skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the piece is bad because it has not structure. Ie it's a train of thought that is difficult to follow. It's as if you wrote down shorthand notes during the presentation and then shuffled them around and dumped them in a document instead of actually writing a piece.

Instead i'd write it as: Thesis / Points that support it / Conclusion. Like, you know - the way writing is taught in school.
Please show me a critical mass of concerned people who would switch to this new P2P. I'm talking with a bitter taste, because I myself developed a securier mail alternative which didn't fly.
http://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/ - will bring hours of enjoyment then
NSA program here to stay, U.S. says
96% suppression of the dengue mosquito in Brazilian trial
Something not being private doesn't mean its has to be public. It just means it has to be disclosed beyond your sphere of personal privacy.

Actually, the 4th doesn't protect sealed letters you hand to just anyone, only USPS carriers. And not what's written on the outside (metadata). Also, in this hypothetical you didn't write the "paper" in question. A CDR isn't your data. Its verizon's data about you.

So take away the special status of the USPS, and add in the fact that its verizon's tracking data for you, and its more like the government hitting up your local steamboat company for a list of all the shipments you sent through them. And I think that would not have required a warrant in 1810.
I'd definitely read a sci-fi book based on those premises. Preferably, lead character would be developer. Not hacker; I'm not interested much in that point of view.
Amusing (and sad) that the US is on the wrong side of this wall this time around.
Is probably unrelated, but why do people use non-monospaced fonts in code examples on their webpage? (in this case Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif)

It seems like this anti-pattern gained a lot of popularity lately.
May be I am being a typical engineer, but looks like sales and marketing, as usual, work in a 'vacuum' and as a result the impact to the overall outcome can be somewhat negative. while the course might be successfull (read it made the money it set out to), its systemic effect is incentives are placed in the wrong place.

I feel more and more we are seeing the need for technical sales and technical marketing people, basically people who understand both sides.

None the less its an interesting problem. Would love to attempt to disupt it by providing real value.
Coincidentally, today their update had a short URL in it. So after three months, I know what the service is. :-)

http://poncho.is/register/

Yes, they have imaginative updates. Signed up on 25 April, and so far, no two have sounded alike.

Also noticed once every couple weeks they seem to have a sort of "localized product placement" type update along the lines of "Sunny and 75 degrees, perfect for an outdoor table at Susie's Diner." At least I assume that's what it is.
"1Password - Password management is now built into Safari & iCloud."

And what if I use Chrome? Not a reason.
I like it a lot when someone involved with the project answers to "bug reports" or complaints like this. Gives me the feeling that they care. I see this a lot on hacker news and it always puts a smile on my face.
this is why everyone needs to wake up and stop buying GMO foods.
Well, it clearly isn't. It's an improvement, but "<=<" is still quite different from ".". I can see it from here.

I'm sure there's an entirely justifiable reason why the two syntaxes have to be different, but that doesn't stop it being a bit of a pain when it comes to trying to learn the language - I've developed a bunch of side effect-free code, and I want to stick a bit of logging in the middle of one bit to help me see exactly what's going on, and suddenly I seem to need to rewrite half my code to use a very similar, but subtly different syntax.
Christ on a bike, there's a lot of weird stuff in there:

cookie:sexual_orientation=female; - watches how often visitors make irrational decision changes and identifies those people who are schizophrenic as: FEMALE.

cookie:favourite_biscuit=garibaldi; - can detect missed key-strokes caused by crumbs jamming the user keyboard. Compares results over a long period of time to determine typical biscuit type.

cookie:favourite_animal_noise=BAAAAA; - monitors any accidentally open audio channels, to determine if the user snorts or chuckles while browsing and then compares the wavelength of the noise with a table of animal sounds.
So, actually one I've discovered, and tried with great success, is Mumble, http://mumble.sourceforge.net/
I'm in NYC area and love this service. Signed up in April, have been wanting to recommend it to friends, but until this morning's update with a URL in it, I couldn't remember what service it was and the SMS "HELP" didn't tell me.

