skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there a generally accepted ratio where it becomes preferable to buy in NYC? You may find sales at 10- to 20-years' rent in the suburbs but I doubt it ever gets that low in Manhattan ever, even during the low points in the real estate cycle. So it seems buying here will always have some speculative component.
Thanks tome.

As a sidenote, I was interested that my total Karma went down by more than the negative votes I can see on the comments here. I don't care about the Karma, I was just curious how this could happen. Do you have an idea? Are motivated people going through my other comments on the site and downvoting them?

Like slashdot, HN, has become a slightly more vicious place, or maybe I just notice it more!

It makes finding more mature people here more valuable.
I kinda wish Jimmy Wales would run one of his intrusive fundraising banners on behalf of WikiLeaks on this last week of open donations. That'd be hard for the US to crack down on Wikipedia in retaliation without digging itself into an even bigger PR hole. Kinda like the setup Snowden arranged by placing himself in Hong Kong.
He loves his country, but not his government. Big difference.
Yes and no. In some circumstances I agree with you, in other circumstances I think you have it backward.

I shall enumerate some cases (note that US citizens always count as "inside the US" in this case breakdown):

* inside the US, old-school warrant exists
* inside the US, secret warrant exists
* inside the US, no legal authority
* outside the US, no legal authority
* outside the US, weird US-logic legal authority

1) If you're inside the US, and the cops have a non-gag-order warrant, you're no safer with your own server. With your server, they serve you, you know about it; with gmail, they serve Google, and Google tells you about it. No difference.

2) If you're inside the US, and they use a secret warrant, in this case your own server might be better. They can probably still do something tricky to you, without you knowing, but using GMail makes it slightly easier for them to get your information without your knowledge.

3) If you're inside the US, and they have no legal authority, then you're fine in both cases. Unless they break into your server illegally. In this case, their job will be orders of magnitude easier if you run your own server.

4) If you're outside the US, and they have no legal authority at all, same as the previous point: if they try to break in, their job will be orders of magnitude easier if you run your own server.

5) If you're outside the US, they might get FISA clearance to get your stuff. In this case, I think you're better off with your own server. This is comparing Google's legal pushback vs breaking into your server. It's totally possible that breaking into your server is orders of magnitude harder than convincing Google that they have legal authority.

In an ideal world, this last case would only apply to political enemies of the US. You'd be able to figure out for yourself if it applied to you, and act accordingly. What kind of idiot uses a US company to plan terrorist attacks on US interests, amirite? Or to leak things to wikileaks (categorize that however you like). But what is much much less clear is whether the US does in fact use this type of surveillance to unethically benefit US corporations, for example. We've heard unsubstantiated accusations to that effect; nothing in my life experience helps me to know if I do or do not live in that kind of world.
>Obviously those who have chosen to deliberately kill civilians in spectacular ways are not right now a danger akin to imperial Japan or Nazi Germany.

Obviously. Which is the point.

>But will it really take a dirty bomb, a successful mass infection/poisoning, or god help us a nuke to stop this silly argument?

These are movie theater plots. "Mass poisonings" are a very poor attack vector because as soon as they're identified they get publicized and people stop consuming the adulterated product, which minimizes the impact. Spreading infection has similar constraints, is difficult to contain (i.e. the attacker can't prevent it from spreading to his own family/country), and it is vastly more difficult to obtain weaponized infectious materials than poisons.

And dirty bombs are a media fabrication. Here's the money quote from Stratfor: "By its very nature, the RDD is contradictory. Maximizing the harmful effects of radiation involves maximizing the exposure of the victims to the highest possible concentration of a radioisotope. When dispersing the radioisotope, by definition and design the RDD dilutes the concentration of the radiation source, spreading smaller amounts of radiation over a larger area."[1]

[1] http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100421_dirty_bombs_revisite...

Which leaves The Bomb. But terrorists can't build nuclear weapons. States can barely do it. So if your concern is nuclear terrorism, the solution doesn't require you to catch the terrorists, all you have to do is limit the availability of weapons grade material. Which is a completely different problem with completely different solutions that don't involve domestic surveillance or foreign wars, is required to prevent state-level nuclear proliferation regardless of terrorism anyway, and mostly just involves being the highest bidder if weapons grade material ever becomes available on the black market.

>It's bizarre to me that one of the anti-anti-terror arguments of choice reflects that hilariously dystopian scene in the film Brazil, wherein the staff and patrons of a restaurant that has just been bombed attempt to paper over the incident by completely ignoring it, as innocent people suffer and die.

