skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly - there is broad consensus, and the controversy is manufactured.

Anybody remember Bush's tax rebate?

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/2008-04-25-...

Or all the times Republicans talk about how we can't cut defense spending because of the jobs that would be lost?

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/05/military-spe...

When push comes to shove, they're all Keynesians, anything to the contrary is just populistic rhetoric or opportunistic bashing of things they don't approve of. Pretty much everyone agrees spending boosts GDP in the short run, they may disagree about the size of the fiscal multiplier, what government should spend on, how big it should be, whether it will cause inflation, how much unemployment is structural, what the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment is, etc.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-23/the-u-s-economic-po...
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer?

The document explicitly called the EU a "target".
Check if your app's Gemfile is ready for Rails 4
Why focus only on the negative, or on a situation for which it would obviously be a terrible choice? It's never going to be as powerful as a battery powered flashlight; that's not really the point.

It might, however, be awfully useful in a stiatuion where there is no ambient light available at all, or where equipment needs to be light and very simply constructed. Perhaps something like in an emergency kit in case of a mine or cave collapse. Or in a situation with very adverse operating conditions, like a desert. Moving parts (as for a hand crank torch) would be a liability in an environment with omnipresent particulate contamination.
CIA faulted for choosing Amazon over IBM on cloud contract
> " I doubt the flashlights would work well, if at all, at room temperature"

I found it a bit disappointing that they mentioned one use case as finding candles when the power is out, shortly after mentioning that it works only marginally at 50 degrees F. It takes quite a while for a normally-heated house to drop to that temperature.

It's a neat invention, no doubt, but the practical use cases for this particular version are going to be outdoors.
I've gotta take beef with the deployment comment, we use Java at my job and the deployment is quite specifically awesome. There is a single package management system, maven repositories, and multiple build options using that management system.

But the reason deployment is awesome is because of the nature of shipping an assembled pile of bytecode. You can build an assembly that statically links in all the code you depend on, and bang: You have one jar (or war) file, can run java -cp myjar.jar MyClassName and all of your dependencies have been packed into the jar for you. It's so easy. No management of which dependencies have been installed where.
Yes, this would be wonderful.
I don't know when he asked the Postgres devs but since I've been using Postgres (2007ish I guess?) PG has been part of Debian and could be installed via the package manager in a trivial way and immediately ready to use.
Maybe Mozilla could invent some standardized encryption technology. They are the only ones that are remotely trustworthy enough to do something like that.
I saw similar reports in a thread a few months ago. I came away with the impression that granting access to downvotes is like calculating average karma - it doesn't happen in real time, but does happen eventually.

Congratulations on completing karma level five hundred. From now on, it's just karma for karma's sake.
Why with the energy cells without the laser rifle?
Reject Google's 'ineffective' antitrust fixes, plead Europe's publishers
"he is instead annoyed by your post to announce your minor decision to the world"

Well, I'm annoyed by these other people's announcements of their minor decisions to play this game despite it being a threat to their security and privacy.

So, I don't agree with the mouthbreathing masses. It won't be the first nor the last time.

You know these same people would probably be exploited by some dancing baby app, punch the monkey game, or porn app which they fell all over themselves to install, and then announced to the world how great it is!

Yeah, I don't want to be hacked or tracked like the rest of these morons are. Sue me.
If elderly without a family is not more than 2-3% of the population, I don't think it's anything that charities wouldn't be able to do.

And that is assuming people are completely irresponsible and don't save during their lifetime. Pensions is just that, but with a middleman.
If your extremities' temperature is cooler than the ambient temperature, maybe all you need is a version with the heat-collection plates flipped?
Google implements Chrome app scanning for G+ developer site
This is embarrassing...This is no different than Soviet behavior, and a huge break in trust for the Obama administration. How can a nation host the UN if it is abused and bugged. Just disgusting.
Local context doesn't require personal tracking, just geolocation information. It doesn't need a dossier on me to know I am searching from San Francisco.
>It's my understanding of the present state of affairs in most countries.

My understanding is that there are laws against murder in most countries. Do you have any evidence to the contrary? This is a rather surprising claim. I don't see anything to back it up in the Wikipedia article on Murder in English common law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_English_law

>So I don't think it even makes sense for there to be a moral imperative that only exists in certain circumstances

Why not? Ethical situationism certainly makes sense, even if you don't agree with it.

In any case, you can just assume that there is a conditional moral imperative to obey the laws if there are any, in which case this imperative could perfectly well have been valid throughout human history. Most moral imperatives presuppose the existence of things which don't necessarily exist. E.g., "don't steal" presupposes the existence of property.

