skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. That's exactly why the system has gotten so far out of kilter. Muting or disabling the normal feedback loops has set the stage for the escalation of abuse that we've been witnessing ever since the banksters that cratered the economy got bonuses in place of prison terms.

The economy and state security are both suffering from a hugely captured Congress. The flip side is that regaining control of our legislators would mean solving myriad problems at once. Or at least, starting to address them in ways that make sense to and for the people.

Breaking this hold isn't a one shot deal. Rather, it requires dismantling four interlocking institutions which have, in combination, the toxic effect we're becoming acutely aware of.

Specifically, we need to open closed primaries, end partisan redistricting, switch from private campaign finance to public, and brick up the revolving door between the public and private sectors by placing a lifetime hellban on future employment of public officials by any private interest they've overseen.

Obviously, these reforms will make a stint in public office far less lucrative than it is right now, so there is a zero percent chance that Congress will initiate them freely. That means support for these reforms must become the primary condition for winning elected office in the first place.

I have no idea how to get a critical mass of Americans to single-mindedly enforce this condition. But I can't think of any other way for them to recover an essential measure of control over Congress. So that's the problem in a nutshell.
Reality? To which reality are you referring? How are you so certain what the reality here is or is not? How is your version of reality any more or less likely to be the truth?

So, no one has proven what happened. That cuts both ways. And that's the point: there are unanswered questions. No one is stating for a fact that foul play was involved. People are merely asking questions. And, given the plausibility of foul play and the incredibly mind-blowing implications if there was foul play, it is much more rational to ask questions than to summarily dismiss out of hand that it is worth asking questions, or to ridicule those who do.

Your post doesn't come off as clever. It just seems thoughtless and unserious.
I love my country (USA) but I feel like like we are on such a stupid path. I get the "make the rich people a lot richer" thing, but we need to get our act together and do it quickly. I think that Snowden is screwed, but he has given us a chance, very small chance, to get our act together and bow out of this Empire thing.
>Mozilla's user stats show that 96% of Firefox Beta users restart their browsers daily and 98% within 2 days.

This number would absolutely plunge if they would allow plug-ins/extensions to be installed without restarting the whole browser. Ridiculous.
You should correct the wikipedia article, then. According to it, he renounced his citizenship, became stateless, and prior to that he served his probation sentence, and is therefore not wanted by US law enforcement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Gogulski

Always annoying when Wikipedia is wrong about everything.
He really should have sent the story, in the email.
Getting on the HN front page is a crapshoot...it's only partially related to the content of the submission and the headline, and strongly related to what else is trending and who happens to be checking the 'New' links. Everytime I think I'm being deliberately ignored, I think of the time poor Jeremy Ashkenas had to submit a PHP-related link just to get noticed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2864185
Bigger than XSS, I think that would create API rot (though I think Google is going in that direction already.)

The only thing worse than having a proprietary API to interact with your application is to have a proprietary API that can only be run from a proprietary sandbox. On the other hand, Google could make APIs publicly available so someone running on whatever platform could easily call them. This doesn't solve the security problems, but if Google can't trust external people with the API a sandbox isn't going to do a lot of good.
i consciously draw letters.

and my old man was forced to write right handed.. i am not sure what they called the method where the teacher would crack your knuckles with a yard stick if you messed up, but that is how he was taught. most perfect, effortless bloody handwriting of anyone i knew. with either hand.

learning can be painful. not learning might be worse.
Xbox One to get big memory bandwidth boost in final hardware?
The engine came out of the car and was thrown some distance along the sidewalk.

I don't know how fast you'd have to be going to make that happen, but I would guess 70 or 80 mph.

One possibility suggested upthread is that he fell asleep while driving, and given that it was 4:30am I think we have to admit that that is entirely plausible. The weight of his leg could have pressed the accelerator, and in a car like that he could have been doing 70 pretty quickly.

