glass of water, you have to be careful how fast you try to feel it up. Developing countries are like quarter/half-filled glass, if you try to fill it up too quick you might slosh a bit of water out of the glass, making it messy, but you can afford to fill it up quickly.
Can someone explain how Nat'l IDs are awful? Not having ID seems to be more bothersome (think about all the voting "scandals" because using some form of ID (such as driver's license) ends up disenfranchising people).
You might be able to do it with linear motors. The problem there would be the reliance on the safety brakes in the event of power outages (not really a problem with counterweight elevators).
Yes, but in either case, energy is lost in accelerating and decelerating mass. If your cable is a mile long, accelerating and decelerating it costs quite some energy, too. Long cable also have problems with swaying and elasticity.

Also, a main problem with high rise buildings is loss of floor space at lower heights (the water, electricity, waste, and person traffic of floors 2 to N all have to pass though floor 1)

Ropeless elevators can have a huge advantage there, as they allow one to hang multiple elevators in a single shaft that both service the full range of floors. Yes, that requires sophisticated software to prevent lift cars from having to pass through each other too often (some designs allow cabines to do that by making it possible for the cars to move horizontally, too), but it is an active research area.

"ropeless elevator" is not on Wikipedia yet; the best (but tangential and possibly slightly commercial) I could find Googling it is http://www.barkermohandas.com/images/Integrated%20Vertical%2..., which is about a system with wires that allows one to move cars horizontally by sliding them from one car frame to another using linear motors.
This was posted 5 months ago.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4985662
who were US citizens

It doesn't matter if they were us citizens or not. Take for example the Tuskegee syphilis experiment [1]. I don't know if you wrote that in order to make those experiments look even worse, but it shouldn't matter the nationality of those people. The fact that they were experimenting with them without their consent, it's just terrible... And they were doing it for 40 years! It looks like something taken from Josef Mengele's research book (and I can't think of a better case than this to appeal to Godwin's law[2]).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
نتيجة الدبلومات الفنية 2013
معرفة نتيجة الدبلومات الفنية 2013 برقم الجلوس جميع التخصصات
نتيجة الدبلوم الفنى التجارى نتيجة الدبلوم الفنى الصناعى نتيجة الدبلوم الفنى الزراعى ونتيجة دبلوم الفنادق
You clearly have no fucking idea what you're talking about. Most drivers in Ubuntu (and other distros) are pre-installed; but even the restricted drivers are completely installed with GUIs. You don't even need to "Google for them", since Linux has had for a long time this thing called "repositories", which come with thousands of software packages, including drivers.

A popup appears, you click it, a GUI installer lets you install them with a couple of clicks more.

Here's a nice picture for you: https://lh3.ggpht.com/_afk-Egip2qY/TAPrR7PwjKI/AAAAAAAADI8/3...
rms doesn't have to use 100% GPL software, he's fine with MIT, Apache, BSD, etc ;)
> Putting ob at the beginning of every function seems like overkill

That's "C-style namespaces" - really the only sane way to avoid an identifier collision, sorry.
Here's an article about contaminated rice: http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/cadmium-rice-...
A slightly more sophisticated implementation: https://code.google.com/p/google-diff-match-patch/
They do use PFS for TLS with SMTP traffic when the server on the other end supports it.
Why not support floating point number type?
Well, it says "shall have Power", not shall do X. But I'm certainly no constitutional scholar.
I'm an ex-JW, I only lasted 1 year. If I had the same mentality that I have now back when I was 13- I would launch a service in highlighting people's answers. It would have been a hit for highschool kids and college kids who need to study. I won't be surprised if there is some type of underground website of kids sharing answers and what not.
Check out the book Python for Kids: A Playful Introduction to Programming. It covers how to make a couple different 2D games.

http://www.amazon.com/Python-Kids-Playful-Introduction-Progr...
Wow, I'd never thought of that way, We'll spy on your people if you spy ours...
It doesn't need to be used as evidence. They can threaten to reveal things and blackmail you, leak to the press to discredit you or use it to know when and where to raid so that they can catch you read handed.

If they do go to court it gives them a list of witnesses a and the ability to blackmail them into cooperation.
Glenn Greenwald: "You have no idea what is coming"
Hong Kong Demonstrators Show Support for Snowden
While this story is fiction, the author was actually investigated by Fitzgerald for possibly uncovering CIA operatives.

See: http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2010/07/john-sifton-guanta...

Summarized: http://sidebarforplaintiffs.naomifein.net/?p=14164
What? Yes. Of course. Again, I don't get this. Where is the idea that Macs are locked down coming from? Who told you this is a problem?

Edit: By the way, in 1996, Apple released MkLinux. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux

This was even before they stopped using non-standard components in their computers.

