skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good points, thanks for this!
That's funny...the part about language and how it can be used to limit thought was the most memorable part of 1984 to me today (well, besides the rats at the end)...but I hadn't interpreted to be written from the perspective of someone in a post-Big Brother world.
I don't know, is it really that much of an issue? I mean, you paid a reduced price for using the service early--albeit it would have been buggier, you're contributing useful feedback, etc., but you obviously were deriving a benefit from the service so it was a fair trade. Fast forward, the product is more mature and "better", is it that unreasonable to ask you to pay more after 6 months of getting to use the better product at the better early adopter rate? And that's the deal killer for you?

[note: I have nothing to do whatsoever with Intercom, just my 2 cents]
I don't know the numbers, so this is just a guess, but I imagine the total cost of ownership gives a single drone a huge advantage and a fleet of them even a bigger one. For each helicopter you have two expensive pilots, maintenance costs, and crazy insurance, plus a lot of high octane fuel.
You do realize that battery swapping stations would also have to charge the batteries from the same grid?

Sure, but not at the household 120V/240V "leaf nodes," where much of the power is wasted before it ever reaches my car.

Ideally, EV batteries could be swapped at any gas station. Just as gas stations don't need their own oil wells, the batteries they lease could be charged and maintained at centralized plants with minimum electrical losses and optimized load scheduling, and trucked to the service stations. At some point, probably very soon, the energy-management advantages will exceed the energy used by the trucks.

This scheme will ultimately require mandatory standardization of battery form factors, much like fuel standards are already legislated. Fortunately, with modern power conversion technology, only the physical sizes of the batteries will need to be specified. Manufacturers will be able to compete with each other on chemistry, pricing, weight, and other factors.

In engineering terms, migrating to EVs any other way is insanely goddamned stupid, and that's why I just bought a new fossil-fueled car. I keep my cars a long time, though, so I'm optimistic that by the time I'm ready for my next one, it'll be a Tesla. That will happen only if I can spend less time refueling it than I do now, and not more. And that, in turn, can happen only with swappable batteries.
At first glance I love this syntax. I'll have to pull out some of my hypothetical syntax notes to see if any holes I came up with for my language attempts apply here, but I very much like it.

Using high-level function constructs for main language flow control features seems to be in vogue. Rust does it too. I liked it when I learned Scheme and have been wanting it to be more main stream since then. That's probably why I like Ruby, since Ruby's blocks are close for many uses.

I'll play with this more when I get home tonight.
Show HN: Bitbanter, an anonymous bitcoin-reddit-McSweeneys mashup.
Generally, it's installed using apt, but from a source maintained by nginx. It's just a quick modification of sources.list.

http://nginx.org/en/linux_packages.html#stable
Chrome DevTools Tips & Tricks
How about "building" and "buiIding"? or "nodata" and "ｎodata"? You probably don't want people running around claiming to be admins because their name looks the same.

Similarly, do you really want to do tech support when someone forgets that their username is "nodata" instead of "Nodata", since their phone auto-capitalized things when they signed up? It happens. And how do you know they're "Nodata" and not "nOdata" or "nOdAtA"?
I've had issue with faces in shadow not being detected, which seems to make sense.
Where's a professional vulnerability researcher I can read making the same case? My feed is full of researchers saying how great this is, and how big an accomplishment it was that Katie Moussouris and her team managed to pull it off after Microsoft publicly declared itself opposed to bug bounties.

The work required to build reliable exploits against hardened Windows can take months. Why shouldn't researchers be compensated for that work? If you don't want to accept payment for it, that's fine; don't. But why is it bad for other people to do so?
> If you just make the buses free, people may take more roundabout trips to get to where they need to go, just to be able to make use of the free bus

What?!
OP and Chief Bitbanterer here. For more background on the site, click on 'pi' in the header (I hope it's a mildly entertaining read). Some other details below:

1) Built with Meteor (using Coinbase API for bitcoin transfers). Loved it, especially as a noobish web developer, but not without its challenges. Some examples: no server-side URL routing/static page model in the official packages, had some trouble with HTTP calls/callbacks, and I sincerely hope no one ever sees the horrible mess that is my home-spun single-application Twitter OAuth implementation. Most of these issues will probably resolve themselves as Meteor/I grow.

2) The lofty goal behind Bitbanter: reduce barriers between (potentially anonymous) satirists and consumers while forgoing the traditional data collection/ad model. Besides the data a user voluntarily submits, zero data collection goes on (even bitcoin amounts come straight from the blockchain). I'm not 100% opposed to Big Data, but to me there's a strong philosophical argument for unbundling content from advertising and trying something "pure."

3) The less lofty goal behind Bitbanter: I love making people laugh, and wanted a place to showcase and scale my satire. But blogs are boring, so I made this instead.