Of course it's not hard to come up with darker possibilities if you want to. He was drugged... his car was tampered with... whatever. I can't rule these out entirely, and under the circumstances I agree that skepticism and further investigation are warranted, but if I had to bet right now, I'd wager he just fell asleep.
It looks like the document is included in the article in a PDF viewer. Sometimes those don't show up because of ad-blockers.

The Examiner does tend to cherry-pick, and it's definitely worth reviewing the document. I searched the doc for "facebook" and it looks to me like the broader goal was engagement, not "likes" as an end-all. They were working off the assumption that more likes meant more engagement, and during that campaign, people started to realize and point out that it wasn't happening. And to that end it appears to be a waste of $630k.

But it's not the case that they just blindly wanted more likes because it feels good. (The article doesn't say that, but a lot of people think about "likes" that way). Facebook and Twitter are legit ways to reach international audiences, for example, to disseminate propaganda / information (depending on how you lean).
Natural Language Understanding-focused awards announced
Learn the shortcuts, it isn't very hard.
Did you guys see the 16 page PDF detailing remote auto take-over? Some are speculating that his car was remotely controlled via this method or tampered with such that his breaks failed.

If you haven't seen that PDF, ill to find the link.
Interesting parallel (I know the events are not equivalent, but still):

Here's a report of a Mercedes crashed at Nurburgring by a test driver:
http://www.automotto.com/2014-mercedes-benz-sls-amg-black-se...

Both the test driver and the passenger walked away unharmed. Do note that this was on the track, where the cars are supposedly driven at much higher speeds than on regular roads.
An honest question: is there a rational reason to get upset about this but not about other State Dept. marketing/PR efforts? This number is a small fraction of the State Department's overall budget and it increased their engagement from 100,000 likes to 2 million.

I feel like the title invites a kneejerk reaction, but its entirely possible this was the best way the State Department had to increase their accessibility.
Designing code with RSpec
Or we're all exposed to mind-altering substances that make us paranoid, making us think he was exposed to drugs, thinking he was chased. It's the contrails, I tell you!
It would be scary if Snowden is not heard from within a day or two after this. Doesn't seem like he would ever be the type to vanish purposely.
Moto X: Better than Instant
Markdown CSS styles
Hacker exploits Ubisoft website to swipe user data
Maybe it was related to TrapWire, a cloud service that has facial, emotional, and behavioral recognition. It would tie in well with the upstream fibertap, and PRISM programs.
Thanks for the reply, danso, I thought I might be in the Cone of Silence. Any thoughts on how to get there without being spammy?

I've been reading HN regularly for several years, so it feels a little weird to finally have something to say and have it just disappear like that.
NYT actually has a perfectly cromulent story which explains some (though definitely not all) of the confusing aspects of the story. Apparently airspace shenanigans haven't been going on just today, for instance.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/03/world/europe/snowden.html?...
s/Spain/Portugal/
This is a good idea, and looks promising. Running it going on other browsers than Chrome would be nice.

Is there any way of getting it compatible with the Syncdocs program which does local machine encryption of Google Drive files? It looks like Syncdocs does AES256

http://www.syncdocs.com/encryption-settings-help/
I am ashamed to be French.
Hypothetically, a win for either Axis or Eastern bloc would spell disaster for capitalism. That practically guarantee that US would join in the fray, one way or another, indirectly or directly. Pearl Harbour helped alot with the decision making, as other members pointed out in this thread and the general consensus on America's participation in WW2.
Hacker Weev Appeals AT&T Security Breach Conviction
I don't think it's quite the same phenomenon, although related. This is about the mental error that people do in assuming that a swing in vocalized opinion is due to people changing their minds, while it's actually just different people speaking up at different times (when it suits them). Example: "Apple fan-boys used to claim skeuomorphism is the best, but now they suddenly prefer flat design, such hypocrites!".
Non-sheeple like us here on reddit and HN see the US for what it is.

