skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I still don't see how that is currency manipulation. Some people decided they didn't want everybody to know how many bitcoins they have. What am I missing?
Not really

For the most part these countries were monarchies whose territories waxed and waned with the power of their ruling houses, where the idea of a nation with a specific government did not develop much earlier than elsewhere. Their development into nation states in fact largely happened as they contracted into core territories with common cultures and languages and the power of their monarchs was put under increasing challenge.

As for Germany and Italy, while they did not become nation states until late in the game, a large part of that was that they were part of empires and other kingdoms long before.

The Holy Roman Empire (not to be confused with the Roman Empire), the West Roman Empire, the Ostrogothic Kingdom ("heir" to the West Roman Empire, including Italy), the Frankish (Carolingian) Empire, the Bysantine Empire (East Roman Empire); Habsburg Spain; Habsburg Austria; the original Roman Empire.

The period of scattered small autonomous city states was a historical "blip" of not much more than two hundred years due to a temporary political and military vacuum caused by the constant tug of war of various of these larger empires.

The core areas of Germany and Italy had been dominated by organized larger scale governments for the most part of the preceding two millenias (depending on region) before nationalism existed.
That's mob rule you're describing, not democracy. And mobs love trampling over the freedoms of minorities.
"mail" is actually a fantastic interface to an email box assuming you don't receive very much mail. I still use it for things like sending myself an email notification when a long-running job is finished.

Maybe this wasn't the case back then, but with the mailx the comes with modern Linux distros you can attach files using the -a flag
They already made posters with the title abolish intelligence agencies.

I find it hard to believe them, though. They seem to be against anything as soon as it gets unpopular.
TIME MAY BE UP,
http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/06/29/what-your-metada...
I will defer to your judgement on what is up to 'our standards' since your account is less than a year old.
> Life seems to have been an easy chemistry experiment.

What an absurd idea!
Great Free Android Apps For Kids
The issue is not that college or art school offers a worthwhile place of learning. Or that college is not a unique experience. The issue is that the cost is too high for what artists earn.

Relevant report on wages:
http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2013/majors-th...

Accordingly art majors make $35k coming out of college and top out at $57k. At that salary it is very hard to pay off $100k let alone $200k. In short, there is an upper bound for when going to school becomes a bad financial decision. Perhaps we have found it. Perhaps not, but I think that is the point of the article.

For the interested more numbers:

Art $34,400; Graphic Design $35,500; Fashion Design $36,300; Art History $36,400; Industrial Design (ID) $43,600.

Clearly these are averages and many people make more then this.
"I say, 'Just a minute while I contact my lawyer'."

Wouldn't it be amusing if, by revealing the request to an outside, third-party, your lawyer, you were in violation of the requirements of the request and had therefore committed a criminal act?

"...because of a double secret, triple top secret, national security, national command authority, black law..."

Of course, the judge is privy to the law and the government's evidence, even if you and your defense counsel are, regrettably, not. But he, naturally, can be trusted to understand the gravity of the situation and act in a fair, impartial manner with regards to the laws of this nation, right?

You poor bastard.
It's just statement of the impression they got. It doesn't give any explanation why they've thought that. They apparently think that splitting money between accounts is sign of attempts to conceal wealth and that it's done not because they want protection from criminals (also governments) but to keep ordinary users in the dark.

If I had 5% of all bitcoins I wouldn't keep them in single wallet either.
Could you describe what you find to be specifically "embarrassing" about the response?
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Excerpt from All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (1967) by Richard Brautigan

About the BBC TV series by the same name: "The Californian Ideology, a techno-utopian belief that computer networks could measure, control and self-stabilise societies, without hierarchical political control, and that people could become 'Randian heroes', only working for their own happiness, became widespread in Silicon Valley...but that the Californian Ideology had also been unable to stabilise it; indeed the ideology has not led to people being Randian heroes but in fact trapped them into a rigid system of control from which they are unable to escape."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of...
What is unclear is what qualifies as a "national security" issue, and what doesn't. It would be nice to see its scope clearly defined.

9/11 without question hurt America as a nation. But in the case of the Boston marathon event -- was national security threatened in that instance? If so, was national security threatened by the various mass shootings that happened in the year preceding the Boston marathon?

Similarly, perhaps one could argue that Bradley Manning, because of his disclosures, threatened national security. But does Julian Assange?

A foreign enemy shooting you on the battlefield: sure. But a guy recording himself making pro-Jihad speeches?

Russian moles probably count. But sympathizing free thinkers?
Could you explain the similarity you see between this message and "Mein Kampf"?
He pretends he didn't know?
Even if you agree that rights exist independently from any written record of those rights, there is still the fact that the public's concept of rights tends to change as culture changes. Despite the efforts of philosophers to connect rights to something more permanent than public opinion, the fact is that the key reason why we have rights is that we believe we have them. If we ceased to believe surely our rights would also go away.