If Poncho is reading this, update your HELP to mention poncho.is!
Russia! Land of the free, home of the brave..?
NSA leak journalist says more revelations on their way
The Scorpion and The Frog
There are similarities between 1984 and Atlas Shrugged, but some big differences too. I like them both but Ayn Rand's work seems more fantastical. Orwell's seems closer to reality in some fundamental way.

Her heros are more unreal, like demigods. Having those perfect heros makes the parody less poignant. I do think hers is a valuable parody as well. The cowardly, opportunistic looters are probably more realistic than Orwell's unbeatable bad guys. The heads-I-win-tails-you-lose dynamic she describes is very good. She messes up (IMO) is in dividing the people into innate types. Also in her description of where this will all eventually lead. When the hero's escape to build their own society the other heros it looks like an extension of the heros' (shared) personality. The looter society left behind (now without heros to support it) devolves and regresses, cannibalizing then living in the ruins of the once great civilization. That doesn't feel all that convincing in the book^.

Even though Rand describes the process and Orwell describes the result, his (mostly inferred) process seems more realistic. His dystopian society resembled actual history more than either of her societies, and feels more like a stable state. I think it all comes back to more realistic portrayal of humans. Orwell seemed to undertand how humans work. The characters are products of their circumstances within their society. It feels realistic. More similar to the people you know. They can be moulded. They can be broken. The John Galts in Atlas Shrugged are real. In Orwell's world they exist as stories, like they do in ours.

^There are lots of example in the world and all through history of similar looking scenes. EG, medieval societies in the ruines of Roman cities washing in rivers that once fed aqueducts. These have inspired variations of The Great Fall stories for thousands of years(Planet of The Apes!).
Third parties are going to have a field day designing accessories to this that will do away with the clutter. A six pronged lightning plug that splits into a meta-rack monolithic black box. Done.

The whining about this product is expected but so misguided.
>because clearly you can't depend on Any Country to keep their own government in check, no matter how good Their Laws Are.

FTFY. The fact is, laws/constitutions/whatever are utterly meaningless. Without enforcement, that is. And it's not up to us to enforce it, it's up to government officials. They can and do simply ignore laws whenever they wish. Sometimes a check/balance kicks in and makes them pay some kind of penalty, sometimes nothing happens.
It's a pretty dark form of humour, I guess. I found Winston to be quite comical character himself, which I think makes the book easier to endure in the darker parts. The extremity of some of the scenes/ministry policies and other characters made them both comical and scary. The former because they seem ridiculous, the latter because you feel it is not actually outside the realm of possibility (when you think on modern history).
Does anyone notice there's a step missing between "GM wheat found" and "we need to be concerned about it", namely "GM wheat is a cause for concern because <X>"?
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http://www.dlu3a.com/Game-396.html
Show HN: BTC.sx - A bitcoin trading platform I've been working on for 8 months
Comments, encouragement and constructive criticisms are welcome.
All this NSA discovery has made a lot of damage.

As an example, the NRA doesn't sound so crazy any more. And that is bad.
Mailing lists are not the same as labels. Labels and Mailing lists are two different features (albeit very similar).

Mailing list only looks at the List-Id: email header. Facebook is sending that in its emails, and that's why it gets its own "Mailing list" automatic entry.

Not that beautiful, I agree.
The customer service is as offensive as the web site. My wife (a regular customer) is always complaining about it. But it's cheap and well stocked.
At this point, I really wish someone would do that. IMO the US has had its time and it's time they started getting cut out more. Having said that, I'm not sure if anyone would trust services coming out of Russia.
Yeah, what happened there? I had Eudora in the mid-90s running PGP integrated really nicely. I was talking with a friend how had never used PGP before and I realised somehow I just stopped using it and don't remember when. Maybe it was just the romantic ideal back then that we were important enough to have our mail read, or maybe it was that we actually personally knew the ISP admins and really knew they could read our mail.
Why Do Startups Fail? [Infographic]
This was submitted way too early (some of the pages are still "lorem ipsum" placeholders), but it's still cool. Looks like the author is basically using V8 to script Redis, similar to how Lua can be used [1] to script it already.

