skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've also noticed that people who don't like wine tend to gravitate towards white wines.

For people like that, I usually recommend some decent, but reasonably priced South African wines (which tend to be a bit sweet).

At least they're drinking wine ;)
So, because you can't find fault with my main point that there are scary high-impact potential threats that the US government can and should try to protect us from, you are instead picking apart an imaginary scenario that I spent all of 30 seconds thinking up in order to illustrate my main point? Or, did I miss something?

I think you missed the point. He's essentially pointing out the fact that you spent all of 30 seconds thinking up a ridiculous scenario and then expected everyone to take it seriously as something that supports your argument.

An invasion occurs when someone or some group enters the land as an enemy and any activity to prevent or discontinue that situation would constitute repelling.

See, that's precisely the kind of thing that makes it hard to take you seriously. You're essentially redefining words "invade" [1] and "repel" [2].

this NSA surveillance (from what I've read) seems to be reasonable, warranted, and used in a limited manner

You're trying to argue that the NSA surveillance is "warranted" by redefining words "invade" and "repel". I don't think we need to go farther than a dictionary for a counter-argument.

What @mikeash disputed, though, was your attempt to argue that the surveillance is "reasonable" by coming up with that amusing little scenario.

Basically, you argued that the surveillance is reasonable because the magnitude of the outcome of the terrorist threat is serious enough to make the surveillance reasonable, because it's supposed to diminish the probability of the terrorist threat manifesting itself in an outcome like that.

Of course, one big problem is that you tried to support your argument with the aforementioned scenario and then blew up at @mikeash for criticizing you, as if the onus of coming up with the support for your argument was on him and not on you. Another big problem is in your assumption that mass-scale NSA surveillance of everyone in the USA and the world will really drive down the probability of a terrorist threat worst-case outcome, which is a subject of a heated debate, instead of being an assumption you can just take for granted.

[1]: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/invade
[2]: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/repel
I'm not a Javascript developer - the main reason I got into using jQuery was to not have to deal with cross-browser idiosyncrasies. Same reason I started using CSS preprocessors.
> When else would you get wine?

Some people like drinking it. They'll have a glass or two after a long day at work. But that probably means half a bottle of wine.

This kind of long term, regular, drinking of not-excessive amounts is worrying, especially among women. They don't see it as harmful, when it probably is.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-16000520)

> Hospital consultants in north-east England have reported seeing an "epidemic" in the number of people in their early 30s with alcoholic liver disease.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15129887) - this article talks about units of alcohol. 1 unit of wine is 125 ml at 8% ABV. This is a tiny glass of weak wine. Most wine is at least 10% ABV, or stronger, and a normal glass would be 175 ml or 200 ml. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Units_of_alcohol_cha...)

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-20410378)

etc etc.
What happened during WWII is a blue-print for what society should not be (like an anti-pattern). Lets not restrain ourselves from talking about it based on some stupid Internet meme, especially when talking about relevant topics, such as identification, surveillance, discrimination, privacy and all kinds of human rights that should be fundamental for everybody, alien or domestic.

Personally I think @PavlovsCat raised some interesting points. I also hate arguments by authority; if anything @bazillion's experience as an NSA employee and a CIA contractor raises red flags when thinking about his agenda or bias (although kudos for his transparency on the issue - isn't transparency great btw? ;))

What really bothers me about @bazillion's opinion is the logical fallacies he conjures:

1) establishing a protocol for communication is done by meeting with your peers well in advance, which does happen; trying to make this problem harder by restricting what you can do is setting up a straw-man

2) you can still use phone lines, you just need to buy a bunch of prepaid cards, tossing them away after usage, preferably with short messages without going into specifics, accompanied by small chat on weather and baseball games - you can make it so that conversations are indistinguishable from normal conversations or from noise, without using stenography and while still bearing important information. You can also receive incoming calls this way. You buy them in bulk, you communicate the numbers to your peers and you toss them away after each incoming call, with your peers being left to try out the next number in sequence.

3) on the Internet you can use strong encryption, in combination with whatever email accounts you want, including Gmail accounts, you just can't use the web interface. Route that access through easily changeable anonymous proxies placed in countries were the U.S. doesn't have much influence and voilà - you can be immune of NSA's spying and surveillance on the Internet, as they'll have nothing - no words, no name, no IP address. They can't even prevent the message going through, as you can ask for confirmation in your encrypted message and have that confirmation delivered encrypted as well.

Surveillance on the Internet only affects the uneducated, which happen to be normal people living normal lives.

