skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry, but why do you think Google and AWS are the best we can do?

We have to rely on Google to "not be evil". A lot of businesses depend on traffic from google, and if it decides to cut them off, well too bad. Many governments including the US government constantly look into google to prevent a monopoly. You want a monopoly in search? And how about the direction of where your hosted software will go ... when Larry Page took the reins, he decided that Google+ should feature prominently in every product. I agree with him but others may not. And what about killing off Google reader just like that? Do you think people come to rely on these things and then the centralized company can just kill the product?

And as for building stuff "in the cloud", what happens when your AWS availability zone goes down? Lots of big internet sites go down. Centralization on the internet also got us facebook, and when facebook goes down or shuts off a site, "Connect with Facebook" doesn't work on that site anymore until they fix it.

(responding to your edit) As for the iPad, etc. ... yes, the original platforms are usually proprietary walled gardens, but eventually the tech gets commoditized (sometimes after a protracted software patent fight). Rather than expound on it here, you can read my complete thoughts on multiple app stores and reputations: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=114

NOW THE DISCLAIMERS:
I will admit, that Google is also full of extremely bright people and does awesome stuff with all the money it makes. Self-driving cars, google glasses, and much more. But you are still relying on Google to maintain its data liberation and open technologies, and to some extent their commitment has lessened.

Also, Amazon's impressive commitment to low margins is a net win for all of us consumers (including the developers). At the scale that Google and Amazon build, a lot of amazing research is possible. That is the upside of centralization. And I am not saying that we should "abolish" centralized services. Especially the ones which are open and have great tools.

What I AM saying is that the open source foundations need to step up their game and produce SERVERS that are user friendly and easy to install, maintain and run. This new generation of servers should automatically link together. I really do believe that at the end of the day, history has shown that open PLATFORMS lead to the greatest good for humanity, as everyone can build apps on top of them without favoritism. For example Apple's iOS favors twitter and facebook sharing over any other companies, because they made a deal with them. There needs to be competition between the "centralized sector" and the "open source sector", which will lead to the server software becoming commoditized and more user friendly, just as browsers are today.
Nobody's claiming computers can't be used for evil. I'm just saying let's not lose sight of all the good stuff they enable which is orthogonal to whether or not their users are being monitored.
The Philosophy of Netflix
This might impose a kind of maintenance tax on surveillance equipment, in terms of resources being allocated to fix broken equipment & 'catch the perps' however I don't think it's enough to slow down the surveillance hydra which can grow 2 new cams for every 1 taken out.

Also it's not just 'cameras' but more ubiquitous sensors that provide surveillance data, increasingly embedded in the devices you use in everyday life.

The problem of data collection is arguably moot. The question of who has access to this data and what we do with it is the crux of the matter.
Like supposedly scientists are split on Evolution, Global Warming and the Age of the Earth?

I am a bit unfair, but economists agree on a lot of things like free trade, public health care (for it, since the 60s), price floors and ceilings, carbon taxes, even in Central banks people broadly agree on a 'Taylor rule'-type behavior of managing inflation over the medium term.

There is a poll by the University of Chicago of a broad pool of economists from Ivies on a set of propositions and you can see that there is broad agreement on a lot of issues:

http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel

http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel/poll-re...

The reason why there appears to be a lot of disagreement is because of at least three reasons:

* economists with a esoteric position are more likely to search for the limelight and the media are happy to give them a platform.

* special interests are willing to hire economists to agree with them.

* Most importantly people don't like to admit they are wrong. Especially if they are vested ideologically or by religion.
I like the point of this article, things that make me sigh while writing code are often the things I need to learn to do a new way.

Before I started using multiple cursors in sublime text, I would invent interesting function patterns to avoid having to copy paste sets of stuff in the editor.

Now I'll rely on my editor, because it's easier to write and easier to change in the future.

I guess whatever keeps me productive is what's important. It could be better patterns in my code, or it could be better tools to write it.
Thank you for the translation Fred.
Hilarious. I stopped taking this post seriously at "You shouldn't write more than a few lines of code a day".

I wonder what substantial project this person has worked on in the past, and if they kept metrics of how many lines of code they actually wrote day to day.
Spying is bad regardless of who does it. I also despise China for its attempts to spy on and hack USA computer systems. Don't you?

Two wrongs don't make a right; they're just a multiplicity of wrongs.
Maybe if our keyboards had sharp pins sticking out of the
keys we'd refactor earlier, too.
Personal finance for dummies
I need to get into this, I'm trying to learn how to make UI more smooth and modern, and this game really does it well :)
What, is this Reddit now?
I wish we had "https" for real life, a way to know someone really is who they say they are. Not so much personally, but more an immediately verifiable organizational identification for a person.

