skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's one reason. However, I have been in the position of being desperate to sell a home (many people were at the time and in some places still are, I'm sure), and "test drive" or any equivalent simply does not make sense in some situations.

There's a lot less overhead to driving a car for ten minutes than there is to living in a new place for a day or two... to get the right impression of a car, you drive it in a residential area, you drive it on the highway, and there, you have at least an overview. To do the same for a house? Move in, settle in, meet the neighbors, live in it, then move out, because someone else wants a test drive, too.

And, of course, neither applies well at all to interviewing a person.

The metaphors just don't work here, and they're not helpful. Maybe there are things that work while car/house/pet/food shopping that can be applied to interviewing, but that correlation does not necessarily indicate any similarity between those situations, and comparison isn't useful unless the activities themselves actually are meaningfully comparable.
I didn't downvote you, but I'd say you're being downvoted because you say "I'm going to play by the rules of the game, as I'm stuck in the system", and are basically resigning yourself to the status quo.

The ethos of Hacker News is all about changing the status quo, and America as a country was about asserting independence and changing the status quo, in the name of certain kinds of rights that wound up embodied in the Constitution.

Arguing that protests are useless, that we don't live in a free society, that courage is unnecessary: it's frankly quite sad. People died in previous wars to give us the right to protest, the freedom in our society, and it is necessary that people should continue to fight to keep things that way, with courage.

Your reasoning sounds a little paranoid, like the "government has already won" and that there's nothing we can do about it. That's not going to be a popular attitude.
On IE 10, SVG is just as smooth as PNG. I can't tell the difference.
I just assumed that it was a HN regular who didn't want to take the reputation hit for their 'unpopular' opinion.

But yeah, it's a red flag.

(I also couldn't tell if they were talking about me or Assange.)
Welcome to the New Home Office
The March on Washington didn't happen overnight. Any movement starts with lots of smaller protests.
I agree. It is always (somewhat) interesting to see who the elites place in the oval office every four years via near absolute control of the news media and a corporate owned congress, full of people who can switch talking points on demand.
It's weird that people are surprised by this considering it's the stated mission of GCHQ to monitor all communications.

I genuinely don't care that GCHQ monitors and stores all this stuff. I'd prefer that they didn't; I think it's mostly a waste of money.

But when I look at spying on citizens by factions of the UK government there are far worse examples of abuses. GCHQ just has a bunch of data stored on disc that they grep for data.

Local councils abusing their powers under RIPA actually affect people. people suffer as a result of the abuses of RIPA.

I would much rather we spent time and money fixing other UK government computing projects than sorting out GCHQ.
It's a DJI Phantom. They are a consumer-ready quadrotor - almost anyone can fly one.

http://www.dji-innovations.com/product/phantom/
I love this quote from his lawyer:

"It's interesting to note people as high up the American tree as Sarah Palin have called for him to be hunted down by American special forces and assassinated."

You gotta be worried when laughing-stock resigned governors of small states are out to get you.

Also, what she actually said was just: "Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?"
IIRC those balloons stay in place, thanks to being able to change altitudes. When the wind start to blow in an undesirable direction or is too strong, the balloon can just get to the lower or higher place, where the wind is just right. That's exactly what normal balloons do and it seems to work.

Because of that I think that giving the balloons to the countries is perfectly possible - just hand them the remote for the ones above their heads.
You're being too charitable: http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2010/12/22/president_obamas...
>So: whose ideas of "right" and "wrong" are we using?

That's the whole problem, isn't it? What the law is now can't be the standard for what the law should be or it can never change. But if we can't use legality to determine morality and morality in general is considered subjective then what are we supposed to do, flip a coin?

Obviously the answer is that we collectively have to define "wrong" based on logic, evidence and history. (The alternatives of basing it on "might makes right" or "loudest voice wins" may be popular but, at the risk of creating a cycle, that isn't right.)

So we need to have a debate. We need to see the evidence. How many terrorists have been foiled with this surveillance? How many could have been caught some other way and what would that have required? What are the risks to the public of allowing the government to accumulate this information? How does the one weigh against the other?

The problem is that we can't have the debate so long as they insist on keeping the evidence a secret. Which is why the secrecy itself is wrong -- it allows for unaccountable government power, which based on logic, evidence and history can lead to Very Bad Things That Must Never Happen Again.
Oh, and I totally was talking about Assange's world view. Not yours (which I don't know about :)).
55 commits: my first month at Twitter
I think its unfair to stereotype a community made up of people of all walks of life based on a sliver of a sliver of its members. What's different about gaming than reading books or watching movies or playing soccer that makes gamers toxic and juvenile?
Thanks for the report. I will inspect this.
Not sure if you should do it? A new game to help you decide
Work-in-Progress: Explore LogLikelihood-Scored Bigrams Online
Show HN: de-clutter browsing tabs in Chrome
I have had one melanoma and have more than a thousand moles.