In that sense, it is extremely helpful to have a document that attempts to make a permanent record of what are rights are and what we should expect from our government. The fact that such a document is (necessarily) incomplete does not make it any less valuable.
The thing about trust is once you lose it, it's very difficult to get back. These days every time I read something from the NSA, Congress or the White House, about spying on the public (most of it pathetically self congratulatory) I think bullshit.

The NSA needs to be cleaned out and the White House does as well.
Show HN: Grrrid, an RSS reader focused on images
I would guess that most civilizations don't use detectible radio communications for very long. Look at us now. Everything is going over the internet. I doubt that these signals travel much from Earth before dissipating to the point of being undetectable.
Theres a lot of history with lisp and a.i. Take for example the famous koza book for genetic programming in lisp. I think its to do with in lisp, the program is data which can be changed
i don't think astroturfing posts are typically this negative..
Do not give password advice without looking at the entropy.

Estimates of the entropy of English text place it below 1.5 bits per character. "The brown cow jumps over the moon." would, generously, have about 34 * 1.5 = 51 bits of entropy, plus a few more for the simplistic substitutions - say 70 bits total? This is assuming the sentence was, in fact, chosen uniformly across English sentences, which is obviously not going to be the case (this one being a modification of a line from a nursery rhyme), so in actuality it'll be even worse.

A fully random password of length 20, from characters on a typical keyboard (say 94, it seems to be on mine) would have 20 * lg(94) > 20 * 6.5 = 130 bits. But impossible to remember and a pain to type correctly.

Picking from my /usr/share/dict/words with no restrictions (99171 entries), it would take 70 / lg(99171) = 5 words to be stronger than the sentence and 130 / lg(99171) = 8 words to be stronger than the gibberish, with no substitutions or tweaks, however not all of those passwords could be typed on my keyboard.

Restricting /usr/share/dict/words to those which match (with LANG=C) '^[a-zA-Z]\{1,10\}$' yields 61078 words at about 7.3 bits of entropy per word, so you would get security comparable to the above with 5 (again - aliasing) and 9 words respectively.

Some nine-word passwords generated this way:

embryo distressed Ramadan chocks broaching official outstript explicit formulas
tokens bruskly realizing rubric earmarks aphorism sweeps hallelujah Bardeen
respects jocularity crummier leave spinsters Rodriquez hatch assurance torture
patinas Elba dairymaids blabbing kissing handyman Ind tobogganed directed
mossy Flora concepts medalist kidding heinously deafened evaluation nodes
Steinmetz lizard Janette scatted cunning geckos belched demurring grandest
faints nicest unleashes navel Monroe frostbites Pl loon careening
overtake tasselled quahog utters Upjohn incloses punchy Jericho reveille
sicked sinning premiere Satanism loiters accrual Caspar infatuate renewable
dinning hereabouts Lithuanian formalism voiceless demoted bundle teed fluent

The above were generated with
LANG=C grep "^[a-zA-Z]\{1,10\}$" /usr/share/dict/words | rl --reselect -c 10 | xargs

This is, obviously, reliant on an assumption that rl produces cryptographic level randomness, which is probably not the case but should certainly be near enough the case for examples (and in any case will be much, much closer to true than any method involving humans - we are very poor sources of cryptographic entropy).
Well, the beauty of a democratic society is that if a majority agree with you, then you can change the system.

This is technically true, but ignores the fact that it's a totally rigged game. You have a news media that's intent on dividing people over relatively small issues and pushing certain narratives. You have contractors who are paid to do the same online. You have a system of surveillance that could be used to discredit (or worse) promising political figures, and intimidate journalists. You have a large part of your government that operates in secret, under secret laws, preventing any kind of meaningful debate beyond "we need more transparency." All of this makes it incredibly difficult to get a majority to agree with anything that established powers don't approve of. It can be done (like we're seeing with marijuana legalization), but it requires a Herculean effort.
can you site the quality survey?
People keep saying this. A democratic nation derives its power from its people. These nations are not willing participants in the spying program. What you mean is that their elected representatives have sold out their country.
>Where are the macrostructures? We don't see Dyson spheres or other evident macroscale engineering. Everything we can see so far looks natural. This is more troubling than an absence of detectable communications.

Assuming a Dyson sphere was nearby, how would we detect it? What would it look like? If it's able to make use of most of a star's radiation output, wouldn't that make it very difficult to see? It wasn't until recently that we were able to detect black holes and I'd have to guess a Dyson sphere's star would be much less massive and energetic than that.
You aren't going to pull down 7 figures on a one-man AC repair business. In that type of business, you are just renting out your time, and nobody is paying $1,000/hr for an AC repairman's time. You can scale it, definitely, and have an army of repairmen working under you and then make tons of money, but then you're no longer talking about a one-man business.
Mac only at the moment
First off, very cool! Nice work.