4) the world is not divided between evil men that conspire and maniacs that want to watch the world burn - Snowden's intentions and motives are actually irrelevant. And what NSA apologists don't seem to get is that NSA's intentions or motives are also irrelevant. What really matters is the final result ... people are not safer due to NSA's actions, while these actions are a disaster for privacy and for human rights in general. In fact terrorism prevention only fixes a symptom of the larger problem and one has to wonder why the threat of international terrorism is much smaller in Europe.
I cannot think of a city who needs these services more than LA. Hope they fight it with all they've got
Wow! I've spent a hour or so looking at the Manta docs and I think Joyent has found the sweet spot as far as abstraction is concerned. Kudos to the Joyent team!

The api [1] is so simple it's absurd. Looking at the design I just keep on asking myself, "but how will it perform?" And the answer is, I don't know. But what I do know is that because of the simplicity of the design, if this compute model catches on, it'll be the start of a new computing paradigm—probably the first genuine attempt at something we can agree is cloud.

The essence of the model is that "caching", in whatever form, is abstracted away. It is up to the architects of the system to ensure that the system performs well on a wide variety of compute scenarios. Let me explain. Usually, in a model like App Engine, you worry about how you'll represent your data in the Datastore, how you'll shard, how you'll use Memcache, and what type of batch jobs you'll run to reduce the amount of dynamic computation that is done on a request. On Manta, you just store your data to their object store and process it as needed. You let the system figure out data locality, what to cache, on which node to perform the compute, etc.

As I said, I have no idea how, or if, this will perform, but as far as abstraction level goes, it's perfect. This is where pricing becomes an issue. At 40µ$/GB/s it works out
to 14.4¢/GB/hr with no mention or guarantee of the performance of the system. If the compute is slow, or the node is overloaded for tasks, what can a customer do? What if the compute is not limited by cpu but access to the underlying object store. Sure they say the compute is done at the edge, but what if they stick 4TB of data on a node that's the compute equivalent of an Intel Atom? So many questions about performance!

All that said, congratulations to the Joyent team. The HN response so far has been muted, but I think time will reveal Manta to be an important step towards true cloud computing.

Hopefully, Manta will mature enough to get a chance to kiss a girl.

[1] http://apidocs.joyent.com/manta/api.html
"IT’s hard to explain, but I feel like there’s a barrier between us - I wonder if they’re going to interact with Glass at some point and do something in the middle of our conversation."

Funny, I feel the same way about cell phones.
You can find a script home page at http://swapped.cc/#!/iip

However, I had to manually enable script on https://news.ycombinator.com/* since it is enabled only on http by default.
I agree. Even if everybody knows this is a joke, it's still kind of in poor taste for a manager to say this.
We'll get there. The low-light level performance of video on cell phone cameras will continue to improve. The view angle will grow, and editing capabilities for video will continue to grow as well.

Personally, I hope increased popularity of video services like this one will help drive further improvements in recording devices and editing software.
I'd be very surprised if electrical stimulation simply acts as local inhibition. This is inconsistent with other electrical stimulation experiments (eg: driving muscle movements by stimulating in M1), and would not provide the correct manipulation to the basal ganglia.

The problem in Parkinson's is that the Substantia Nigra and a certain class of excitatory neurons start dying off, leading to less dopamine release. The electrical stimulation is thought to stimulate the remaining neurons to release additional dopamine to compensate for this loss.
Love the improved dev tools and WebGL decision, but I also hate how long it's taken MS to reach this point.

Would also love for IE 11 to be available on Windows 7.
I read it this way: "we are asserting our 5th amendment right to neither confirm or deny we violated your 4th and 5th amendment rights so you can't sue us and have some uppity judge make us follow the law."
>Is it a problem to let people try to start business while they're relatively unencumbered and near peak creativity?

It's not so much 'let' as "pay them lots of money to"

as for the encumbrances, well, we all make choices. Children don't magically appear when you hit 30. Personally, I find it really surprising that people who choose to have children seem to be able to compete with the childfree in top jobs... but it seems they can, so what do I know?
Unfortunately individual applications need to add support for ECDHE for it to be usable, and Apache 2.2 does not have such support. Apache 2.4 does though.

(Corroboration: http://vincent.bernat.im/en/blog/2011-ssl-perfect-forward-se...)
http://roon.io has been awesome for my purposes lately. It's clean, uses markdown, has good mobile apps, and is quite pretty+responsive on the web.
Would taking the battery out simply suffice, too?
What we learned raising on AngelList
You can usually find decent French wines in the States for $12-15 if you shop at the right places. Most wine specialty stores tend to overprice (and at restaurants they'll easily run $30-50).

I don't like the plastic corks myself, they seem inordinately hard to pull out of the bottle.
It's currently understood that it's the presence of the electrode that causes buildup of glial tissue, not the stimulation current, so this approach wouldn't really work.

It isn't really necessary though, since you can turn up the current slightly to compensate for the buildup around the electrode. It's a relatively coarse manipulation, but we'll be increasingly using optogenetics as a replacement.
With SNI[1], the hostname is sent unencrypted (so that you can host more than one domain in a single IP address), so the watchers can simply filter out porn domains.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication
I kind of like the ceremony of decorking. I'll usually go to the twist-off bottles for my second round ;)
Changing the crypto would require lots of time to roll out new platforms and updated clients.