[1]: http://redis.io/commands#scripting
They were allowed to release something like this in the wild? This is like playing god. If you kill all the mosquitos, nature cannot recover. They may be pests for us, but they are still a critical part of the biosphere. The true impact of this activity will not be felt for some time. It harks back to Mao's devastation of the birds.
Part of me thought this was a practical joke. So many sites back in the day just wouldn't load...
He would be insane to accept something like that. What would stop them from just saying "oh, we had our fingers crossed" once he was back in the US?
My Post-PRISM checklist
I can believe that, even more after they started requesting mobile phone numbers to login into vk.com. Since I refuse to give my number I cannot access or remove my profile.
I agree that it's presumptuous to give yourself big ol' gold star, as a "top developer".

I don't consider myself one, but if I had to define it, I would say that they were within the top 10-20% percent of whatever arbitrary metrics are most important to you. If you want a "top Python developer", I would expect a nice Github (or whatever) profile with tons of relevant work. If you want a "top enterprise C++ developer", I would expect they have a long list of successful projects, and be able to walk you through the intricacies of each.

To me, it's highly contextual.
Why would I choose to use JS in a DB? Why, oh why?
This language has more quirks then a 2012 US Republican Presidential candidate.
"But I suspect the NSA doesn't know how many guns you own. That alone is somehow seen as a violation of your rights"

Have you purchased a firearm in the US from a licensed dealer recently? There's paper/digital record of most firearm purchase in most cases, with a few exceptions. There's a cursory background check ran too.

(In the case of most US citizens the government doesn't care about small arms. Most are used for sporting, hunting or deterrence.)
I love VirtualBox and I think it beats VMWare and others in UX department anytime. That said, for running Mac (Hackintosh) I would STRONGLY recommend VMWare. On VirtualBox I have tried 3 (!) different images and they were all slow, while the one I am running on VMWare works properly. And I mean properly.

I never had these kind of problems with Linux and Windows guests on VirtualBox though, so I'm not sure what the problem is - but it is real.
Thug Kitchen EAT LIKE YOU GIVE A FUCK
Well I'll inform the author that his project got here. And I'll ask him about its purpose.
If I'm a Russian citizen outside the reach of the US government, then why do I care if the ones spying on me are the NSA or Facebook and Google themselves? The latest revelations change nothing for me.

Fact is, Russians don't use Facebook and Gmail because they have more popular local alternatives. This decision is ultimately more about trade protectionism than anything else, much like the US witch-hunt on ZTE and Huawei.
Nitpick, but it's not in Cyrillic, the same way your comment (and mine) is not in Latin or Roman. It's in Russian.
What would be the point? The vast majority of the data is public, and Twitter will give you firehose access (essentially a stream of all tweets) if you ask nicely.
A bit of history in relation to the proposed anti-ballistic defense system in Europe.

In 2002, the US unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty with Russia. The treaty had been active since the 70s and sought to decrease the amount of those very systems installed. In the same year, no longer bound by the treaty, the US started to look into expansion of its defense arsenal in Europe, which eventually led them to Poland.

It is no surprise then that Russia saw it as an unfriendly gesture at best. Any independent country would, when all of a sudden someone dumps the anti-ballistic treaty and then decides to build a defensive shield along your borders.

The EU has traditionally been used as a playground to advance the US agenda. The proposed defense system is no exception. Gladly, it did not come to fruition. Otherwise, we'd seen a very different Europe now.

Given our attachment to history, Russia is still often seen as this "cold war" aggressor out to get you. But if the past decade is of any lesson, I think we have a new candidate on this role.
I wrote one you might find helpful. It explains monads via a helpful real world analogy.