If multiple developers can modify files at the same time, how do you handle merge conflicts when syncing?
I like nmh, though it takes a lot of setup to get usable (which I've admittedly not yet done since my last change of computers).
No, but if it was, they would, right?
One of the key's to high incomes is personal spending habits. Spend 105% what you make and your stuck on debts treadmill. Spend less than 70% of what you make and not only do you have a cushion that lasts longer, but you can take a significant pay cut without issue. Now let's say you have a great idea, if your over 25 then scraping together 6 months living expenses pluss a little working capital is easy, by 30 taking 2 years off is not that risky. After that you can start looking into angle type investing. Granted, the risks are still there but being able to take more of them greatly increases your long term chances.
No you're right. At least Hitler was being honest about what he thought.

This is just straight up lies to appease the sheeple. I'd say this man is literally worse than Hitler in that respect.
Nice. Just signed up! Can't wait to try it!
Considering the vast time scales and the vastness of the galaxy, the most plausible explanation for me is still that we happen to live in a historical dark zone.

But it's fun to speculate since any number or combination of events might be responsible for the absence of fellow civilizations.

There is a Great Filter argument that tries to say that we're really, really, really special or that our civilization-ending event might still be in the future. Since we're speculating, I don't think the biological filter argument is very plausible. Historically, we have always been proven utterly wrong after presuppositions of specialness. On the other hand if the Filter is ahead of us, it would have to happen very soon - good candidates for this remain AI, nano tech, or plain apathy. But then again assuming these would be an issue for every advanced civilization seems a stretch.

The simulation argument only makes a difference if the simulation is specifically targeted and limited to simulating us humans. If it's just a universe in a box, it wouldn't tip the scales either way.

The Drake equation and its cousins are nice, but they contain a lot of unknowns. Still, it's a good tool that shows how easy it would be to have statistical fluctuations resulting in a dark epoch.

I personally like the Agents of Suppression theory as well. It wouldn't even have to be another civilization suppressing everything directly - it could just as well be a completely automated armada of leftover killer robots. In my opinion it's one of the more plausible hostile alien invasion-stories as well: one day, we'll fulfill a set of unknown criteria and are simply tagged for extermination. But again, they would have to come our way pretty soon, like in the next 1000 years (which is not a lot of time). This would require a pangalactic drone network for observation and a fast local strike capability. Not completely unfeasible, but not exactly obvious either.

The absence of large-scale artifacts is also interesting, but we have to ask ourselves if we could even detect, say, a ring world or a Dyson sphere if it was in our direct neighborhood (and chances are, it wouldn't be that close). Also, intelligent civilizations would not necessarily produce them. However it would be enough if a few did build huge structures. Again, I don't think we're advanced enough to detect them (or their absence) with any confidence.
You mean... a CODE?? Now there's a new idea.
I don't see that assumption in the parent's post. You apparently are operating under the assumption that politicians are less two-faced than they are.
This is just misplaced indignation. As long as there have been countries, even friendly nations have conducted espionage against each other. Give me a break.
Moreover, this isn't a new idea, it led to the opposition many founding fathers had to "Standing Armies".

Soldiers are, in a sense, slaves. A standing army is a vast apparatus under direct control of an executive.

But, the opposition to standing armies is long forgotten. We also forgot the reason why only congress was given the authority to declare war, which has become dead letter, and these ideas considered quaint and outdated. But 1776 wasn't that long ago in the history of human governments, and the history of human governments is the history of abusing power.

"Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever." - Cicero
Too bad there isn't median data. I would be pretty surprised if these numbers weren't skewed by a few giants making a ton of money.
Social Wallpapering
What about encrypting such data?

Does the app encrypt the communications?
You're right. Soldiers are ignorant sheeple unlike us here on reddit and HN who actually understand things.

It would be much better to have someone from reddit or HN in charge of the NSA. It could be decided by upvotes. Does anyone want to start a poll?
All things considered that's pretty sad, though. A digital archive format that cannot reliably be read by machines, even if it contains just text.
Assume away. But France is not Denmark and vice versa.
Every time something is released, people like you come on HN to say, "Really, you're all so naive, were you really surprised?"

Would you mind please telling us the next big development before it happens so that we can get a jump-start on being so surprised?
you can delete feeds now. hover one and click the trash icon. thanks!
I'm not sure what your sarcasm proposes. So is your plan to mark this day as the day that all nations become friendly to each other or something? It sort of is what it is and nations have to do what they have to do. Personally, I think equating the US with brutal regimes like those of China and Russia are a bit silly, but ok.
Reddit co-founder: Tech companies can help fight NSA snooping [video]
Is that a picture of Murray Rothbard? Pretty fitting :)
"The challenge of these leaks is exacerbated by a lack of public understanding of the safeguards in place and little awareness of the outcomes that our authorities yield."