I don't think anybody is arguing that there should be no response to a terrorist act. But why can't the response be to bring the terrorists to justice as international criminals, and not to let it change the fabric of our society?
Why wipe the hard drives? Use WDE, and have the alarm (a) unmount the drive, (b) overwrite the system's RAM with 0s (or at least the portion of RAM where the keys are stored), and (c) power down the system. That is a lot faster that making a backup and wiping the drives; by the time an agent has snuck in and located the computer, the process should be over.

Also, it might help to install a security camera, so you can tell the difference between a rat triggering the alarm and an FBI agent (I'll leave it to the audience to make a few jokes). Alarm is triggered, the camera starts sending pictures of the intruders to your smartphone or to Usenet (encrypted, using a key you keep on a smartcard) or whatever.
If I were doing a Bitcoin business, it sure wouldn't be in California. Aside from the obvious startup friendly Seattle or Austin, it might make sense to pick some small state who could have favorable laws (South Dakota for credit card issuers...)
I'm in the financial district too, except that I'm in San Francisco's financial district. ;)
I guess I don't quite follow what the difference is. Moving from Williamsburg to Jamaica (Queens) is as big a deal, if not bigger.

But we've sort of tangented off, what I meant was 'Agree with you but Manhattan is such an outlier and so evocative that the mere mention of it kind of Godwinizes any argument you're actually trying to make. That I agree with.' That's all.
Lessons learnt crashing a hang glider
Leadwerks KickStarter to get on Linux
Show HN: Hide all Snowden-related HN links with a Greasemonkey script
Why? :s
Yea it's a pretty classic debate technique - http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-propaganda.html#divert

It's also a great time for lawmakers to pass unrelated, controversial legislation while everyone's attention is elsewhere.
If that's where you got your manichean world view I've very glad I didn't take any polysci classes in college.
Link is down for me; here is a google cache copy: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
Here's a quote from James' Pragmatism and Common Sense lectures that expresses the idea:

Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it. [http://www.authorama.com/pragmatism-6.html]
I'm using it and really like so far.

3 requests:
Save my searches in the primary nav
Post to Wordpress blog. Provide a way to add my blog to post
Add bufferapp.com sharing

Keep up great work!
Here's a video interview with Chomsky linked to within the OP's link

("What do Takism Square, Google Glass, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and NSA data gathering have in common? Find out in this interview with Noam Chomsky.")

http://grittv.org/?video=noam-chomsky-on-secret-trade-deals-...
PiMiner: Raspberry Pi Bitcoin Miner
Be good to yourself - crowdsourced app to get you to relax.
You do realize that Clojure is not Common Lisp ?

That being said, the linked video is from 2011 (published in 2013, but from 2011).
A Look At The Charges Against Edward Snowden
No, as a verb it pretty much only has one meaning, which you should look up :) Kudos on your English though. I'd never have guessed you aren't a native speaker.
I'm sick of seeing nothing else on the front page. I'll go to reddit/r/politics when I want constant updates on his flight itinerary.
I asked myself the same question years ago with TV and I figured in the end that watching TV was a complete waste of my time. These days I probably watch under 10 minutes a week in total if that.
Yeah, they showed a lot of improvement in the Dorner case.
Google has a legal team whose full-time job is pushing back on these requests. At some point, they have to either obey the law, or go to prison themselves. Get off your high horse.

Google has a business model whose entire premise is to push the envelope on privacy and to collect as much as possible and hold it forever--to make a few extra pennies per user. Get off your high horse. Google (and FB) is /are a menace to us all, even if only because they gather so much private data about us.
> it says lapdog

Interestingly, "lapdog" appears to be an Americanism.

Going by headlines in British newspapers, the equivalent British expression appears to be "poodle."

The Economist: "Tony Blair is not George Bush's poodle. It's much worse than that."

The Guardian: "Special relationship is over, MPs say. Now stop calling us America's poodle."
I haven't fully formed an opinion about it, but it's the most-completely-laid-out version of his study of cellular automata, which was genuinely novel in the '80s when he first published a classification of them, and led to some interesting debates since then. He digs into them in a lot of detail and forms some theories of computational emergence and philosophy-of-computation, which he then ties in to a sort of computationalist view of the universe that hypothesizes the ubiquity of complexity from simple interaction as a key feature. Along the way he puts forward some pithy "principles", some of which are thought-provoking, though not all are novel and some are obviously problematic (one of the more-cited ones is http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PrincipleofComputationalEquival...).

I do think a massively edited down and more humble version of the book could at least present interesting positions to argue against or develop. Part of the problem with his writing approach is that so much of the response is (correctly) pointing out that he didn't invent certain things, or that he's giving new names to things that already have names in either CS or philosophy or both, etc., that it obscures the contents, and the reader has to do a lot of work to get something out of it.