>What makes you think it is morally permissible to steal something just because the owner had obtained it immorally?

If he obtained it immorally then in what sense does he "own" it? At most in a legal sense. But that shouldn't matter to you.
Our Journey To Empower A Thousand New Kickpreneurs
Wow, an encouraging comment on HN? Not assuming they're a moron?!?! You give me hope for this place.

Speaking of phase-change materials, why not fill the flashlight with them? It still wouldn't be steady-state of course, but I envision the fan eating up all the power. Heat pipes might help, but they still leave the problem of heat rejection. Evaporative cooling pad?
I don’t want to be able to easily rename a hundred method calls, because why the hell am I calling a method from a hundred different places?

So if I don't have a tool that lets me rename a method everywhere it's called, then the guy who left the company two years ago won't have called it a hundred times from poorly-factored code? Sweet! I'll uninstall my IDE first thing Monday morning and let you know how it goes.
You missed the whole point. Randomness exists in both normal and chaotic systems. The difference is that in normally distributed systems, randomness can be predicted.
Well, UK openly said that if Snowden arrives in the UK he won't be allowed into the country, so there you have the "democratic and free" countries. But to be honest, people should be really upset about the stuff he leaked about GCHQ since it turns out to be as bad as NSA, yet people hardly talk about it.
No, we don't. A great talk and an illustration about how law and protection could work in a stateless society: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o by David D. Friedman (an economist AND a lawyer).
Digital Darwinism - Survival of the Fittest in the 21st Century
Cassandra – using collections and maps asynchronously using Datastax Java API
In this article, we will see how we can use collections and maps in column families, using the brand new Datastax Java API and Cassandra.
This flashlight wouldn't be great for lighting up shadows created by strong ambient light, but in complete darkness, even a little light makes a huge difference.

I'm thinking backup light source for camping, spelunking, power outages at home... just enough light to find a path when there is no other light.
Well the article does say that it works ok at 41 degrees and kinda sorta at 50 degrees. As with most things, its level of impressiveness varies with your understanding of the physics involved.

The interesting question for a science fair would be to see what she had learned of the science. Did she evaluate the efficiency of the Peltier device? (typically single digit percentages) Did she compute the amount of work you could do with different energy differentials? Coming up with the total joules available, versus the joules harvested? Did she look at the efficiency of the LED to convert energy into light. What is its lumens per joule rating, and given the choices did she look at single color light (say red) versus broad spectrum light via a 'white' LED (which is a UV led exciting phosphors to get different colors). Did she go over the various enhancement strategies (drop an ice cube in a hollow tube inside the light?).

And most importantly, given what she has learned about how one can convert a temperature differential into work, what other problems might she solve with that principle?

It is unfortunate that ExtremeTech goes for the link baitey angle "ooh a flashlight that works off body heat" and less on the "Hey if we teach kids real science, they can do stuff!" (which in my opinion is a better angle on the story).
If you specify the right options in the manifest (or configure the maven assembly plugin appropriately) you can reduce it to java -jar myjar.jar.

But these megajars have other issues when you need to run in slightly more advanced scenarios, e.g. hosted Akka or Play. It's not hard to end up with multiple versions of the same library on the classpath, and the wrong ones getting chosen.
There are the very real issues of apathy and media-influenced distractions. For example, here's the last 30 days of Google search traffic on "NSA" vs. "Paula Deen":

http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=nsa%2C%22paula+deen%2...
the problem with economics is its self-conscious insistence on being taken seriously as a rigorous, hard(ish) science which leads to an over use of complex, fancy looking mathematical models that, given the subject, require a great many assumptions to "work". in a dynamic, human-created system with constantly changing rules (society) those assumptions are often massive over simplifications or quickly made obsolete with the passage of time. better to think of economics as philosophy with which statistics might be applied rather than a science in and of itself...(i have a graduate degree in economics)
HTML5 as Enterprise Strategy? No, It’s Not Magic
Ask somebody who actually shipped a game on a PS3 what APIs they have used. Simples. Since you have over 20+ titles you surely know somebody in the industry and don't need to rely on Wikipedia and ycombinator's comment to obtain information.
In other words, you'd rather have a really big and powerful gang that is impossible to fight, than many more competing small gangs? Totally sold me on the idea.
Did you read the comments under the article? I usually do not buy sexism in tech, but this got me.
Mobile leap forward for Probability
I made it no longer public if anyone reads this, it was probably a stupid idea broadcasting who I was publicly in this context because that is a sure way of shooting yourself in the foot in case an employer didn't ask about the specifics.
Paraffin would be a good choice, although just putting a slug of copper into it and storing it in the freezer would probably work just as well. Of course you have to be able to find your freezer in the dark ...
No, not at all: what can be predicted can because it is essentially free from that randomness.