I wish the sheeple could see it too but they're blinded by the mainstream media.

sigh The curse of being an intelligent free-thinker.
What distributed application can not be "philosofed" into essentially being a distributed database, and I feel like I'm just repeating your question.

With that in mind, I believe it boils down to where is the logic located, with the data, or not. Because a lot of "databases" are just used as a datastore.

So let me try to create some scenarios:

1. To push out a product(Startup/Prototype/POC): Develop in the technology you know, and let the stake holders know you are acquiring Technical Debt.
After startup/prototype product is a success. Explain to stake holders why you need to move to a better technology stack that supports distributed systems "better".

2. If you have a design or product, develop directly in a distributed technology stack.

It boils down to use the correct tool for the correct job, but you will mostly only know if you used the correct tool later in the development of the product.
The NSA/US government probably has lots of dirt on politicians in these countries, and are applying it. Democracies are not so much democracies when the NSA can blackmail local politicians. I personally believe that this is the whole point of our large scale sweep of "everyone" surveillance, no matter how innocent they are.
Your tax $ at work...
VCs Confident In Bitcoin’s Bright Future, Despite So Many Unknowns
> How do you like it when you click on an ad that looks like it has useful information behind it, and you come to a page that's mostly ads?

Was that a Freudian slip? If I click on an ad that doesn't fulfill my expectation, the advertiser failed and will feel it, the market fixes this in the long run.

If I click on a search result (perhaps you meant that) and I get to see mostly ads, I can a) install an ad blocker, b) go back and click on the next result, c) ignore the ads or actually click on the ads. But there's nothing about this that warrants special treatment for Google's pages, which are full of ads. If Google thinks, users will not like pages full of ads, they should stop cluttering their search results with them. If they don't, they're just giving themselves an unfair advantage over the indexed pages.
Give me $600,000 and I'll double that 2 million likes to 4 million likes. Does that add any value for end users of the State Dept. (i.e. taxpayers)?
I would disagree for the most part when it comes to twitch. Games such as Stacraft have many small details happening at once that informed viewers wan't to be paying attention to, and on a small screen a lot of it blurs together. I've watched on my phone before and all of the small things escaped me despite knowing what to look for.
Have you considered starting with Grails? It's a much easier jump into the "java-ish" world. The main benefit is you can choose to run a grails application and rely on java jars for when you need performance boosts.
On the two occasions I have used it, Google flights was able to find me cheaper tickets than what Southwest offers. It is now my first stop, and then I double check Southwest to see if they can beat what Google has shown.
Daily Apple IIGS user here, with one 65816 project on github. :) There are still a few of us. For what it's worth, mine is stable at 12MHz (hot-rodded Transwarp GS), and is completely solid-state: CompactFlash and LCD only, no floppies or CRT monitors. I may not have used it to write this post, but I'm still busy trying to beat all the games.
Ex-pat in Bolivia here. People here are _pissed_ at this abuse. I wish Snowden does make his way here to Bolivia and hides in the jungle. Good luck finding him.
Wonder if his notes could be found, I imagine they would have been cloud backed.
Prezi Funds Development of New Computer Programming Language
Exactly same disgusting thing happens to my app. I have filed a complaint to Apple weeks ago and yet to receive any response.
Seattle Times Editorial Board’s Pitiful Swing at McGinn’s Gigabit Broadband
> When a car crashes isn't an engine pushed back into the cabin, not thrown forwards?

It certainly can be, but considering that he hit a tree -- a narrow object, not like a wall -- I could imagine that if the impact point was not in the center of the car, the tree might not have been directly in front of the engine, and thus it could come out.

Obviously he had to have been going petty fast, though.
Because law enforcement abusing power and doing crazy shit flat out never happens.