Shallow isnt a problem?
If you want to spark mass protest, here's how you do it: cut all government programs. Once people realize how much government is artificially inflating their livelihood and how little corporations have really left for them, they will get angry and start rioting. It no longer will fit the left/right paradigm. If a Walmart employee can no longer feed their family because they have no access to government programs and Walmart pays their employees an awful wage, do you think they are just gonna take that? No. They'll demand actual change.
A pretty apt username for the situation.
What's strange is that scrolling SVG can be quite smooth in browsers, at least in Chrome. The map library Leaflet, or instance, makes a point of panning the map with -webkit-transform: translate3d() and it animates very smoothly. I wonder why scrolling the whole window like this is worse?
Hi! I've actually made a bunch of other posts discrediting Assange, too, but they're under other slamming-fist-against-the-keyboard usernames. :)
It's entirely possible (and in fact would be a very fun hobby project for me some day) to build a hybrid autonomous drone (via GPS, gyro, accelerometer, compass, range finders, etc) that takes a queue of commands or even little high level command scripts and executes them. Video would be stored locally as well as broadcast back in real-time, in case of jamming attempt.

Edit: Apparently, according to other commenters, there are already open-source autonomous quad-copters you can hack on, which is great news to me! (And you can buy the hardware preassembled).
There are icons in the SVG sprite set which consist of numerous clip paths, which could be the root cause of the performance issue. If you load the sprite in Chrome (http://adrianosmond.com/images/sprite.svg) and inspect the element immediately above the facebook logo you will see an example of this. That aforementioned icon could possibly have been created using a single line path and gradient fill (I've not edited SVG files for a while).
Thanks for sharing details. Did you use REDIS to store user playlists, search history and other user data?
This makes me curious.

Do you think three-letter agencies are now actively trying to shape public opinion of themselves and their doings by astroturfing popular tech blogs? I recall seeing a document not too long about how the FBI could basically "destroy" a public forum by trolling, insulting, making fun of certain ideas certain principles certain people. In the recent months I've been seeing this on Reddit, -- views that before couldn't be found before about acceptance of surveillance at the cost of liberty, about the goods of laissez-faire capitalistic systems -- you didn't see this much on Reddit before. I'm not sure what to make of it, if it's just new users with different views or if there is some concerted effort by political, or possibly governmental entities to shape things in their favor.

That probably sounds unreasonably conspiratorial, but nevertheless consider how effective such a taking would be. Once the public at large is on their side, it's a done deal.

Anyway, the great thing about HN is we wouldn't fall prey to such troll tactics. It's good that unsubstantiated attacks, ad hominems, etc. are usually downvoted.
NSA targeted China's Tsinghua University in hacking attacks, says Snowden
Thanks ! I keep your idea for the full screen icon. :)
> The only way public demonstrations are going to have an effect is for them to be massive and concentrated. That does not mean widespread protests are a bad idea per se, but that if none of the protests actually have mass, they are going to be ignored by both officials and your fellow citizens as a temporary annoyance for which they will hold little sympathy.

This statement sounds a little defeatist and gives an excuse for not participating in demonstrations (since the required massive scale is likely not reached, one might be better of not going).

Actually demonstrations, even if they do not effect immediate change, will still have a number of positive outcomes. First, they will likely be reported on in the news (at least that would be the case in Germany), raising awareness. Second, demonstrators will meet like minded individuals with whom they can network and form strategies. Third, demonstrators will realize that they are not isolated and feel more empowered as a result. Last, it will at least remind the public and politicians that some people do care about this.

Is any of this enough to affect change? Likely not. But it is a first step and if we can't even go demonstrate against this then we might as well stop caring. The possibility that demonstrations will not have the immediate effect we desire should not stop us.
He has some good points which I appreciate, but I do think he's trying to associate his own ordeal with something that is of a completely different magnitude. He's stuck at that embassy because he does not want to be interrogated by the Swedish police on suspicions of having had sex with a woman without a condom against her will. He is of course not guilty until proven otherwise, but the reason that he is at the embassy does at least not make him a hero.

Again, I agree with most of his points, but I find the association in this passage distasteful:

> As a result of that decision, I have been able to

> work in relative safety from a US espionage investigation.

>

> But today, Edward Snowden’s ordeal is just beginning.

Update: I should have also written that Assange says that he will not go to Sweden because the authorities here will extradite him to the US.
Author also uses defn instead of defun, he's probably a Clojure...Ista? Clojurer?
Drones like this one aren't reliant on phone networks at all. They tend to use the 2.4GHz band for the pilot control link, and sometimes also for telemetry back to the pilot.
The video links are analogue transmitters on 900MHz, 1.2, 2.4 or 5.8GHz depending on personal preference and local laws.