If you remove the claims to novelty and take it instead as a description of a certain contemporary paradigm of simulation-oriented science that resolves around computational models and complex systems, and take Wolfram as just your narrator digging into its philosophical implications (with a particular set of biases), it's not a bad read either, although it could also use an editor to move along more engagingly and not talk about Stephen Wolfram so much. So I'll admit it's not great for that purpose either; it maybe wants to be like a Douglas Hofstadter book but isn't really. I think some HN readers might actually like it, though. At the very least you can take it as an experimental attempt to answer the question: just how much of a philosophy can you hang almost entirely off of a study of cellular automata?

That's a pretty lukewarm endorsement, because honestly I don't think it's a good book as written, but some of the negative reviews are exaggerating its lack of contents.
Sounds like we've narrowed it down to Ecuador, Venezuela or Iceland. Maybe Snowden's strategy is to confuse everyone as to where he is headed (or is).
I enjoy this sort of thinking. My masters work was in urban planning and I've been involved with helping advance the idea of dynamic democracies. Las Vegas was built as a "city of sin", I would be interested in building a "city of virtue". Perhaps it could be done by running analysis on property values and town populations and seeing where you could take over a local government by emigration of a group of hackers.
Personal just means you are buying it with your own funds and not being reimbursed by a company. You are free to make paid apps with it. I'll work on language to clarify.

Thanks for pointing out the contradiction there. We may be going above and beyond what is required of us by the license, in the case of refunds. But we'll still do so.
>the right to beat their wives or persecute gays, to refusing education to their daughters?

Conservative religious beliefs aren't exclusive to Muslim immigrants. A good percentage of the locals are fighting for these same things, and the immigrants we receive will probably skew at least more liberal than the population of their home countries (just based on the image we project around the world.)

The bulk of US immigration took place from the late 19th century to the 1910s, 1920s, came from Europe, and they and their descendants are probably a plurality of the population.
I get an internal server error...
Fortunately there is always Bitcoin:

http://shop.wikileaks.org/donate#dbitcoin
The unreasonable effectiveness of Mathematics in Natural Sciences
No, because going to Hong Kong, then Russia, then Ecuador with a few laptops full of classified information is not something a serious person does if they're interested in the welfare of the United States.

And seriously: It would have been completely illegal to send Snowden to Gitmo or any other nation. If you're worried that the President is willing to do things that are blatantly and obviously illegal and unconstitutional, as opposed to in the gray areas of national security, and that no one in the Congress or the judiciary could or would do anything about it, then hey, get that impeachment petition going. But really this is all just hn hyperventilation.

If Snowden thought he was a true whistleblower, he should have followed the law, which describes exactly how he should have communicated his concerns. If that had failed, go to Congress and testify. But sneaking off to HK with (apparently) a bunch of unrelated information was not a "brave" or "patriotic" thing to do.
There is a practical way to reduce terrorism and make the US and the world safer that won't cost a dime and doesn't require compromises on civil liberties.

Stop starting and getting involved in foreign wars, stop supporting the abusive policies of Israel, and stop supporting corrupt and abusive governments around the world.

You don't hear much about that option on TV, but it's by far the simplest and best course for all concerned save a handful of greedy and duplicitous folks at the top.
That might require a bit of a commute.
It's quite easy for them to convert bitcoin into fiat, wherever they are.
According to the article those 600+ authorities are all trusted by the browsers...

Quote:

"Break into any Certificate Authority (or compromise the web applications that feed into it). As we learned from the SSL Observatory project, there are 600+ Certificate Authorities that your browser will trust; the attacker only needs to find one of those 600 that she is capable of breaking into."
Why for heaven's sake does anyone who does anything that might piss of a government use GMail or any hosted mail provider?

This is far beyond me.
Hi Matt - I hope someone meets up with you! I'm in London at the mo, but I just wanted to say (it's a bit off-topic): BugMuncher looks great! I am definitely going to give it a go, when I find some time. Nice one. Good luck with it :)
So, you write the UI code in Java for Android and Objective-C for iOS, then there is some build process for both platforms?

This seems a little awkward. A sample project setup to build for both platforms would be useful to see.

For some types of applications, the native UI boilerplate would probably be minimal, but for apps with complex UIs, this might add a lot of dev overhead.