Which is just an argument for starting sooner rather than later, and staying ahead of the curve, rather than giving up the point...
Principles of a Killer Hackathon Demo
You'll also need some way to distill the skill of video editing into a tool.

Documentary video editing (ie editing non-staged video) is really hard, and it's a skill very few people possess.

I'm not saying that software to suggest edits between shots or timing changes can't be created, but it's a hard problem.
I love the look of the new development tools, lightyears ahead of IE10. Lets see how it matches up to Chrome
Thanks for the video. One interesting point, they're determining the price based on their knowledge of wine, and how much a wine of that variety, grown in that particular region should cost to produce. At no point do they associate taste directly with the price. I think this helps to illustrate we should be trying wines from different regions, rather than different price points. Find a region and variety that you enjoy, and then find a bottle that's priced fairly for what you're buying.
How to Create Pixel Perfect Levitation Photos With iPhone
How in the world is the government not "completely out of control"? At this point basic decisions that violate the constitution are made almost daily. Hell, today we decided that the right to vote wasn't important the week after the government confirmed it is unconstitutionally spying on its citizens. What would you need for out of control? Them to be randomly shooting citizens? The idea that we should accept unconstitutional surveillance because the government's stated reason is that this "saves lives" (it doesn't) is just absolutely shocking and quite frankly, seems quite stupid.
Looks like someone didn't RTA
They address this at the bottom of the article (read the whole thing).

Battery removal can be equally deceptive. Even once one figures out how to extract the primary battery, there may be additional power sources within the apparatus. “Some phones use an additional battery for memory management; it’s unclear whether this battery could be used by logging and/or tracking systems such as Carrier IQ,” Mr. Harvey explained, referring to software that monitors mobile phone users.
How do you take a battery out of an iPhone?
We are outside the habitable zone :\

ref: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23118-earth-and-others...
Yes. On some phones even when its off.
It sounds interesting, but how do they get around the app store approval process?
yes

http://news.cnet.com/FBI-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdroppin...

http://hackaday.com/2009/09/14/disabling-your-cell-phones-mi...
Imagine Michele Bachmann requiring Congresspeople to undergo a "patriotism" test, and surveilling them to make sure they are "patriotic".
Is it just me, or are that others that think "Didn't it support that yet?!" at every IE release? I don't use Windows so I never use IE anymore, but I'd think IE9 or 10 would support WebGL by now...
Nonverbal Human Hacking
Ask HN: Never worked in a startup before, not sure if this is normal
I recently moved into a new job in Vancouver, B.C. Just today, the project manager accused me of not "being 100% in it" for the following 2 reasons:

1. I have not updated your LinkedIn profile since starting this new job 6 weeks ago. (Note that this person is not even my connection on LinkedIn)

2. I have not been working overtime on a regular basis (aka every single day of the week). I would understand if there was something urgent that needed to be done, and I have definitely worked hours over 12 hours in the past.

However, the employment contract never mentioned this was a requirement as he seems to be suggesting, and I do not see anyone else on the team pulling these hours. In fact, I am often the last or 2nd last person to leave. I do not believe in staying long hours for the sake of staying long hours, I do my best and put my full attention on my work. Just this past week, I had personal stuff to attend to, I got up to leave at 5, and let him know, he was quite aggravated.

I'm just beginning to realize I may have made a big mistake putting myself here and I'm not sure if I am just being overly sensitive. This is technically a startup (~50 people), and I do enjoy the product I work on.

I've never worked in a startup (besides running one on my own, but not with 50 employees), and I do understand startups are known for working harder than big corporations, but something just seems "off" with these expectations suddenly being expressed by this project manager.

Any advice/suggestions/similar experiences would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I realize the first sentence sounds like I relocated. I didn't (just poor writing skills...). I've been in Vancouver, B.C for quite a long time already.
from the article:

Battery removal can be equally deceptive. Even once one figures out how to extract the primary battery, there may be additional power sources within the apparatus. “Some phones use an additional battery for memory management; it’s unclear whether this battery could be used by logging and/or tracking systems such as Carrier IQ,” Mr. Harvey explained, referring to software that monitors mobile phone users.
Boxcar2d let you save the genome of the car. I spent months running multiple instances, trying to develop a car to beat those tracks (and the others on the forum).

