skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Project link? Cool idea - Hate wasting time on small things like this; but not comfortable putting my, or a clients, information in a public site. Would love to host this myself.
I believe in a previously shared blog post, the founder mentioned that he was planning a "large-scale controlled trial". However, I haven't seen any additional details about these plans.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5815108
The Debt Collection Racket in NY
We'll be sending out an email to driver developers to help them with the Protobuf changes in 1.6 shortly. Shoot me an email (mike [at] rethinkdb.com) and I'll make sure you get on the list.

We also have a Google Group for driver developers (https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/rethinkdb...) that you can always ask questions on.

Thanks for working to build a Scala driver, I'm excited to see it!
Take a look at these two writeups:

* A biased/big picture one -- http://rethinkdb.com/blog/mongodb-biased-comparison/

* An unbiased/technical one -- http://rethinkdb.com/docs/comparisons/mongodb/
If it were me, I'd try to compartmentalize the factory/day to day IT stuff, and the dev + colo systems. Having a basic IT shop to handle printers, workstations etc, and a specialist or freelancer to handle the dev + colo work, would be my suggestion. Have you looked at retainers? I was thinking about starting a retainer based IT consultancy (10 hours a month for 1250$ w/ 4 hour response time or something similar). I am curious to see what your thoughts are.
Has the quality of their billing system risen, too?
I have a bunch of domains, but I'm using DO for temporary apps, and would like the DNS records to be automatically created/destroyed along with the droplets.
"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."

The question is why is there only "Matt Cutts"?

Google could have teams of "Matt Cutts" that are accessible and approachable.

Noting that in the traditional legacy business world (that everyone complains about all the time as the "old" way and needing "disruption") there are usually people that you can complain to about your problem and even an escalation procedure as well as monitoring at the company to make sure the right thing is happening with all the feedback.
Twitter ordered to reveal details of racist users
The National Park Service isn't a division of the DOD.
So that's how they built the pyramids.
Class Schedule  NYC High School Incubator - Open to the community
There is one big difference:

In Government / from within, hackers generally don´t have the skills to be able to change the system - Government is run by politicians - the effect of a good hacker is about as small as in your typical old-world corporate run by finance guys…

Compare that to companies where hackers are the CEOs…
Sorry again about that, definitely confusing/misleading.

I emailed info@ycombinator.com with the request - it seems to be the only access to mod email.

If there is a way I can edit the title on my own, or someone else I can get in touch with to mod it, please let me know.
"Although" is not the right word here -- you're supporting my point. :)

The requirement to pay taxes in USD is the primary "inherent value" which makes that particular commodity circulate as money. The "inherent value" is to increase the odds that one may continue living outside of a cage.

When I call that value "inherent", I am obviously speaking very loosely and tongue-in-cheek. Remove the threat of force, and USD paper cash has no significant value -- it's too rough to use as toilet paper and doesn't even burn particularly well in the winter. It is durable enough to function as wallpaper, though with a rather busy and avant garde retro design.

Combine that dynamic with the Mandrake Mechanism described in "Creature", and you have a very powerful monopoly fiat money, consisting of cash and bank "deposits", useful for financing horrors like World War I, the Marxist overthrow of the Kerensky government, endless bailouts of banks and corporations throughout the '70s, '80s, '90s, and '00s, and a litany of other ridiculous, juvenile schemes.

It is the monetary inflation, produced by the central bank buying government debt (i.e. a promise to tax), which gives governments most of their "spending money". Taxation itself merely gives people a reason to accept the USD in the first place, and also serves as the principal means of social engineering.

When you look at it that way, taxation and inflation are seen as two mutually recursive functions, whose fixed point is the gun.
This is perhaps the worst example of people who learn their science and medicine from reading Reddit that I have yet seen in the Hacker News community. It illustrates the fallibility of human nature behind every new business scheme, and shows that a business doesn't have to be a big, multinational publicly traded corporation to engage in business with little regard for customer safety or public benefit.

AFTER EDIT: I have read the numerous stories submitted here about this YC-affiliated company before, and, yes, I am painfully aware of the company founder's appalling lack of background in nutrition and medicine.

http://blog.soylent.me/post/51007573199/the-biggest-pivot-in...
I just skimmed through their discussion board for a while, and it seems they are planning to employ a couple of industry experts (whatever that means) fulltime or for consultation with the money they made from their crowdfunding campaign.
Oh Mitch, you really know how to make a guy blush.
That's very key. Kind of ironically, in my case, the reason I'm not nearly as worried about NSA overreach is because we have people like Sen. Wyden and the EFF and ACLU to strenuously push back against government overstepping their boundaries.