I agree that foul play doesn't seem like the most likely cause, and I don't expect it is systemic if so, but seeing "he was on to a pocket of more explicit corruption and they offed him" as outside the realm of possibility seems odd.
It's a weird little thing, an LCD where each pixel has a bit of memory. This means that you can simply provide enough power to the LCD to drive the pixels and because of the built in memory it will display whatever it had been displaying, there's no need to continuously refresh the display from a buffer or any of the usual tricks of driving a display.

Unlike true e-ink it won't retain its state while unpowered but it does require incredibly low power for operation (tens of microwatts). They are commercially available components: http://www.sharpmemorylcd.com/
It's really a sign of how blinded we've all become to the mainstream media's message that the entire front page isn't 100% Snowden related articles.

I am very scared for the world that even here on HN we are not 100% focused on where Snowden might be.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Cabin_nos...

Why would they need the little folding umbrella on the plane if they weren't worried about exposure to the chemicals in the black drums?

This is why I've asked the orderlies to let me skip recreation hour in the yard!
It's just luck, I think...probably only 1 out of 20 of the links I submit get more than a few upvotes.

In regards to your app submission, the title does sound too spammy...and the content is probably a turn off for most HN users, who don't like having to actually log in/download something before finding out what it does. I'd consider writing a blog post that walks step-by-step through some of the technology/code you used to implement your app...Most people probably aren't initially excited by a treasure hunt app, but many of us hackers always like to be inspired by novel ways to use image recognition and/or GPS.
Warcraft (both WOW and WC3) are pretty much dead as far as esports go. Most have converted to Starcraft 2 which generally gets the highest viewers for individual streamers (10k is the highest you usually see for players like IdrA, Demuslim and Stephano) although League of Legends dominates live events.
Uh, no. Breitbart was a lot of things, but certainly not a journalist of nearly the same caliber. And given that he claimed to work on "big stories" pretty much all the time, we can take that out of the equation, too.

And your disingenuous argument trying to tie drone attacks into that is an utter disservice to truth. To quote from the fine article: "could target a citizen if he was a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda involved in plots against the country and if his capture was not feasible."

Whatever your position on this is, you need to stretch mightily to make this into "the government is indiscriminately killing people it doesn't like".

So please remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And try to bring at least the tiniest bit of evidence to a post that's rather light on them.
The truth is that we'll never know.

Maybe in 10 years some whistleblower will come out and admit, but probably not. The way Snowden is being treated you'd have to be crazy to do it now...
I believe Ben Smith said it was about Barrett Brown.
As I've said before, it's disappointing this C&D came from California, especially when I view our state as one that embraces tech.

I speculate that the purpose of this publicized cease and desist letter was just to send a message about DFI's disapproval of Bitcoin and ward off adopters of the awesome crypto.
Browsers just need to actually get on the security bandwagon and build support for public key crypotagraphy into an api. Then you could generate keys, export them to back them up / use them on different machines, and these solutions would actually be usable. As in, I could type in someone's email address, and it would find their public key and encrypt the message to them. People have known since the 70s that symmetric encryption is just not easy enough to use for normal people (key exchange is hard). We have local storage - why can't be have local keys?

Realistically, I bet the way this will mostly be used is that people will exchange keys through an unsecure medium (like, a non-encrypted GMail message, or if people are being clever, GTalk...), and the whole thing will feel good but be nothing that a little bit of work on Googles end couldn't undo.
No, they are trying to show the world the value of collecting data on millions of innocent law abiding citizens and how it enables accurate targeting of which plane a whistleblower is on almost as well as it can prevent terrorists bombing marathons and flying into buildings.
With an eye on Apple, Google is planning a smart watch
I believe it's a Dassault Falcon. See: http://www.flightradar24.com/data/airplanes/fab-001

Still a good point, but a Falcon has about twice the range.
Guess that explains why I want to work hard... I want to make my own marshmallows
After developing for Netscape 3 and 4, IE4-6 were a breath of fresh air.

if(document.layers) ...
Reality -- is that the place where our President has an American citizen, without trial or court order, killed by a drone? Yeah, it is. So while not proven, certainly not beyond the pale from what we do know is true.
"I feel like the title invites a kneejerk reaction, but its entirely possible this was the best way the State Department had to increase their accessibility."