This one has some amazing features. Hopefully Rafael will give us some way to compete!
Show HN - Gifft, My first app. Built with Phonegap and AngularJS
Have they said it won't be on Windows 7? I would expect them to release it on Win7 to try and keep their market share. I hope they do as I am building a WebGL application for work :)
Los Angeles had ridesharing in 1914, and it got banned.
So basically this guy is saying he'd rather remember his life as a distorted story that airbrushes away reality in order to embellish an element of perfection that never actually existed than as the actual real-life moment he experienced. Sounds strikingly similar to:

-Brave new World
-The Matrix
-The Truman Show

and all those other "is a fake bliss bliss nonetheless" type stories.

This guy took the blue pill.
SOLID Development Principles – In Motivational Pictures
So the answer to 'Should we drop jQuery?' is 'Not now'.
I had a job interview with Fab's CEO once. He impressed the hell out of me - charismatic, strong vision, ambitious - but it was blatantly obvious to both of us that I wasn't a good cultural fit for the company, and that was as far as it went.

Just based on that one interview, I doubt too many people get through Fab's entire hiring process who aren't already a cultural match. I certainly couldn't work there, but some of the things that bother me (mandatory coatracks and clean desks?) they probably consider benefits.
I've never been able to understand why people claim that no wine is better than another, or coffee, or tea, or anything. Do a lot of people have very insensitive taste buds? There is most definitely a correlation between price and quality. Very cheap wines are most often garbage, and very expensive wines are almost surely good, and usually exquisite, as long as they have not turned to vinegar. That being said, it is not necessary to spend a fortune on a wine to get a delectable experience. I've had $15 dollar wines that I have much preferred to $30 wines. But I find it unlikely that I'd prefer a $10 wine to a $100 dollar wine. Note also that some wines have a better price to quality ratio: I'm more likely to prefer a $50 Bordeaux than a $50 Chilean wine. What's more, does anyone think that "movie appreciation" is bullshit because some reviewers will give one star while others give four to the same movie?

Another thing that happens is that certain wines, e.g. Chateauneuf-du-Pape, are just never as cheap as others, and cheaper wines just typically don't have their flavor profile. So if you want that certain taste because whatever food you're pairing it with would be matched better, then you'll find yourself spending a little more, not fundamentally on quality, but on variety. This leads to the tinted white wine "experiment": if you know what you're drinking, you know what you're looking for (the test is sort of interesting, but I don't see it as evidence that wine is bullshit). Recognition is one of the main sources of pleasure in a lot of things. Consider a neophyte looking at oil paintings: many people are baffled by the prices some of them sell for. But for someone that recognizes the evolution of a certain genre, style, and techniques, it may not be so incomprehensible. Similarly, if a flavor profile only appears to exist in certain more expensive wines, one guzzler may appreciate looking for its subtleties. That they would not notice them if they weren't told which wine they were downing is entirely possible.

Lastly, I'm not sure I understand people's gripe with using words like asphalt, tar, leather, tobacco, etc. Flavors, in wine or anything, usually fall into three categories: vegetal, animal, or mineral. If you've picked out a characteristic flavor in what you're drinking, it is not hard to categorize it within those three. What is more difficult is to make this observation more precise, and if you have the enlightenment to see that asphalt is actually what you're reminded of, then why not use the word? It doesn't follow that just because you wouldn't eat asphalt, you could not appreciate the playfulness detecting this aroma.
jQuery is far closer to a "crutch" than it is a "power tool".

It may look like a "power tool" in the sense that it made certain awkward things much easier to do, but that's only true if you don't look at the bigger picture.

Taking a wider view, it becomes obvious that jQuery's usefulness arises mainly because the DOM and client-side web development as a whole is so broken in so many critical ways.

It indirectly offers what the browser developers should have directly offered many, many years ago. So it's clearly more of a "crutch" to help web developers hobble around the various browser-imposed limitations than it is a "power tool".

As some effort is made toward clearing up these browser limitations, jQuery's true nature as a "crutch" does become more obvious.
Love the new changes in IE and the direction it is taking.

>IE11 allow you to turn off the SmartScreen filter right in the download UI.

Now only if chrome would do that I can keep myself from switching away from it. Its frustrating to know that everytime I download a file or save an image, the file hash, IP and the download URL is sent to Google. The whole NSA thing isn't making it better either. [1][2]

[1] http://superuser.com/questions/387724/how-to-disable-downloa...
[2] http://blog.chromium.org/2012/01/all-about-safe-browsing.htm...
And while it's all fine and well to not depend on Wikipedia... when the majority of people treat it like the word of god when it comes to "facts", it's important to work to help make it as accurate as possible.
H.K.: 'We Let The NSA Leaker Go Partly Because The US Got His Middle Name Wrong'
Oh yes, video editing is very hard. The tools are extremely obtuse, as well. Which is why I am hoping that smart people rise to meet the demand and make something more powerful than the current crop of casual video editors, but less obtuse than major NLEs.

To get off the ground though, you could maybe start with some automatic greenscreen software or something. Novice cameramen would love that, and if you are splicing in a set video file, it could be pretty straightforward from a usage point of view.