4) Yes, I'm aware that at scale there are some huge problems with the way articles are promoted (e.g. spam, someone with big pockets could push an article to the top and my whole anti-bundling-ads argument goes to shit). Still thinking through those issues, but figured they wouldn't matter as long as the site was tiny.

5) I know bitcoin elicits mixed feelings, but man, it's cool. Without bitcoin, it would have been much, much more difficult (I think impossible, but I have a small mind) to build a platform where people can post things anonymously and get value from others seamlessly (another example: reddit's bitcoin tipper bot). Even if this f(l)ails, I'm pretty excited about bitcoin's future. If nothing else, I hope my experiment gets the HN gears turning. There are more nascent bitcoin ideas on Earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy...and I'd love to see them.
> Luckily however, we have a way to tell which is more efficient: The free market!

Free markets find Nash equilibriums, which are locally most efficient for each market participant, but aren't necessarily most efficient globally.
So free buses are a bad idea because the driver didn't enforce the use of the bus for travelling.

Why are only self-cleaning toilets a bad idea? Again, policing would have solved that. Or a door timer. Or blue lighting.
DocMunch looks awesome! Great job Max + team
I can't think of any. Just inertia on MSFT's part. This is just part of the overall trend of legitimizing vulnerability research, instead of trying to ostracize or (worse) legally threaten them.
Remembering a comic from 1995 is impressive, the best I could come up with is 2008.

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Defect-Black-Market.aspx
Well, yes, censorship via disappearing history and feeding the masses a steady stream of meaningless entertainment to keep them complacent and detached from each other.
Thumbor (https://github.com/globocom/thumbor) is a great Python library for helping cropping which uses openCV for facial detection (as well as other algorithms for finding "interesting" parts of photos)
Give them a better option?
What sort of length are the videos generally? Is it up to the client or is there an imposed duration limit?
well, it is far safer and easier to taser someone rather than tackle, club, or otherwise physically subdue them.
It looks like the main reason to pay is for data retention -- otherwise the free service only gives you 24 hours of data. IIRC that was also the distinction between the previous services New Relic offered, free for 24 hours, pay for more.
For the longest time I considered it time-gained as well. When I was working in NYC I had a forty-five minute commute in the morning, and an hour plus in the evening. For the first few weeks that was cool, and then I just wanted to get the fuck home.

In the morning I enjoyed the commute much more than I did in the evening. Now that I live in the D.C. metro area I drive into work. It takes about half as long but definitely costs me a hell of a lot more. I don't mind public transportation, but in D.C. it is horribly unreliable. If it was free I'd probably actually forgive the problems that D.C. has, but its not, and I have a feeling there would many more problems if the transit system was free. Maybe there are other areas of the country/world that could afford this without sacrificing a reliable schedule, but definitely not the U.S. capital.
Homelessness and poverty are different issues: although some people might not want to ride with simply poor people, that's a miniscule group compared with those who don't want to be in a confined space with a homeless person who is likely unhygienic, drugged up, or (non-exclusive) mentally unstable.

Saying "free would work much better if there weren't homeless people" is probably true, but that is a pretty big supposition in lots of cities. Those cities without a homeless problem should feel free to experiment with free transit.
D-Wave's Quantum Computer Courts Controversy
My own analysis of my local (mid-sized city) transit data from the National Transit Database, using actual gallons of fuel spent, and comparing CO2 emissions of the average passenger car, the buses are net adding CO2 to the environment. Indeed, hybrid buses are barely more efficient than traditional diesel buses.

Would you mind sharing your stats?
it's a different problem, though to some degree they stem from the same underlying issue (similar but different characters).
How to become a designer without going to design school
But what if the Facebook feed algorithms found that talking about the NSA bums people out, thus decreasing engagement and revenue? They might then decrease the visibility of such discussion.

What you observe might be a real phenomenon – the 'normals' are barely aware of the NSA stories so far. But something so carefully curated by a for-profit entity as the Facebook feed (or similarly, the national TV networks' nightly half-hour news) is not going to give a representative sampling of people's concerns.
As far as I can tell, the main usage for this MegaPipe system would be creating a better API for webservers like apache and nginx to plug into to bypass some of the overhead inside BSD sockets. Most popular MQ solutions also use TCP/IP and hence BSD sockets, so they're not alternatives - they would actually replace their BSD socket API calls with MegaPipe API calls and receive performance benefits (in very large message/recipient situations).

I think either you have misunderstood the article, or I have.
Fab Raises Another $150 Million at a $1 Billion Valuation
> "It's a sticky subject because nobody -- politician, man on the street, mother of children, or law-abiding citizen -- wants to come right out and say that he or she is advocating for prisoner's rights."