How anyone could ever have thought Apple was blocking installation of alternative operating systems is beyond me.
Consider x a distance between a place where an event took place at time t1 and a brain. At time t2, if x is larger than c * (t2 - t1), it for sure does not affect the brain.
Nice idea, but please give it a name that makes the language easy to discuss and search for.

There's no way I'm going to work on Monday and discussing: 'did you see that new language that I have no idea how it's pronounced that was on HN?'
It's more that a lot of people are more inclined to trust a leaked NSA document that claims NSA does the type of things that people already believed NSA does, including when it implicates Google, than a Google PR denial of a very specific interpretation of the same.

In the absence of more evidence about what exactly PRISM does, what we have is guesswork, but guesswork where believing some interpretation of the NSA documents becomes easier the more revelations of extensive NSA surveillance via other channels that are coming out.
I remember reading about this filmmaker in a previous NYT article. It bothers me immeasurably that this sort of harassment (is there any other way to describe it?) happens to people simply because they are trying to shed light on things the government would rather keep in the shadows.
Why Django model is not an ORM?
I don't have an opinion on the issue, but the ACLU does: http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/5-problems-nation...
I learned two things since I was 15:

1. People are really bad judges of their own insight.

2. It's quite common that what seems to be brilliant insight at the age of 15 is perceived as obvious at best and really stupid at worst when the person is 35.

Also, get of my lawn.
I've had exactly the same thought.

I remember hearing that elevators took up a quarter of the floor space of the old World Trade Center - only because they used express and local elevators, it would have otherwise been half the floor space. So it would seem a "vertical train" system could be quite valuable for saving real estate.
Right. Who would ever want to be able to write libraries that can run on any platform?
Indeed, having so little economic productivity as to have a peasant class would give one someone to feel superior to, as an educated person. Their hovels are also wonderfully picturesque if one doesn't see that the building one thought derelict is actually inhabited by three families.
Greenwald's statement here about the Prism program is explaining what the NSA document claims. This is clear from context. If it is false, it is false in the same way as a book reviews that recaps events in a novel is false.

And unless I've missed some major revelation, it "appears to be false" on the basis of press releases from companies with an interest in not being caught with their pants down.

Forgive me for not being so willing to jump to conclusions about which claims to believe.
Again, I'm not sure I'd call a reiteration of the design criteria an attack or weakness of the system. Bitcoin was designed to operate by 51% proof-of-work consensus. It's a feature, not a flaw. It's kinda like saying democracy is broken because you could be unseated by a 51% vote.
Health: Correlation is not causation. Those people also have cash, access to the best care, preventative care, etc.

Environment: What services are you talking about? Remember that to squeeze people together in the first place you have to import and maintain costly networks for moving food, water and energy. So dealing with decentralization from an efficiency standpoint should take this tradeoff in to account. As for the emissions references, I suppose they don't take in to account the ridiculous amount of pollution that goes on overseas or in other areas for products shipped in to cities (or the overheads of shipping itself).

I agree that historically there's great social and intellectual wealth in cities, but I personally believe that's now being eclipsed by non-geographic movements, many of which are largely fostered through the internet.
Presumably doing Matasano-type appsec work for DoD if it were for internal DoD software would be fine (i.e. making sure the VA's medical records system is relatively secure against outside threats)?
I've never seen any other forum (and very few publications) where members are so up front about potential conflicts of interest or biases. I see it daily, and I like it.
Fing site is a piece of shit
It does take some tinkering to get things setup right, but on my Asus Zenbook UX32VD I do get ~5 hours of battery life for simple usage, which is the same as the advertised battery life with Windows. This is running Ubuntu 13.04 with the latest linux kernel (3.9.6 atm), laptop-mode, bbswitch to turn off the discrete graphics card, power saving mode on for the wifi card etc.

IMO its paramount to be running recent kernels, both for good battery life as well as compatibility with the latest hardware.
In short, being closer to nature breeds efficiency.

For some basic examples: with more privacy, less pollution and lower rise building, people have a viable option to open a window when they're hot instead of turning on the air conditioner. Eating food from your own garden. Being more conscious of which food is in season, thus consuming more of it and less of the other stuff, saving on transport and artificial production overheads. Realistic capacity for grid-independent energy generation, wastewater disposal, rainwater capture, etc. There are plenty more.

(Edit: Seeing as people are apparently voting this down, I am honestly curious what they disagree with?)
Ecuador minister arrives in UK for Assange talks
Sure. Except then you need to define c. Back to square one.
Why you're not hiring a software engineer for "equity"
Curbs artistic freedom, and nitpicks style instead of focusing on grammar issues/ ambiguity.
It's ironic that the description has a language style error:

"Nitpicker is a language style checker which compares your text ..."

s/which/that/
I agree with you on everything.