However, you can operate these things in fully autonomous mode. You can start a few km away, fire it off, and in 10 minutes it will fly back with a memory card full of whatever. You can even program the landing spot to be different to the take-off spot & program feints. I'd personally land it somewhere secluded where I can safely watch for activity.
If there's an hint of trouble, just leave it and power up the next one...
I Know The NSA Wiretapped Barack Obama In 2004 Because I Saw The Order
Our democracy is why there is a free press to expose these things, and why we can talk about them freely. While we don't elect the Director of National Intelligence, our democracy allows us the right of peaceful protest to change it.

None of that would be possible in a country like China.
Similar events happened in Texas, but Texas' legislature isn't back in session until 2015.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/04/autos/tesla-texas/index.html

and in North Carolina... "Any time there's an innovative way to bring a product to market it's going to initially get push back from the fellows that have been doing business the same way since 1902..."

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/05/24/4062463/tesla-se...
Could they also use he motors to spin the wheels up to speed right before landing? I always see a puff of smoke when the wheels first touch the runway. I imagine that wears down the tires pretty quickly?
He's stuck at that embassy because he does not want to be interrogated by the Swedish police on suspicions of having had sex with a woman without a condom against her will.

You know very well that this is not an accurate or complete statement of the problem.
Texas college students hijack drone aircraft
Pretty cool .
looks like iTunes link is not being updated when I change songs.
Imagine the trouble nation-states will have imprisoning 2030's Snowdens
The post to which you are replying isn't arguing that shallow radiation is not a problem.
Thanks for sharing the thought 'cause at first the demo looked meaningless to me. Now it makes sense.
We've got a lab full of them, and if you've got $600 dollars, you can have one tomorrow.

http://www.udrones.com/product_p/acrtf2.htm

The amateur UAV community is awesome for hackers. See:

ArduPilot: http://ardupilot.com

Paparazzi: http://paparazzi.enac.fr

OpenPilot: http://www.openpilot.org/

Plus PX4, MultiWii, UAVDevBoard and all the others I've forgotten
Poll: Have you changed your online habits since the NSA surveillance scandal?
Planning to
"comes from a belief that American government are morally superior"

Not necessarily. It may as well come from a belief that "first world" governments are better supervised by people, journalists and politicians, that legislative, judiciary and executive branches of government are actually independent, or that said country is far away and probably not interested as much in someone as his own government.

How unfounded and idealistic those beliefs are is a matter of discussion, but there are many possible reasons for preferring "first world" country as an entity controlling the flow of data. Compared to the alternatives, where corruption and nepotism are much more rampant, where the opposition is routinely persecuted by the government, where journalists are killed by special agents, where you can land in a prison for long years because you jokingly said something to your friend...
Parallel Computations in R with "Pretty Quick R"
"No Deal for Higuain": Oh Dear
Backbone Unclassified - Declarative child elements for Backbone Views
Updating scrollTop is a pretty slow way to scroll on some browsers. Have you tried animating `transform`? That gets you hardware acceleration on webkit at least
Considering the vast majority of our time behind the computer is spent with software that uses 2D graphics, it is kind of ridiculous that we still don't properly exploit our graphics hardware for vector graphics.

Luckily the hardware vendors are already working on fixing this. Here's an example of a particularly problematic scene rendered using NVIDIA's GPU-Accelerated Path Rendering, compared to Skia, Cairo, QT and Direct2D:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=zI...

NVidia: ~220 fps

Skia: 6 fps

Cairo: 29 fps

QT: 0.3 fps

Direct2D: 48 fps

(On a sidenote, I guess this is why IE10 is often faster at rendering SVGs than the other browsers: it uses Direct2D, whereas Firefox and Chrome use Skia).

Using graphics hardware should be more energy-efficient, so maybe we will finally see a change because of mobile devices with HD screens.
Technically I think I am correct with that statement (or at least close). In regards to any other theories as of why the Swedish police is trying to extradite him to Sweden I have a hard time believing them. I know quite a lot of people believe them and of course there could be some truth in them (or not), but from what I know and believe they are not believable. I could be wrong. Debating this is to me like debating religion, you believe what you believe.

Regardless, I still say that he's trying to associate himself with people that have done far, far more good than he has done.
This is all a bit reminiscent of Frederick Forsyth's "Fourth Protocol". A few words about the plot: the book is set in the early years of Margaret Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister, in the time of the Reagan Rearmament. Elements in the Politburo devise a secret plan to explode an atomic bomb near RAF Bentwaters, blame this on a malfunction of American nuclear ordnance and cause a leftist government to be elected and Britain to fall into the USSR's sphere of influence. This plan was to be kept secret even from the KGB.

Both MI5 and KGB get wind of this, and they work in concert to stop it while they remain enemies, because either side feels that if it succeeded they would open Pandora's box and have no institutional knowledge to deal with this new world.