True, but part of the problem is framing. Since most people won't make political decisions based on careful reflection, you have to have an emotional pull of some sort. Language like "tough on crime" and "keeping communities safe" frames the debate as those who value enforcing the law and safety versus their opponents, who presumably don't.

Instead of playing that game, what aspiring policians will have to do is frame these kinds of things in terms of human rights, not prisoner's rights. Simply accepting the phrase "prisoner's rights" implies that rights can be doled out by government based on how it chooses to classify citizens. This kind of framing can work:

Political challenger, to incumbent: "Do you support human rights?"

Incumbent: "Of course."

Challenger: "Do you consider prisoners to be human beings?"

Incumbent (worried look): "Well...yes, though I would add that..."

Challenger: "Then why do you support things such as prolonged solitary confinement of prisoners--which is widely agreed to be a form of torture--and the outsourcing of our justice system to race-to-the-bottom private corporations that are held to lower standards and have far less oversight?"

The really sad part is that this is just as disingenous as the narrative supplied by the supporters of the prison industrial complex. But if you want to change things from within the political system you just have to convince voters the other guy is the bad guy.
In the US we've built a system where the cost of car ownership is mostly hidden (because of gas subsidies and hidden infrastrucure costs)

If we fix this, then it may lead to an improved public transportation network, which would help poor people.
I'm not arguing about compensation, I'm arguing about public safety. People and organizations selling exploits are effectively complicit in the damage resulting from their sales.
Chrome no longer supporting RHEL6 (and CentOS-6 and SL6)
Phew, NSA Is Just Collecting Metadata. (You Should Still Worry)
Hmm, the 30 day window for IE11 attacks seems a bit small if they want someone to be able to do a solid job at developing an exploit. I mean it's doable of course, but for 11k working on that short of a timeframe might not be terribly attractive to some of the better folks in the industry.
These are people selling vulnerability research to the only company in the world that is capable of effectively fixing those vulnerabilities.
Build a Community Website with eXo Community Edition (Open Source)
D³: Data-Driven Documents [pdf]
What is the damage to public safety if I find a way to exploit Windows and tell Microsoft about it?
The article specifically mentions incarcerations skyrocketing as a result of the drug war. Throwing petty dealers in prison is not an effective use of taxpayer dollars.
Google releases first beta SDK for Dart, including 20% faster analysis engine
> I think modern day Russia is pretty epic to visit

It is, but as an old joke goes - just make sure to not confuse tourism for immigration.
Written by Matt Blaze, whose 1994 paper identifying vulnerabilities in the NSA's proposed key escrow system was a key in defeating the Clipper Chip.

http://www.crypto.com/blog/mcconnell_clipper/
Disks that become unreadable when they lose power aren't called disks, they're called RAM.
Me neither. Thing is, using PFS modes (like, DHE or ECDHE), even a server key compromise won't let you decrypt passive intercepts.

Google started using these for their TLS setup about a year ago, and it's smart. They blogged about it, hoping others would follow suit.

I wonder if perhaps that change, and blog post, were their way of saying without saying.
It reminds me of the old short "The Parlor":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmDPdCzCfFM
Dave Teare at WWDC: How One Month for 1Password Became 8 Years
I currently pay a $15 round trip toll for bridges I use in the NYC area. The bridges cost a fraction of that to operate and maintain. The remainder of the toll goes to support public transit in the city. So you are right: TINSTAAFL.
They call it an "open platform". I don't get it -- what part of their platform is open? The plugins are open source, but that's not their platform.
Finally! Someone other than myself recognizes there is an appendix to 1984, and that it (the appendix) is an instruction manual.
Fahrenheit 451 is primarily about self-censorship, born of a desire to avoid causing offense.

Or, if you believe Bradbury, it's about Television Is Evil and nothing else:

http://www.laweekly.com/2007-05-31/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenh...

> Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.

[snip]

> Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

> “Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” Bradbury says, summarizing TV’s content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: “factoids.” He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.
Why didn't you go with statsd or graphite? You would have gotten a lot of bindings with that.
The customer decides the length. Nearly all of them are between 30 seconds and 5 minutes. The majority are between 1 and 3 minutes. We recommend that customers keep them short, to keep their viewers happy :)
I know of a few occasions when he has said it's only a theory and that our propensity for war does not bode well for how evolved we are. Although it's apparent he doesn't agree with the majority of scientists, you can't really argue with that :) He certainly doesn't vote like a typical pulpit-thumper though. His politics are typically very neutral, despite his own personal beliefs.
DNA Smoke identifies perpetrators
This is sort of where I am. Given that I have known about ECHELON for oh, 15 years at least and basically look at the NSA as the organization that does explicitly this, I don't see why people are shocked over the PRISM leaks. ECHELON to PRISM, the only thing that changed is they got better and people willingly put disgusting amounts of information out there.

I just figured it was the mobs lack of long term memory.