Don't get me wrong though, this looks cool!!
Ask HN: I'm in the Bay Area. Anyone wanna grab coffee/beer?
I'll be bouncing forth between PA, Mountain View and SF. Let's meet up.
MPAA Kicks KickassTorrents Off Google With ‘Precision’ Takedown
Remember a few year back when a group of Irish were the worst terrorists in the world? Oh, wait, a few people in the United states funded them!
There will always be people that fight nations with non traditional warfare. Today it happens to be from the middle east. Tomorrow it may be Hello Kitty fanatics.
One of my favorite quotes is from William James, addressing this point:

A great many people believe they are thinking, when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

(Paraphrasing, I'm on mobile and in a hurry.)
"Trust me" is shorthand for "Without any supporting argument whatsoever, please believe".

When you are tempted to write "trust me", please reconsider and think of why your readers should believe what you're saying.

So in this specific case: why do you think people should be reading "Steinbeck or Vonnegut or something"?

I don't particularly disagree with your advice, but I'm also not inclined to follow it without so much as a shred of a given reason.
Part of the problem is that the people have no direct voice over the policies that shape their lives. Even Plato hinted that people will always be unsatisfied with their rulers (be they kings or democratic electorate) in writing, "People unwilling to govern themselves will be ruled by those deemed unfit to govern."

Fortunately, ubiquitous computing opens up new approaches to democracy.

https://bitbucket.org/djarvis/world-politics/
Neat project, but would be great to see a demo page.

Also, s/buad/baud/
Snowden looking for asylum in Ecuador
git push/pull is easy, but there's no getting around the fact that Git is a distributed version control tool, not deployment software. Using Git for deployment is probably fine for simple deployments where you're just getting a bunch of static files onto a single box, but as soon as you stray into the realm of non-trivial web application deployments then things change. Factors like database migration, dev/prod environment parity, dynamically spinning up new server instances and continuous integration etc. mean that the act of simply copying your files become the least of your worries. Sure Git will play an important part in getting a snapshot of the codebase from a dev's workstation into the deployment flow, but that's where it ends and tools like Chef and Puppet take over.
Other people have in fact been pointing out this very fact/approach as well, you just chose to ignore them. Coming in at the last moment and saying "Finally!" is just dense and completely transparent.
Out of curiosity, is there any classified information he could have turned over (intentionally or otherwise) to the Russians that would make you reconsider the wisdom of his decisions?

What if one of those laptops has the names of undercover agents on it? I'm not saying it does, I'm just trying to understand the scope of your argument.
It's probably the low probability of success, combined with irreversible tarnishing of reputation and threat of prosecution upon failure.
You could use the same definition on software developers, too.
Alternate title: Woz preaches to the choir.
> I think reading fiction has a lot of value. If you want to enhance your creativity and be inspired you can get a lot from great fiction. It will also make you a better writer. It can be act as a break from your day to day as well (recharging is important).

It's also fun. You know ... fun?

[There are certainly other benefits, but I think the notion that activities like reading fiction need to be justified seems a bit wrong-headed.]

> Being more purpose driven, or at least knowing why you do something, can never hurt

Er, well, that's far from clear...

Being generally aware, more or less, of what you do and why you do it is almost certainly a positive thing, but if you obsess over justifying everything you do and every second of your day ("Relaxing read: 30 minutes. Laughing with friends: 15 minutes. ...") you may well go nuts, and going nuts seems, ... counterproductive...

Everybody is different, and some people are fine with ultra-controlling every aspect of their lives, but for many people, I don't think this is true. There are many points in the spectrum from total slacker to robot. Leave a little freedom to chill.
Because HN isn't a politics site. In fact it's not even a tech news site. That's what the likes of mashable are for.
Perhaps he will, one day, but for now the large staff he has working for him all depend on sales of Mathematica to feed their families.

Curating the data sets behind Wolfram Alpha (and Mathematica) is a hugely labour-intensive endeavour. Mathematica itself depends on a large team of extremely well educated people; the pan-scientific domain expertise is significant in that company. Jeopardising that with a radical change of business model, like open sourcing Mathematica, would not be the choice of a sane businessman.
Don't worry. It shows.
I am not sure that a trial version is really necessary if you provide several solid complete examples (source, build setup for both platforms) and pre-built apps for the demos that we could try on our Android and iOS devices.
Send me an email at zchlatta (at) gmail.com with a bit more information about yourself and what technologies you work with. I'm working on a few open source projects that could use another developer on them.
Thanks OpsGuy :)

It was indeed an eye opener.

If asking a question, in what generally appears to be an open minded forum of seemingly well read people of above average intelligence, can be this complicated...its easy to imagine why Congress has a tough time doing anything.

I guess we just have to keep trying to refocus on solutions and hope for the best.