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/write_some_fucking_co...
There was lots of government surveillance and invasion of privacy of (say) gay men back in the "good old days". Maybe it's just because the white anglo christians are affected by government surveillance and intrusion that's new?

My point isn't "this old thing was bad", my point was "this thing has been happening to lots of people before, now it's happening to everyone".
DConf 2013: Metaprogramming in the Real World by Don Clugston
Here's a classic case of Caution Before Proliferation. If the thing that you make can grow and multiply, whether it's engineered in DNA or C, a responsible creator has an obligation to ensure the end result can be rendered safe and inactive with reasonable care.

When there are so many middle-men in the distribution, from truckers to the actual farmer involved, this reasonable care becomes harder and harder. Every link is a potential failure point in the chain of security.
I am surprised to see the value of the bitcoin fall. Although transactions are public, it still beats credit and debit cards, paypal, etc.

Cash is the only thing that wins from bitcoin in this respect, but is useless on the net.

What am I not seeing?
Sign the pardon petition: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snow... Not likely to make much difference, but it's something, and if Snowden is pardoned it will make a huge difference in terms of threat of transparency. Don't stop there, though.
A migrating bird could have eaten a few seeds and in the course of traveling long distances, pooped it out. This happens all the time with migrating birds.
The Wii U didn't innovate on this: Sony has been allowing developers to self publish on the PS3 and PS Vita for some time now[1]. This is just a continuation of that policy into the next generation. Much of the news coming out of E3 for Sony has been "we're not changing our policies, unlike our competitor".

[1]: http://us.playstation.com/develop/
Since I don't know enough about Russia, I can't dismiss this report as sensationalist, but something tells me it is.

Perhaps someone with more knowledge can tell us if Russian law requires intent to prove "high treason"? And how influential is this "Lower House deputy" anyway?
It's titled "New Page 1". It's just so perfect.
Don't judge iOS 7 by screenshots
Sadly Lin is now blaming Hacker News for hacking her site with the intention of taking it offline - which is just retarded as:

a) we're legitimate curious visitors (albeit not maybe not customers - but who's to say that some of us wouldn't be converted from window shoppers to buyers - that's kind of the point of websites after all) and

b) her webserver set up to only allow for 500 concurrent connections. Which is just pathetic - particularly given the amount of crap she serves (and thus the countless number of additional server connections each visitor makes to download said content).

I used to think that her site was a mark of a genius; where she deliberately made her site to look amateurish to push the site viral and thus give her huge exposure that most other rentals could only dream of. But then I read her rage tweets[1] and realised that she's just another idiot with an internet connection. Needless to say I'm very disappointed - I liked Lin and her site better when I thought it was designed ironically.

[1] https://twitter.com/LINGsCARS
> If you have zero physical security, that means that anyone can come up and just knock you down and take your things, your woman, whatever... Not my idea of "freedom".

These are orthogonal issues. There are strong reasons to believe that the modern stability that we enjoy is maintained by networks of mutual self-interest, soft social norms and overall cultural sophistication. The idea that we are being protected by the state is just a fairy-tale and there is no scientific evidence of this whatsoever.

Saying that something is not "black and white" sounds clever, but can be used as a way to disguise unscientific, mushy ideas.
Amazon Pre-Orders Show Sony PS4 Ahead of Microsoft Xbox One Already
That is how it works, and how it has worked since WW2, at least in the English-speaking countries and NATO.
As a biologist, the furor over GM plants drives me crazy. Crazy! Why?

We've been genetically modifying plants for hundreds of years. Mendel himself fucked around with plant genetics - crossing plants is nothing more than fiddling with genetics. People were messing with genetics hundreds - thousands - of years before Mendel and they just didn't realize it.

Hell, people have been messing with the genetics of animals for thousands of years, selectively breeding dogs, horses, goats, cows.