Developing a presence on social media, sure. Buying "likes"..? I'd need to see a convincing case that this helps in any way.

To me it sounds like a way of 'juking the stats', as they would say in The Wire. A way for the people who created the social media program to report to the higher-ups that "things are working really well, see, we have millions of people liking us and using our pages!"
When you tell your kid Santa Claus isnt real, they already know. But when you admit it its often the first time they realize that their parents lie. If Santa Claus is fake, the Easter Bunny is probably fake too. Then one day they are sitting in church and a picture of Jesus Christ falls out of someone's bag and onto the floor. Your kid sits there, starring at upside down Jesus, and cant help but notice how much he looks like his school bus driver. After that, all the lies of the adult world unravel.
> How does a 2013 model Mercedes Benz with a five star ANCAP safety rating (the highest rating you can get) scoring 35.51 points scored out of 37 (an Australian car safety rating for reference) with more airbags than wheels (8 airbags for those of you playing at home including a curtain airbag that drops in-front of the passenger and driver protecting the head and upper-body from impacting anything) crash into a tree without there even being another vehicle involved?

You are massively confused over what airbags do. They don't do anything at all to reduce the chances that one will drive one's car into a tree. They only come into play AFTER an accident has begun.
> How long will it be before people no longer feel safe expressing opinions online?

Since about three months ago:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/07/01/197669...
"Neither has been proved, therefore either is equally likely" is false, and if you believed that to be the case you would be horribly calibrated in your judgements, and parent would be right to criticize it. Plausibility is of course a much lower standard, but there is still some correct level of belief; I disagree with the parent in asserting that it is clearly below "plausible" but it's a legitimate discussion.
Interesting to see that France and Portugal are willing to risk their diplomatic relations with South America for getting Snowden. I would not have expected that. I would guess people and politicians in Bolivia are quite pissed right now.
It's 2013, people.
> Not relevant, the problem is that IE6 didn't work with the web back then

I think you're mis-remembering a little. Or maybe you had a different job than I did.

Back then, the web WAS IE6. There was nothing else. And it really was, for a time, a popularly-praised relief from the previous browser wars. I didn't have a standard but then again, at least I had a standard. You can design for IE6 and be sure it would "just work" everywhere because IE6 was the only option. Market share in the mid 90's IIRC.

The real crime is, as you went on to explain, the utter stagnation. And of course insult was added to injury when Firefox was released. For years then we DID legitimately have the trouble of designing for one modern browser and one curmudgeon who just happened to still have 4/5th's of the market. Lame.
Maybe because it smacks of "buying" love? It doesn't help that the thing here is called "Likes" and they are literally paying money to get people to "Like" them...so yes, your suspicion is right that some of this is connotation. On the other hand, I think most people here don't like the idea of PR/propaganda period and the fact that it's Facebook-powered propaganda makes it even more unpopular.

But part of it just seems like a fool's plan. There's a sneaking suspicion (OK, from me, at least) that they've paid money for a lot of magic beans without any real way to measure ROI.
Good call - lease a bigger 16-core 32GB box such as your database server on their managed hosting platform (not cheap), and then just spin up cloud instances connected to that server using RackConnect which seems to be some fancy, cumbersome routing/vlan monstrosity.
Facebook will now let you beta test its Android app
I was an affirmative action 'imposter'
Teen in jail for months over 'sarcastic' Facebook threat
Dividends of Being Foolishly Optimistic
After the 200th failure and rejection, I said to myself, "fuck it," and chose to be foolishly optimistic.
This is seriously a crazy, upside down world we live in lately.
Show HN: Reformatting an NSA faq using Sidenote.io