Even where I disagree on a given particular issue I know that they are doing good work, and that enables me to trust the government more.
I was interested when it was one guy on a mission for himself. I've become less so now that its clear he wanted to go worldwide with this as soon as possible.

I do not wish the project ill will, but I won't be signing on at this time unless things (re: testing) get a lot more transparent.
Add Republic of Ireland to that list
Ask the NSA, they know.
Supreme Court on shaky scientific ground with gene patent decision
Hi Garraeth!

Thank so much for the shoutout about the docs. We are very focused on building up our developer community (with our IRC channel #digitalocean, forum, and tutorials) and growing as an educational resource. If you ever have any additional article requests, please feel free to send them to etel@digitalocean.com
Note that this is not actually real time. There is one http request made when page loads and it doesn't make any more requests afterwards (just cycles). It seems to just grab top X words from different languages then repeat them.
There is an uncaught syntax error coming out of jQuery when you try and click the payment button with text in the promo code field. I'm assuming this is because I didn't have a valid coupon when hitting `retrieveCoupon` but still, it should display an error message instead of just "not working".
Police departments also want SWAT teams because other jurisdictions have them and it's easy to get funding.
When I worked for a data center/ISP, there would be occasional government calls. The protocol was to get the persons name, then call them back through the official list of contact numbers (FBI, NSA, CIA, etc).
I really like this project because for me one of the most impressive things about emacs is the way that it can be extended and the self-documenting nature of those extensions. I'll be interested to see if the same principals will be useful in applications other than text editing.
Unpaid internships in jeopardy after court ruling
How many atrocities have been committed in attempts to make it "not hard"?
"You have this mistaken idea that google is a "steward" of your information."

They are -- you can question whether they are a good steward or not, but that is irrelevant as far as I can tell. The government didn't give them the option of keeping their users' information private.

"Its not a "search" of you to get information google keeps about you using government powers."

You assert that, but I don't see why. Clearly they were trying to find something in all of that data -- if trying to find something is not a search, what is?

"The framers did not contemplate that people would freely hand over private information to third parties who have no legal obligations to protect it."

It doesn't matter whether they have a legal obligation to protect it or not. They weren't given an option to protect it. If I write you a letter about a new political party platform, you have no legal obligation to keep that a secret. But do you think it's reasonable for the government to come in and demand all of the letters you've ever received, and then browse through them to see if someone might be starting a radical political movement?
Game change: iOS 7 welcoming game controllers is a big deal
I would be careful about making assumptions about people's motivation.

Lots of people use Google as their primary means of navigating the internet -- nothing to do with censorship. I would guess that a Google search for "facebook.com" is one of the biggest referrers to Facebook.
The problem is that you're average twenty-something can live off of all sorts of crap for an extended period of time before feeling sick. How many of you live off of fast food and Mountain Dew?
I suspect core.logic is the more practical library in many cases. I wrote a disproportionate amount on core.unify because I couldn't find any official docs that approached it from the perspective of someone (e.g. me) who didn't already know all about Prolog and unification in general.
This decision affirms a previous decision that synthetic modifications to DNA sequences are patented - regardless of whether they have introns. You see, the ruling suggests that the act of creating a new synthetic, modified DNA molecule (in this case without introns) is patent-able. (Not a comment on your opinion about patents, only the part about patentability relying on introns.)
I am the consumer; the bigger authority.
The Chrome/Webkit debugging tools are pretty fantastic:

https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/

I'd be interested in what you get out of Firebug that I don't get out of Chrome's debugger.
To add on to tips for dealing with tear gas, I would also suggest carrying half an onion or something else strong smelling with you in protest situations.

when the gas comes, remain calm. When you feel yourself panicking from the gas, breath through the onion. For some reason, the smell of the onion (in Turkey I've also seen people using lemons) seems to re-center you and mitigate some of the instant psychological effects of the gas (i.e. suddenly you're in a poison cloud).
Part of the problem, as your post itself demonstrates, is an excess of choice: once we've decided we need something better than plurality voting (PV, aka FPTP), we have to pick a system. It becomes an engineering decision, and a rather subtle one at that. I've long been partial to Approval Voting, but I have to admit it has a clear disadvantage in actual use relative to PV: because the total number of votes is no longer bounded by the total number of voters, it gets much harder to detect fraud.

The point is, first, the relative merits of the various alternatives to PV are debatable (and debated), and second, considerations apply beyond the mathematical properties of the systems.

This is why, though I detest PV, I have little hope that a consensus will emerge as to the best alternative -- at least not without a lot of experimentation.
I think the trick is (as it is with most vps providers), that most users, don't always use full memory and or full CPU usage, or even disk space. The full usage, if it ever happens usually happens in small bursts.