Just because we are able to modify genetics precisely doesn't mean it is any different. If anything, we should have fewer problems (e.g. how many german shepherds have hip dysplasia because of inbreeding?)

Edit: Don't have time to respond to all the replies, but there are some good arguments there. I acknowledge that this post was over the top - but simply because all the press one sees about GM = evil. Things are never black and white.
Because some databases have a significant usage among web developers and web developers have a significant expertise in javascript.
> if you want to make the best product possible, wouldn't you make a single piece of hardware and software made specifically for it and take it to perfection?

No, that is exactly what I wouldn't do. Apple are a rare exception where this model actually seems to work. When Steve Jobs was asked to give examples of other companies that have succeeded with the same closed model over open competitors, he couldn't come up with a single example.

> Apple doesn't want to be responsible or guarantee that it'll work properly.

They don't have to. They just have to not put up legal and technical barriers to people using it on other systems.
Because it destroys the natural heterogeny of the wild gene pool, depriving us of hardier crops and enslaving us to a corporation whose sole purpose for being is profit-taking, with a short term frame of reference and the minimum of environmental or social concern?
"highly sophisticated propaganda/subversion and bureaucratic repression" is (1) a lot more general than what Orwell gave us and (b) could equally describe "standard totalitarian systems"
Depends on how you do it. You can download an existing VMWare image (don't use VirtualBox for this - the guest will be slow, not sure why) and run it in minutes. Just be sure NOT to allow it any access to network, unless you are willing to be a part of some botnet. It's probably not legal even if you have the original CD.

Or you can install from your own ISO image... havent't tried it myself. But it's still against Apple EULA which states their software can only be used on their own HW.

While we are at it, how does Apple pull something like this off? Isn't there some anti-monopoly law that should prohibit using such EULAs?
The "Riding Rockets" book by shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane goes into this a bit. It's very hard on the families. Rocket launches aren't that safe. And the best time to retire is right after you get back, because that's the furthest time from your next flight. The longer you wait, the more you get caught up in the next one and just want to make it through that one.
Yes, I can't wait to apply for virtual visas to visit foreign internet sites, which I guess we'll need after a full scale balkanization of the internet.

On a more serious note, I hope the internet stays together, but that the pendulum will start swinging back from "cloud" to decentralized, federated or even P2P protocols and services. Wasn't it originally meant that way? (with NNTP, email, ...).
What to Make of a Global Warming Plateau
Panel about The Open Manufacturing Revolution (Video) with Dale Dougherty
Impressive! It would be very interesting to see how the weight of his motors compares to equally powerful motors made using traditional techniques.
iOS 7 vs. Android – A Quick Feature Comparison After the WWDC Keynote
Me neighter. I really don't see how keeping information to himself could have helped in any way.
It's important for society to be aware of what is happening and it's up to society itself to decide on how much of their freedom they want to give away in order to be 'safe'.
And what on earth does visiting one's mother have to do with a national security issue?
Perhaps one solution is to store your data in a jurisdiction that is not the US or Australia.

If some nation can step up and provide some guarantee that your data is not subject to law enforcement without rigorousness due process, they might be able to attract substantial investment.
A YouTube Creators' Bill of Rights
If only these people had already read the book...
Why Yahoo Could Become the Next Major TV Network
Granted, it's not exactly the same.

> I seem to need to rewrite half my code to use a very similar, but subtly different syntax.

Half is a massive over exaggeration if you've written it in the right way, i.e. the in the composable manner, preferring (.) and (<=<) over function application and (>>=). However, this I don't know how widely appreciated this style is. It's certainly not taught first in functional programming, unfortunately.
Looks great, I just need to wait for the Linux version before I give it a go :)
Apple's TV Strategy: Speak Softly And Carry A Big Content Stick
That's a tautology, since a tax is by definition imposed by a government. Bullets bought with private money kill just as well, though, and can and have been used to create new governments.