/Don't call me a millenial
No, it's about what Orwell saw around him in the UK in the late 1940s, working in a government propaganda office.
Evil in a Haystack
I do use RSS clients, however. Serverless RSS clients, even.

I think it's perfectly legitimate to for me to comment on why this particular serverless RSS client does not fit my needs and what I believe better alternatives are and why.

Anyone with similar needs or who may not have considered or been aware of the alternatives might benefit from my comments, and someone who has experience with other software that might better suit my needs might mention in return, which would be of benefit to me and others with similar needs or concerns.
Factoring numbers in polynomial time with Time Loop Logic
Someone should start an auction side with one seller (discoverer of vulnerability) and two buyers: Ballmer on one side and blackhatters on the other.

This would make things fair.
Old (?) free accounts did not have full analysis tools - you could not break down slow requests etc. with Java monitoring, only see the average response time over a time range.
I have a feeling over the next 2-3 decades, there will be a ton of revolutions in most countries, because governments will keep wanting to create total surveillance states, and eventually many people will get fed up with it, but it will be too hard to fight from the beginning, and it will just turn into revolutions later on.
I have only been in the D.C. area for a little over a year and there is definitely budget problems here as well.

The problem may actually be that the people, and by extension the government, do not believe that mass transportation is a replacement for cars (yet - maybe ever) in a metropolitan area. There may also be a whole hell of a lot of other political reasons (oil and car lobbies, etc). But the end result is the same.

When I was in New Jersey I heavily took advantage of the NJ Transit Light Rail system in Newark, and between Hoboken and Jersey City. That was absolutely amazing, and the price point was a hell of a lot cheaper than it is to ride the NYC subway or D.C. metro systems.

I really think that the northeast just has had a lot more experience and failures here. The main arteries for traffic, at least that I see, come from Amtrak (which again, is amazing in northeast) and local rail systems such as NJT and PATH.

In contrast it seems that there are a lot less people in the NOVA and Maryland area that use D.C. metro and the VRE. Some of that may because of the distance, the belt way, but I think a lot of it has to do with the reliability of the systems (at the very least for D.C. metro).
I would also highly encourage you to look at Balanced or Stripe for checkout - the integration isn't too bad, the pricing is great and you have full control over the look and feel of your checkout pages.

Also, great tip on the CVV2 info, realized we didn't have it in our system either.
The homeless didn't seem to be an issue in the "Fareless Square" in Portland, Oregon, at least the times I visited. (It existed from 1975 to 2012, and was discontinued because the local transit authority was short on cash.)
Microsoft releases this exploit information to governments as a matter of policy, and the governments accordingly conduct clandestine operations and cyber-attacks using this exploit information.

MS is in the unique position of being the only ones able to fix the exploit so they are a single-point-of-failure, which diminishes the security of everybody using Windows operating systems.
How to uninstall McAfee (video by: John Mcafee)
Sorry, I should have used sarcasm flags. The US is just much more sophisticated in how it peddles its hate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
The same argument could be made to say the government should be in charge of running all the phone networks.

Instead, I think everyone would agree its better to have a multitude of cell network providers (unfortunately government regulations prevent us from having more than we currently do) that compete for your business.

The same should be true for roads, in my opinion (of course we're drifting away from the OP and there's many arguments that can be made against privatized road networks, we'll have to save that discussion for another day)
Jury Nullification seems to get bandied about a lot on tech sites. Yet in practice it is not as easy as one suspects, nor does it happen with any real frequency. It is common that defense attorneys are not allowed to instruct a jury to seek nullification, juries are regularly advised to apply the law in a case, and then there are courts which will screen out prospective jurors if they voice the opinion they don't agree with the law.

Then to top it off, you have to get all members of the jury to agree to it. With that you run up against morals and predispositions of the various jurors. It would have to be a pretty damn extreme law, one unfavorable with the public as a whole, to get caught up by a nullification and you can be the authorities would do their best to stack the deck
If all the world's a Model S it could work, but if electric cars become the future it seems likely there will be variation for different body styles, price ranges, etc.

Funny, this isn't a problem in consumer electronics, where thousands of different devices from flashlights to ghetto blasters use one of a very small number of battery sizes.

Don't think of it as swapping one monolithic battery... think of a Ferrari that runs on two 'AAA' cells, a Buick that runs on two 'AA's, a FedEx truck that runs on four 'C's, and an eighteen-wheeler that takes sixteen 'D' cells. Service stations would only need to stock a few discrete sizes.
Those are two separate issues. Few people other than caricature billionaires from 80s movies would care about impoverished people riding the buses. Homeless people camping out on them is another matter entirely.
That's exactly my point, which is why it's dangerous. If the exploits were made public as soon as possible (full disclosure) then MS will have incentive to release bugfixes as soon as possible to the general public.