Most vps providers have a rule that you are not alowed to use 100% 24/7/365 or they can cancel your account (I don't know if this is true with DO). The trick is that if you have a lot of customers you can spread the cost on users who are not using full resources (which happens to be most users), at large scale you can make decent profit in this kind of setup, even if your revenue per account is low.

I didn't mention bandwidth because at DC level, BW is the least expensive component, but it is also true that most users will not use up 1TB per month.

Most of it is speculation from my part, and a bit from experience.
Hash lookup in Ruby, why is it so fast
Quick Redis Benchmark: AWS vs. Azure
I believe you are correct here.
Lawrence Lessig on Using Coders to Protect Our Privacy
Top X words among recent searches for that language, you mean? I assure you that "Blackhawks" is not a common English word and suggests to me the data is was generated relatively recently.
Twilio uses it to run their API. So, that must be very reliable.

"Flask-RESTful was initially developed as an internal project at Twilio, built to power their public and internal APIs"
http://flask-restful.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
My impression is that "hacker" is a word that used to have a fairly specific meaning that has become more general over time, to the point that the differentiation between "software engineer" and "hacker" is more a question of how you self-designate rather than what you do. That said, "Hacker" is a bit counter-cultural. "Engineer" implies that you think of what you do as an extension of engineering. "Developer" is not particularly specific.

Re: over-generalizing, I described what I think is a trend. You might argue that it is less pronounced than I seemed to indicate, but you can't legitimately say I'm over-generalizing (i.e. all trends are ipso facto "generalizations" of some sort)
This robot can answer your general knowledge questions
That was a great post, thanks. I'd like to add another point - one may need paranoia [the common, not medical, interpretation] to make all that power work without bugs.

You know the quote about a good programmer needing laziness, impatience, and hubris? I disagree, for many systems it should be laziness, impatience, and _paranoia_. Paranoia puts in asserts and assumes any untrusted input is just that, and puts in documentation for the future 'you' on the project to consult. Because as you say, nobody has your back or will review your trickiest code (on the average funded project with one smart guy doing most of the work), and frankly, hackers _are_ out to get your code.

So when we don't have an explicit check against something, the behavior is undefined. And when there is no check against power , we know where the road leads.
A productive use of this trollpost is to list failures of giant software initiatives by private companies. You could fill up a thread w/just SAP.

Levi-Strauss, SAP, and $100M:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/projectfailures/levi-strauss-sap-r...

"Levi’s is bucking the industry-wide trend by going ahead with ERP now. 'It’s expensive, high risk and requires a lot of cultural change, and unless you have a really compelling reason to do them you don’t [during a downturn],' says Paula Rosenblum, an AMR Research analyst."

Waste Management, SAP, and $100M:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/promises-promises-a-look-at-wa...
The service looks awesome, will definitely be trying it out.

Also I love how the comments on this post have provided a plethora of new places to find music. Thanks everyone.
Not every engineering solution survives politics.
Maybe if we start protesting en masse against the NSA (or whomever), we will also be tear gassed.

Then you'll be glad you read this article on Hacker News!
I really thought this article was going to be about google glass.
Web Application Streaming
If you're interested, "Programming Language Syntax and Semantics" by D. A. Watt, and "Syntax of Programming Languages: Theory and Practice" by R. C. Backhouse is probably useful in answering some of those questions.

In reality, notation is in the eye of the beholder. Some people like brackets and braces to split up the flow, where as some prefer whitespace as delimiters. There are papers out there on this (which I can't find right now).
Well, here's a source for that (they use it in Guantanamo):

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/04/29/3370916/more-navy-medi...
It absolutely should mean this. Maybe 23andme can be something more than a toy.
Camjacking is still working on Chrome
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that you don't actually know where this guy learned his science and medicine. Let people experiment on themselves. IMO there are enough humans that if a few get slightly ill from this, it is worth it for the chance that it does work (which seems significant given the experimentation he did on himself, the presence of similar, competing products, etc.).
I don't consider Sony trustworthy either.

As far as the NSA's published guide you linked, of course it is in the national interest for them to do things like that, and given the nature of a public document it would be foolish for them to put false or misleading information in it. That would be both bad, and comically obvious. I was thinking more along the lines of them promoting or mandating the use of encryption/technology that has weaknesses known only to them.
The site isn't making any asynchronous requests, so there really is no "real time" aspect to this. If you look at the bottom of the page, it says "Showing the latest hot searches in All Regions".

So, these are just the top X searches from some time period, presumably after some processing and filtering (NSFW results eliminated, capitalization and spelling corrected, maybe some categories omitted, etc).
Failed: Surveillance Tech Predictions
That was common.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuMont_Television_Network#DuMo...