The fact that it is easy because the distribution is normal has nothing to do with the randomness. Really.

You cannot 'predict' randomness in a normal distribution as you cannot in a geometric or uniform.
Very clever!

I'll state for the purposes of prior art that, if you can get enough power to add a little fan or other air-moving mechanism to the circuit to pull air through the tube/heatsink, it will operate in still air for as long as a human can keep it warm.

This opens the mind to a realm of interesting body-powered devices, especially in environments where heat sinking is easy, like for divers, motorcycle riders, and sailors. Want a wetsuit or jacket that lights up or operates sensors on its own? Easy peasy.
Maybe Belgium can offer Snowden asylum now.

More seriously, who uses public internet terminals for anything? I would never log in from one.

I would (and admittedly not very carefully) use a public internet connection with my own laptop. If I was carrying state secrets, I'd hope that my state would have given me a very well-configured laptop which would just use the public internet for a VPN, and would allow no DNS or anything else to be consumed from the public resource.
Bicycle license plates? The Dutch still use them? Anywhere in the US?

Boats? Yes:

Every vessel in Puget Sound, Washington State, is tracked with cameras and radar. We see two stereo cameras mounted on top of the channel marker from Rich Passage at south end of Agate Pass.

I've read this is now all part of the USCG-Coast Guard, the NW is in District 14(?).
I wouldn't put too much emphasis on such wording, as various fields use common words in uncommon ways. For instance, cryptographers refer to those they seek privacy from as "adversaries," which may sound excessively agressive to a layperson.

(I'm only playing devil's advocate here -- tapping EU networks is damning enough.)
I came here to see if anyone else noticed the sexists comments under the article, what a shame.

However it's not difficult to find sexists pricks in tech.
Your clients will tell you about their concerns. Whether it's HIPAA, PCI, PABP, SOX, ITAR, etc., they tend to be overly expressive and understanding. They're also very similar and once you've nailed it a few times, whether it's "securing privileged information," "transparency," "traceability," etc., a quick browse of the Wikipedia article can warn you of any specifics that are outside your experience.
Google does not offer a Tor Hidden Service, but DDG does [1]. Not only can google not see my search query (unless I use !g instead of !sp), but not even my ISP knows what I'm looking for. There is a bit of lag for searches (5 whole seconds maybe), but those of us used to the way Tor works, this is not much of a problem at all.

There's also a Firefox Search Add-on [2], for those interested. I combine it with Foobar [3] for a more seamless and chrome-like interface.

[1] http://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-to...

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foobar/
No, gravity is something for which there is overwhelming, unambiguous evidence. Macroeconomics is something that by its very nature is difficult to gather convincing evidence about. (No controlled experiments, very small observational data set.) Strings is much more like a macroeconomic question, because neither can be definitively tested.

How to formulate a quantum theory of gravity is the most important outstanding question in fundamental physics. Strings is the best guess. Policy-wise, the effects of government spending is the most important outstanding question in economics.

I think it's pretty analogous actually.
Funding Sources For Entrepreneurs (Videos)
I've heard things like Photoshop only having the amount of cachet it does in the professional world because of its ease of piracy for students. Sure the prosumers and teenagers who pirate are "not the customers you want" but it can be worthwhile long-term marketing. What's your thoughts on this?
Right now, datacenters are just starting to fully abstract the OS from the hardware -- physical servers run "hypervisor OSes", which can host several virtual servers and live-transfer them from physical host to physical host. And the hypervisor OS does little else.

Meanwhile, virtual servers handle all of the actual software tasks. Through advanced routing, these virtual servers remain connected regardless of which physical server hosts them, and even while being moved from one physical host to another. Thanks to virtual HDDs on SANs, these virtual servers can always reach their virtual HDDs, regardless of physical device failures.

Virtualization tech has already entered browsers. And browsers are slowly becoming the entire client, as we've seen with Chromebooks. It's just a matter of time for these movements to all collide, allowing for virtual servers to freely roam the spare memory and CPU space of all of your browser-OS-based computing devices.

This would be sort of like running Hyper-V on all of your users' Win8 desktops to host your email, directory, database, and information servers. Boom, no server!
Visualizing your Twitter interactions with roundrobinwatch.com
Somewhat related, I just discovered PyEphem, and have been using it to pin down a time and location from the stars that appear in XKCD #1190

http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=101043&p=3395021#...

http://rhodesmill.org/pyephem/
I'm compiling externally with sass --watch. The sass files are kept in public/stylesheets/sass/
I recognize that there are security implications for this sort of technology, but I think that if we used it properly, the convenience would be well worth the trade-off.