I always thought badges were a weird way for police to self-identify, considering a thug could make something that passes as a badge, especially in a dark in-your-face encounter like this. And you're supposed to do exactly what they say without regard to protecting yourself or fleeing, for fear of being charged with felonies (or worse). That just seems like a system that wasn't well thought out.

The article said these women called 911 to verify these guys really were cops; that to me is an extremely smart move given the amount of terror they must have been going through.
What makes you choose a car are your previous habits of interfacing with a car.

I could have the best car in the world on all points, if the driving wheel is a bit too big or a bit too small for my habits and the speed lever is on the left side, I won't even entertain the thought of using it and will commute by skateboard.
Here's a way to check traps, gather wood, and stoke the fire separately:

var stoke = function(){if(!$('#stokeButton').hasClass('disabled')){$('#stokeButton').trigger('click')}}

var check = function(){if(!$("#trapsButton").hasClass('disabled')){$("#trapsButton").trigger('click')}}

var gather = function(){if(!$("#gatherButton").hasClass('disabled')){$("#gatherButton").trigger('click')}}

g = setInterval(gather, 1000)
c = setInterval(check, 1000)
s = setInterval(stoke, 60000)
Do non-US foreign intelligence agencies have equal interest in everyone? They do not.
My friend was hit by a car the other night crossing the street in Brooklyn (just bruised thankfully). It was a hit and run and when the NYPD came, they did everything possible to try and dissuade him from making a report. To the point where we had a mini confrontation with the cop in order to just get him to file the paperwork. It really seemed like he had outside pressure put on him to not file.

So I wouldn't be surprised if the NYPD is fudging the numbers somehow, though homicide is a tough thing to hide in crime stats I'd imagine...
> Writing lots of code quickly is not a good thing. You shouldn’t be writing more than a few lines of code per day.

Some studies says that on average a programmer writes a few lines per day. So OK.

> And if your editor is helping you write a lot of code really quickly, it’s encouraging you to write bad code.

Are you implying that being able to write faster results in more code produced ergo lower quality code? Usually being able to write/refactor/replace/etc faster means you have less friction between the code and your thoughts. You can more easily express what you have in your mind, in the code.

> Why? Because it puts pressure on me to refactor.

Make a refactoring without the right tools can be counter productive. Try to refactor a 400 lines of code of Python with Notepad. You will only detect the errors on run time, I promise.

> I don’t want my editor to refactor my code.

As far as I know, you editor does NOT refactor you code. YOU are the one who does it. The editor is just a tool that allows you to do it without pain, preventing common errors and helping you to do your jobs, no the other way round.

And not just that. Any good editor should do syntax highlight for you (you are more productive, but this does not imply to write more code). And automatically indenting. And maybe balancing the braces. And a long etc.

The editor is a tool. Any professional should use the right tools for doing its job. Is your best tool a pain-in-the-ass editor and you can do a good refactor as fast as your team mates? Good for you! :D
What's the drug scene like in New York these days? First you had heroin, then the rise of crack cocaine, but since then the murder rate has gone lower and lower (early 90's)

There's a very close link between the drug trade and inner-city murders.
"For science!"

Related: http://xkcd.com/54/
>It's pretty GD scary - how are we supposed to identify the good guys?

The bad guys are the ones initiating aggression - it doesn't matter what uniform they wear (or non-uniform).

The 4th amendment is being destroyed because other amendments are also being weakened that would normally protect it. The 1st and 2nd amendment could easily protect this shocking situation from occurring. The 1st allows us the free speech to inform the public of what's happening. In terms of the 2nd amendment - if this woman had been carrying a pistol in her purse (which is common in the South) to protect her from being overpowered, she would have a chance to defend herself. Just one incident of a citizen defending themselves would see the immediate halting of these kinds of thuggish tactics.
> Try it on Java and say you still want a dumb editor. It's like saying you want to do rocket science while doing all the math by hand.

Whenever I try Java, I don't want a smarter editor. I want a smarter language.
Since "Hackers" have often have an attitude of disobedience, it's not surprising that articles related to law and abuse of power are considered news worthy.

This isn't "Startup News".
It's certainly capable of being one.
"there's also the effect of the newer policing techniques"

Or the non-effect of them.

Crime rates have dropped drastically across the board, across the
country, in many places that didn't make their policing policies more
fascist as NYC's government chose to.

From the MJ article:

Second, and far more puzzling, it's not just New York that has
seen a big drop in crime. In city after city, violent crime peaked
in the early '90s and then began a steady and spectacular
decline. Washington, DC, didn't have either Giuliani or Bratton, but
its violent crime rate has dropped 58 percent since its
peak. Dallas' has fallen 70 percent. Newark: 74 percent. Los
Angeles: 78 percent.