However, on the strict point of "metadata" (which would mean IP, time, and little more, but anyway, data), and only guessing, splitters would be useful, would they not? and at the same time make the "direct access" negation stand true, if I read correctly?

I know you are fighting a different battle (that Snowden does not mean this and he is wrong, on which I tend to agree more or less) but this idea would also be useful for the Gov't and not that much of a deal to implement.

Even more, come to think of it, this might be done at the Telcos level, might it not?

EDIT: Just realized this would only give one end of the communication, so not THAT useful, I guess. I see.

EDIT2: Well, with some analysis and some luck you might get the size of a mail, with care and timing and then with more statistics get an idea of who (IP) may have read it when (albeit just STATISTICALLY) but you may get lucky...
I'm not saying there isn't a need, but I'm interested in knowing of another need. Hasn't this been done in C already? C pretty much runs anywhere, after all. What exactly does this bring to the table?

Sorry that people thought I was being negative (as per all the downvotes - you people really aught to comment), I'm just curious as to why other languages don't fill this gap.
I honestly couldn't get through reading this in it's entirety as i was laughing too hard. I've saved the page so i could finish later.

Clever, utterly insane and timely.
I think the US greatly helped that with their constant reassurances that "only foreigners are being spied on in this manner". Worst line to use in such a globalised world!
Well, considering that Andrew is an author of South, maybe he just wanted to point out that it's something that should be part of django (simple "add a field" operations).
New app from Macroglossa team. Dherma Search - skin topics identify helper
They seem fairly self-aware of this. It is called 'nitpicker'
http://occupygezipics.tumblr.com/
Wow. looks fantastic. Breaks my heart this is not MIT/BSD or Apache2. Still a great addition to the community though. Thanks.
c is speed of light?
This reminds me of this video showing a similar change for George Bush: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvknGT8W5jA -- maybe the case is simply that being the president leaves you in a position where you have to consider so many different interests and so many people try to influence you that being steadfast becomes impossible?
I shudder to think what a modern day McCarthy or Hoover could do with all this information at his disposal.
c is commonly used to represent the speed of light[1]. The commenter was saying that an action sufficiently far away cannot affect you immediately, because the information of that action's occurrence cannot move faster than light. I believe this is generally regarded as true by physicists, although there are some ideas for circumventing this limitation.

I think they were making a joke.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light
I'm not sure what Andrew meant, but as I understand django doesn't have concept of ORM like, for example, SQLAlchemy.

What you can do in SqlAlchemy is, your business-objects could be not some inheritances from some "Model" class, but rather just pure python objects. So you'd implement your business-logic without any knowledge of database etc (ok, you'd use some abstract interface for querying those objects). Then, you describe your "models" as objects representing your database schema (and data structures inside it). It's not the same as your business-objects and can differ quite a bit. And at the end, you "map" one to another, so that ORM only comes in when you map your business-objects into your models.

I'm still not sure why django models are not ORM, maybe because there's no mapping (as I described) going on. Personally I'm fine with ORM termin for django models :)
Check out this plan for the (pre-9/11) World Trade Center:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Trade_Center_Buildin...

Roughly 1/4 of the area is taken up with elevators, stairwells, and so on. So here's a back of the envelope calculation:

Elevator to office ratio: 1 : 3.

Proportion of floor area that is usable: 3 / (1 + 3) = 3/4.

To join the mile-high club, you need a building that's about 4 times higher. I will make the very crude assumption that, for a building that is 4 times higher, you will need 4 times as many elevators.

Elevator to office ratio: 4 : 3

Proportion of floor area that is usable: 3 / (4 + 3) = 3/7

Usable floor area compared to floor area of the old World Trade Center, occupying the same site:

4 * (3 / 7) ÷ (3 / 4) = 16 / 7; or about 2.3

So it's doable, but it's ridiculously inefficient. Where you draw the line is an interesting question. 100 stories is already pushing the limits, but you can alleviate this problem by tapering the building, like the Burj Khalifa. This is remarkably similar to how the pyramid builders solved their problems.

But what the pyramid builders really needed was the arch. And what modern engineers really need is an efficient vertical transport system. The obvious thing to do is have more elevators per shaft. Maybe something like a vertical cable car would work. Or even ditch the cables and make each elevator independently mobile within a network of interconnected shafts, like a vertical train system.
>Sure, in Africa they get online with mobile phones, but that's only because it's not profitable _yet_ to run landlines.

I'm not sure it will be ever be profitable to run landlines.
The big issue being that there wont never be public and private monopolies again and that you dont run a line to a single costumer.