For example, in Ontario, ALPRs were used in conjunction with RFID to build a toll road that was free of toll booths in 1997. (Politics later led the toll road to be sold by the provincial government to a privately-owned European company, which has been surprisingly good at maintaining said tollway, even during winter storms.)
unless you count !image, which redirects to GIS.
I see the sparse fourier transform and other tweaks to the FFT creating decentralized p2p systems where video and audio sharing requires little bandwidth. Centralization is doomed, it's just too expensive to maintain now with the entire world getting new devices and connecting by the millions everyday. As for languages Lisp will still be alive! :)

Re: the article font, it looks fine on Firefox nightly build running on Debian wheezy
How to Ensure Privacy in the Age of HTML5
Hey, Ramin here one of the founders at Kickpreneur.com. We actually wanted to make this a Show HN post to hear your feedback :) Excited to hear what you guys think...
I use SBT-Assembly with Akka to generate megajars and I haven't had any issues with multiple dependent libraries getting packaged with conflicting versions. SBT-Assembly has a pretty straightforward system for handling conflicts, allowing you to define merge strategies for different files or patterns.
This is to be expected. New doesn't cater to what holds the interest of the current user base so you get the things most existing users didn't bother upvoting. Basically New is unfiltered through the status quo of "HN appropriateness" even though that's been changing since the time the forum came online.
> The fact that we have twice elected a President who (...)

The fact that your alternative to re-electing that guy would've been somebody equivalently bad, tells me that there wasn't a lot of choice involved in the first place.

Your betrayal started already before that, with the corruption of choice.

The Simpsons laid it out pretty clearly already some decades ago, and instead it seems to have only gotten worse--from "the lesser of two evils" to "the equivalent of two evils" ...
I think it helps to look at the scope of the analogies being presented. For instance, the friction of installing & configuring Postgres is compared unfavorably to MySQL. Objectively speaking, those are pretty minor differences (i.e. installing Postgres is easy). However, the point that was being made was that even minor increases in "friction" can negatively impact adoption.

No-one is saying Maven / Gradle / Ant are terrible package management systems. However, when compared against tools used in other popular languages (ruby gems, pip, NPM), it's fair to argue that other language's package management systems are more fluid - in that neither of them require prior configuration and work quite well outside of an IDE.
IMHO: The greatest strength of Java is back-compatibility; the greatest weakness of Java is back-compatibility. Thus, it will remain viable and frustrating.

It's biggest problem (touched on in the talk) is that innovators are innovating elsewhere (e.g. sinatra). One day, this will cause the long fall of Java.

One would think Java's performance would be less important as CPUs get more powerful, but so far in practice we're seeing smaller devices and GPGPUs. It's possible Java will keep hitting a sweet-spot of usability/performance for generations to come, as C has.
Disable Java? Tech experts say yes
Heck, ice would be pretty good, and would maintain a large ∆T until it melted. Copper's a great conductor, but the specific heat is pretty poor: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/tables/sphtt.html

I guess it also depends on the relative importance of mass vs. volume optimization.
Make sure you keep in touch with the client. Use those hours so they see value. In Patrick's case, it can be as simple as creating a mailing list for clients and sending middle managers tips on industry trends, possible candidates for positions, etc.

This will also keep you from being surprised when someone wants their 10h/(month|week|whatever), and may actually prompt you to recommend how to use that time. They will pay you for leads on additional work because they see that it's a winning situation for them.
Steve Jobs famously re-leased his SLK every 6 months and never put plates on it -- seems like a great way to avoid this type of tracking if you're in the financial position to do so.
This is a solid snapshot of the actual state of affairs. What it really does is demonstrate how nuanced economics is, and how the article ignores these subtleties which make or break "good" economic policy. For instance, there is a massive difference between keynesian and neo-keynesian policy which the article completely ignores.
Thanks for the feedback. I added a way to just jump to the playlist with some predefined usernames, thanks for the suggestion :)
What could you do with all this money the US is spending on making the rest of the world (its targets?) hate them more with every new revelation?
Like throwing your garbage over to your neighbors lawn every day and building higher and higher fences because you sense that they might be starting to hate you. Obama wake up already!
Yes, you can predict the amount of randomness in a normally distributed system. If you could not, standard deviations would have no meaning, and all branches of statistics built thereon would be false.

In chaos theory, the best you can hope for is strange attractors. Unfortunately, economics doesn't even seem to have these.