This is a self inflicted wound that they are refusing to accept responsibility for. While I am against domestic data collection without cause period, when it happens there should be informed consent, not blind trust that they won't abuse the privilege. Furthermore, the handling of any of this data, whether domestic or foreign by defense/security contractors should be banned. Add any other entity that would have an economic incentive to secretly abuse said access to that information to the list.
Worth pointing out that if you use LastPass and the US government wants a list of all of the accounts you use, a history of when you logged in to them, the IPs you were using when you logged in, and your usernames and passwords, they can get it.

All they need is a court order to compell LastPass to target your account with some modified backdoored JS. They have done this before to force Hushmail to send backdoored java applets to targetted users.

I used LastPass for a very short time. I now use a PGP encrypted text file.
I don't know if I would necessarily call that debunked. It only means the previously debunked introduced revisions to amplify their original points and the debunkers disclaimed that their debunk may be outdated in part or in full. Or not at all. I wouldn't necessarily assume that it's a forfeit. It could just mean the debunkers didn't want to invest more time into it. It's weird that they didn't link to the revisions though.
That's only true if the voters have visibility of what they're voting for. That's wht is so bad about this situation, the secracy negates the foundation of democracy
Culture Shock: iPhone to Android and Back Again
The tone sounds slightly panicked. I wonder what's going on over there; especially with the way he bolded the fact that people should keep working. I wonder if that's just his writing style (military folk love urgency), if it betrays a growing rift within the organization, or both.
Almost entirely off topic, but I was caught off guard by the following line:

> Your dedication is unsurpassed, your patriotism unquestioned, and your skills are the envy of the world.

Your patriotism unquestioned! I wonder, is there any democratic country outside the US where patriotism is so much a thing? What does it mean, really? I love my country, so I'll do.. what? What would I do that I wouldn't do if I didn't love my country? Are those things actually always the right thing to do?

I'm not really getting to a point here. I'm just surprised that a term as strong as "patriotism" is used to casually. Do common people in the US really identify with being a patriot? Or is this just army-speak?
Looks good - thanks for the tip
Ask HN: Very reliable uuid1 collisions in Python 2.7.3?
Since friday I've been arguing with a project owner about the use of uuid1 in their project as I can rapidly and reliably cause uuid1 collisions in a single process in under 1 second of testing.

I wrote a test script here https://gist.github.com/devdave/5892749 that always fails in .05 to .09ths of a second.

I originally discovered this was happening when testing out cqlengine ( an ORM like interface to cassandra for python ) and opened an issue ticket.
Here's the issue ticket - https://github.com/cqlengine/cqlengine/issues/82

I've gone down the line, isolating the issue to the gist, trying a pristine Ubuntu 12.04 instance, and still gotten the same results.

The source code for uuid1 in Python 2.7.3 is mirrored here https://github.com/certik/python-2.7/blob/master/Lib/uuid.py#L490

And I discovered after setting https://github.com/certik/python-2.7/blob/master/Lib/uuid.py#L500 `_uuid_generate_time` to None the collisions went away suggesting theres a problem in libuuid or more likely how Virtualbox implements /dev/random

Still this seems like a somewhat major gotcha that someone else should have at least run into before... right?

My dev stack:
Virtualbox 4.2.10 r84104
Precise 32bit Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Python 2.7.3
#ldconfig -p | grep libuuid
libuuid.so.1 (libc6) => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libuuid.so.1

Currently upgrading virtualbox to see if its a VM implementation issue thats been resolved.
If the resources are kept in check and the infrastructure is maintained in a sane manner, there's no reason why the service can't work well on donations alone. It's no Wikipedia after all, and certainly serving static pages would require far less overhead than server-side scripting (of course, this excludes logins/sessions, but considering how simple the backend is and sessions are limited there, it shouldn't require too much overhead either).

And I don't think the creator feels this is a "business" in any way. It's more like an ambitious hobby/public service.
I like that it is built using angular so I can get some tips on how authentication is done. However I think the UI needs work, for example expanding a feed button is all the way to the other side, why not slide down on click of title? I found some UI bugs for example, where the + and power icon was underlapping under my feed. The power button also does nothing for me. I also had issues with adding non rss feeds.
Otherwise I like it. Nice work.
Basically, the optimizer failed to notice that

(long)(c?a:b)

can be turned into

(c?(long)a:(long)b)

And that since a and b are literals, the cast to long is free in the latter case, but costs two instructions and a register in the former case.

Note that this is very much compiler-specific (the person asking the question didn't say which compiler he was using), and I did not get the same slowdown in the Mono compiler (with or without LLVM).