"By the early 1970s, their vast library of 35mm and 16mm kinescopes eventually wound up in the hands of ABC, who reportedly disposed of all of them in New York's East River to make room for more recent-vintage videotapes in a warehouse."
I've been using DigitalOcean to host a GitLab instance for a while now (20GB Droplet) and it's been working great.

I ran into two small issues so far.

First of all, for some reason the traffic from my home connection is routed through New York (I'm in Europe using a Droplet in Amsterdam), resulting in a ~150ms RTT (I usually get 30-40ms to Amsterdam). Since this only happens with my home connection and it's fine in the office, my ISP might be the one to blame for this. Anyway, I've opened a ticket, so maybe they can fix it.

The other weird thing is how they hande kernels/kernel versions. You can't simply update your kernel through apt (or anything like that) - you have to select the kernel version from a gigantic drop-down (containing multiple kernel versions for every distribution you can run) in their UI. Plus, adding new kernels seems to be a manual process for them, since it takes a while until updated kernels become available.

I'm sure they're working on a better solution for that though. All in all, they offer great service for an even better price, so I'm happy with my choice.
It's probably also worth mentioning dokku, which is a simplified private PaaS built on top of Docker. It adds Heroku buildpacks (Ruby, NodeJS and Java right now) into the mix, and a git push-to-deploy model.

Because dokku has a concise and readable codebase, browsing the source is a good way to see one practical application of Docker, too.

I've set it up as a sandbox environment for developers at my company, and for our purposes it's a much better fit than some of the more heavyweight private PaaS products. I'm really enjoying working with it!
Color me impressed, 3x throughput for the price(60,000vs20,000) for azure might be enough for me to create an account. Can anyone comment on what accounts for the differential? It doesn't seem like the hardware would do it,but I could be wrong.
The Soylent guy is an engineer who approached it like an engineering problem. It is supposed to contain everything your body needs on a regular basis.

Ensure is a food replacement that has a long history of helping people with medical concerns. My great-grandmother lived mostly on this stuff while going through chemo.

So far as I know, Ensure has never been advertised as the magic bullet to replace every food ever.
What I'm referring to is not only synthesis (artificially generating), but design and engineering. This is substantively different than natural products, in that they are truly invented.
Also a good strategy when your bank / insurance agency, etc. calls
"The real question then comes to who in the command structure decided to use such group for serving a warrant"

"such group" needs practice similar to how firemen use controlled fires to practice their skills. As such it makes total sense that you would use this as an opportunity to hone the groups skills for a time when the target is much more important.

I've seen cases where the NYPD sends officers overseas to (sorry can't find a link) help with matters that have nothing to do with NYC at all. I assume this has to do with some kind of practice for when they need the same at home.
The recent Inc. article [1] about GitHub isn't really deep but the end has some insights:

a shift is taking place: "Now we are finding that it's not just about the code; it's about, 'Hey, I want to work on this with you.' That's really eye-opening to us and gets everyone here superexcited. Working with someone else is just an awesome part of being alive. Creating art, creating tools, creating documents, doing homework, anything--it's not limited to programming. I don't see why musicians wouldn't want to work this way, for example."

Take that, and now consider how much a forward-thinking city could do with its data as GitHub adds features like this. I don't think it's about being just an IDE/app hosting service ... it's (eventually) about collaboration/control/revisioning beyond purely software projects.

[1] http://www.inc.com/magazine/201303/will-bourne/2-reasons-to-...
> I am waiting for the first politician to come foward with a "I have no idea of this stuff, can anyone of my constituents explain to me how and why to vote on that" message.

I suspect all too many of their constituents would be very happy to explain how they should vote on all sorts of matters. Getting peoples' opinions is the easy bit, working out which ones are worth listening to is the challenge.

Maybe we should just go with the most prevalent opinion on any issue. But, besides the practical issues, we can all probably think of at least one issue where we think the majority of people have got it wrong. We'd like our reasons to be considered, not just our numbers.
Yep. More detail (with samples) here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colors_of_noise
No, they really didn't. Can't we all stop pretenting that the iPhone wasn't expected? The idea was ripe, Apple just did it first. The second person to make a wheel wasn't copying off the person who did it first.

At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, all they did--which is still impressive, just not un-expected--is add a phone to the actually groundbreaking iPod Touch. The first time I saw an iPod Touch was when I was working at RadioShack selling mostly un-customizable flip phones, and my first thought was 'if they just added a cell antena to this, it would be the phone everyone is waiting for.'

We all wanted a phone with a big screen, lots of customization, and simple interaction (touch). The second person to make that phone didn't copy off of the person who did it first.
What you are describing is overselling, and I am under the impression that overselling is less possible with KVM, what DigitalOcean uses.