There must be more going on here than just a change in policing
tactics in one city.
sure, but when something happens like the recent GCHQ scandal in the uk, people don't get angry because "the english" are being tapped. they get angry because "people" are being tapped.

there's not the same enshrined "us v them" attitude that you see so often in american countries.

really, it's a thing. americans come off as extremely insular.
How do I run my C code?

How do I pass commands to my app?

How do I read/write a file?

What is a "compiler?

What is "the preprocessor"?

What is "linking"?

What is a "linked list"?

What is a "Makefile"?

What are "C89" and "K&R"?

What are those strings in ALL_CAPS?

Why is there a segfault and where is it coming from?

Why does printf() wait to display stuff not ending with "\n"?
He seems to be happy with the police having access to everyones id card data and appearing to have no oversite to see if the Police are abusing the power of asking people to present your id card or "papers please".
He donated to Ron Paul's campaign so my guess is that he voted for him, too.
> I'm sorry, but why do you think Google and AWS are the best we can do?

Please don't set up a straw man. You seem to be claiming that I'm arguing in favor of complete centralization. I'm not.

Google and AWS both need competitors.

That also doesn't mean that we as a society haven't benefitted monumentally from Google and AWS existing.

Centralization has vast benefits. We should not discount those simply because it also makes a juicy target for evildoers. It's throwing the baby out with the bathwater to say "this is the fault of centralization".

Your approach works and benefits people even if we as an industry continue to primarily build centralized services (and we will, because it is tremendously more cost-effective). I encourage you to pursue it in parallel.
> Why not?

Obvious ethical considerations. I'm sick of living on the death star.

It doesn't seem possible to me that any non-transparent organization with such capabilities will ever live up to some promise to "just spy on brown people". In Snowden's words: "policy protection is no protection — policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens".

I don't think foreign spy programs are relevant to this discussion. If Pakistan jumped off a bridge, would you follow?

> The main threats in the world are no longer just states

The main threats in the news are no longer just states, that's all. A few people commit criminal acts in a foreign country somtimes. Meanwhile, states have nuclear weapons and are very often in a state of war.

> That same relationship does not exist [for foreign citizens].

Perhaps it should. Your reasoning was developed back when packets had their ping measured in years. One very simple reason to call Snowden a hero is that I want US tech companies to be trusted and to thus prosper, because I want to work for them.

In general, it upsets me that some narrative has taken hold where, because "non-US persons" are on the internet, it's OK for a non-transparent agency to listen to everything on the internet, and high treason for someone to attempt to save me from it. Living in China for a couple days and talking to the news isn't "going to the enemy", as you'd so like me to see it.
Making a business (especially, its revenue model) that is based on somebody else's business is extremely risky and usually best avoided.
Heap space analysis for garbage collected languages
From the linked PDF:

Shooting Incidents YTD 2012: 581, 2013: 423

Shooting victims YTD 2012: 685, 2013: 486
Yah. That stuff should be here, don't you think?
We _do_ have ALPR toll systems, at least here in California. You can leave your Fastrak RFID in your kitchen drawer forever, as long as you associate your license plates with your Fastrak account.
The basic problem with economics is mathematical. Economists keep acting like the economy is normally distributed when it is not. For example, the "Black Scholes Model", assumed that the system was normally distributed, differentiable at all points, continuos, etc., which of course was not true. What's worse is that every economist knows this, but they continue to use these faulty formulas because they are afraid of the alternative, chaos.

The economy is governed by chaos theory. Just like the weather or earthquakes. Chaotic systems don't have nice little formulas. They are extremely complex, and the slightest miscalculation can produce large changes in outcome. At least with the weather, the core principles are well understood. Scientists can perform experiments on how heat affects pressure and other properties. We can't experiment in economics. The core principles are not well understood. Therefore, economic models are hopelessly lost. Admitting that makes economists look dumb though, so they stick with Calculus and pretend the world is normal.
While I understand where you are coming from, a pain in the ass text editor or a built up IDE won't make a difference. Your IDE does not manipulate and refactor your thought process in solving a problem. Good programmers know how to solve problems efficiently regardless of how many keystrokes it takes.
Well, you called him a noob, so I guess personal attacks are fair-play.

Let me guess: You're the kind of programmer who immediately invokes a debugger when something unexpected happens.
Economists are no different than the prophets of old. Everyone claims to be speaking the truth. What's sad is that they live off the 1 correct prediction while disregarding the 20 that they completely failed on.