It is my sincere hope that the world's intelligence agencies have the institutional knowledge to deal with the widespread knowledge on spying on its own citizens.
> But this revelation goes the other way.

That's not what this is saying. China hacks US and other foreign corporations for specific and exclusive economic gains. They steal intellectual property and pass that IP onto Chinese competing companies.

The US hacking into China is state run spycraft. Maybe it's not good, but it's not "the other way", because that implies the US government is taking intellectual property from Chinese companies and passing it on to US companies. There is NO evidence that such a thing is happening at a scale anywhere approaching Chinese activities.
Indeed they exist. See Arducopter [1] for a very popular open source implementation. Their solution already supports pretty much everything you said.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/arducopter/
Assange says that he won't go to Sweden because they will extradite him to the US, which I believe is true.

But even if it isn't true, your comment needs to acknowledge his side of the story to be taken seriously.
How to know if your 2011 macbook pro can run with 16GB of ram
Signed, thanks for posting!
For the moment, only country top are stored to REDIS for 24 hours. Search history and other user data are loaded once at startup and given by MySQL. The call to external APIs (to search, to retrieve playlist and so on) are made directy through your browser. (thanks to JSONP) :)
Exactly the same for me. I'm on an old Firefox (10.0.6) so maybe it's poor PNG performance rather than good SVG performance.
That's what I thought at first as well (the animation shows going in one direction and then rising and moving in the opposite, after all), though it seemed really optimistic that you could have enough control from different layers of wind to stay around one spot. Layers of wind move in different directions, but not often diametrically opposed (at least not near to each other vertically), and overall winds in the stratosphere move largely west to east. It seems more likely that you could do some steering with the different layers, but not anything approaching staying still. More like change your latitude very slowly. IANAMeteorologist, though.

Check out the "how loon works" video, it seems to back that up (the source article quotes it as well): http://www.google.com/loon/how/ at around 2:55

from the transcript:

> "Now we have some ability to steer in general, however, in the stratosphere, most of the time the winds actually flow from west to east. Because the winds generally circulate this way, we typically will have bands of our balloons that will be around the world at different latitudes. So if the balloons are circling around the bottom half of the world, eventually the balloon that's over South Africa will pass over South America."
If everyone that disagreed decided to call and write our congressmen, they would definitely be listening. Too bad most of the country is too lazy to do this...
I'll be futzing with a side project today--doing some coding.

In a couple of weeks I'll be working Friday-Sunday for the site shutdown for IT.

For a short bit the people outside of IT wanted to schedule it for July 4th holiday to take advantage of the 4 day weekend. For previous shutdowns, major holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving have also been suggested. It's never ended up happening, but it's really horrible when you can't make holiday plans for a couple of weeks while the timeline is still in flux, so if anyone here makes that decision for your team, remember your IT folks are people too. Even if you give alternate vacation days it's not really the same.
It alarms me to think that people don't realize how little Obama had to do with this, and how much it has to do with Dick Cheney.

Obama is at fault for continuing it, but Cheney would have had way more hooks into a Romney presidency to continue to push it further and further beyond what it is currently.

Also, I don't think anything short of pictures of Obama eating children would have changed the outcome of that race.
A cruise-missile is a UAV that crashes deliberately. From a security standpoint, these things are a nightmare.

Mostly radio-transparent, cheaper than a handgun, pretty much untraceable if you build them yourself.
oh, that one slipped through the vetting process. It is removed now
I apologize and agree that I should have written that he believes that, regardless of that I do not think it is true. If it helps I do not think he's crazy and I do see why he could think that he could be extradited.
Easily Backup And Transfer Your Website To Another Host Or Server
#2 - footage shows 3 cars run the red light in rapid succession, which was edited out of the version on Youtube.

1min 9s on: http://embed.newsinc.com/Single/iframe.html?WID=2&VID=248956...
Yes, this is feasible and Flash did this (optionally).

Flash supported this as a trade-off via the cacheAsBitmap attribute on elements. Basically you'd set that to true if you knew the sprite was just going to be translated around in x/y and not scaled or rotated. It wasn't on as the default for new sprites because this mode would actually bite you in the ass if the sprite was going to scale/rotate nearly each frame because the cost of recreating the "cached" version would then be added to the render time without actually ever being useful.

So it is a good idea in practical usage to make this an optional feature, though I think Flash could have been smarter about it (like soft-default to caching and only override that once it sees a scale or rotate taking place).
> Moreover, the flight itself totally dominates the radiation cost of an airline trip.

Except the flight has a real benefit and scanning has almost no benefit. So calculate the cost-benefit between the cost of radiation for flying vs. the scanners.
> consider how effective such a taking would be.

Effective at what? Getting computer programmers to going back on topic? That would be awesome. Why would the NSA care who's getting karma points on Hacker News?