The field simply is not a science. It has no predictive value.
The biological microprocessor
Bunch of fucking amateurs. You have six plainclothes officers "on patrol" for minors in possession of alcohol. That's absurd. I go to college in a city where the cops understand that underage drinking is a thing and won't hassle you unless you're asking for it.
And Native Americans. They weren't people either.
> Re factoring is also ALMOST irrelevant if you are adhering to a good MVC or MVVM pattern.

There are levels of complexity where an MVC architecture isn't enough to make refactoring "almost" irrelevant, and you run into them pretty quickly.
I have the impression that economists (the real ones, not the politicians that use that title) need an esoteric terminology to protect their field. That'll decouple macroeconomics from policy while it's developed (and it's still embryonic) until nobody can deny their claims anymore.
Nine Digit Number Puzzle
I think we're saying the same thing. As I mentioned, I am NOT saying centralization doesn't have benefits -- I even mentioned some major ones, including having enough money to do awesome R&D and move humanity forward. What I am saying is that open source foundations need to step up their game, and build servers that automatically talk to each other, are easy to install, maintain, and are user friendly. Kind of like the new WebRTC P2P client/servers.
FillText – generate JSON data sets for testing or demonstration
This is why the War on Drugs is so evil -- it's being used as the foundation of this destruction.
Same use as a graphics card... to show off and play games.
"when the editor wars were between vi and Emacs"?

When was this armistice signed? I am afraid to know the answer but I have to ask: Who do you think the belligerents are in the current editor war?
> The two party system, as alluded to in the article, really is a huge problem ...

Yup! A truly open system would respect as many competing forces as possible. However, in India we've seen several competing parties forming a coalition after the voting is done with. And then they play different equations to their advantage, grab power bring in misery back again.

So it is not as easy as it seems.
> If you want real change and bloodless revolution

... destroy politicians' careers and make their techniques impossible to maintain.

I've written on this subject before, but I believe that destruction is the most effective means of change in politics today. The obvious way is to dig up as much dirt on politicians as possible and back them into a corner, but 1) that can easily backfire, and 2) it's hard to deal with the systematic problems.

A great example of how to deal with a serious technological hurdle: In Cory Doctorow's book "Little Brother" (absolutely worth a read -- my favorite of all time, FWIW) everyone in the bay area has RFID passes for traveling on BART and paying tolls by car. One of the characters comes up with plans for a device that will suck in IDs from these devices, then randomly swap them with others, preventing the DHS from tracking people based on their location. By distributing this far and wide, the system becomes completely and utterly useless.

I think that things like this are the way forward. Destroy, guide the rebuilding (using positive -- not negative -- means), destroy again if it doesn't fit the proper form. Semi-rapid iteration of government.
He'll be happy with something like mg, acme or even sam.
I used to be a software engineer on an ALPR system.

There are things I like about ALPR and things I don't like -- it's up to you guys to make sure it isn't abused. This technology could be abused without oversight.

Images are taken from cameras and matched against known "hot lists" of wanted people. Wanted for what? That depends. There's a list for expired plates (a.k.a. revenue generation - the selling point is that law enforcement will recoup the cost of the systems very quickly), stolen cars, murder suspects, missing people, sex offenders. There is even a notion of a "secret" list where the cops operating the system aren't even aware of what the analysts are looking for. These systems can also do geofencing -- if a plate for a known sex offender is spotted within a certain distance of a school, they're busted. Lots of stolen cars have been recovered via ALPR -- and remember most serious crime starts with the criminals obtaining a stolen car.

The system can also be used for internal investigations -- for instance there was a cop who was stalking his ex-wife who happened to have an ALPR. They pulled the capture history and her license plate came up multiple times. So he's busted.

Depending on how the system is set up they could store and back up the images and geolocations forever. There is current pending legislation regarding how long they can store data. The highway patrol can only store data for 60 days, most police departments have no such limitations. Update it looks like this failed--http://gizmodo.com/how-automated-license-plate-readers-threa...

Given enough mobile and fixed ALPR cameras the end result would be the same as having a GPS tracking device on everyone's car. I don't see why citizens should subject themselves to that long term data collection.

How about controls? Anyone querying the data leaves an audit trail behind. There are lots and lots of auditing and authorization levels built into the systems. That being said if something isn't configured correctly as was depicted here... http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/08/technology/security/shodan/

Something to note, this technology is out of the bag. In the future 3M which makes most license plates are going to be adding QR codes to license plates. http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/6029 You won't really need specialty cameras.

Presently there isn't a national database for ALPR but they're working very very hard to make this a reality. It's up to you guys to make sure this technology is used with proper restrictions and oversight. As I heard out of the mouth of a salesman after a sale to a middle eastern country "Hey regimes are great for business!"