skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The page looks nice and you have a clear flow and call to action...but the copy could use tightening up all around. For example, the subhead:

> New, exciting way of doing online courses

Sounds like it's missing an article: "A new, exciting way of doing online courses"

And is "doing" the right word? Maybe the verb should be: "taking" or change the sentence structure from "of doing" to "to take"

There's a lot of little grammar and style things that should be polished...IMO it's a big factor in an online education's first impression
Edward Snowden asylum: countries approached and their responses
Snowden's True Motives?
It would be nice to think that Snowden released the information he did to let the American people understand the situation regarding their government and their privacy. This issue brings up significant questions about the role of a democracy and the constitutionality of its intelligence gatherings. You can convince me that Snowden did this as a patriotic duty as an American to other Americans ("Patriot Snowden").

However, his latest batch of releases focus on the US's spying on enemies and our allies (bugging embassies and such). To me, this appears to be less about informing Americans about their government than it is simply exposing the USA and harming the country. This is common espionage that's been practiced for decades by many countries, friend and foe. The release of this information only appears to harm the US. ("Traitor Snowden")

Agree or disagree? Is this "Patriot Snowden" telling Americans what they need to know about their misguided government, or is this simply "Traitor Snowden" undermining the interests of the USA?
So maybe there was some sort of bust going down on the place she bought the water, after a suspected chain of underage sales.

You still don't pull guns on people you suspect may be carrying a case of beer, then lock them up and file felony charges when it turns out they haven't done anything more than get scared by your paramilitary tactics and try to escape from unknown, out of uniform assailants.
You kinda sounds like you agree with Snowden's message, appreciate his risk, but then want him just left to hang out to dry? Surely this bloke deserves protection? If he is forgotten while people deal with the allegations, he'll rot.

I do agree that the issues are important, but the life of one human being, especially the one who made the debate possible, has to be as important. If publishing personal stuff protects, and at the moment it seems that keeping him in in the public eye is probably helping keep him alive, then so be it.

Also, freedom is partly about how we treat individuals in the extreme. The US reaction to this says a lot.
Firefox OS Demo
Uh, we knew that far before any leak, honestly.
true that :) ... wicker park is awesome too!
My hopes are on Google Groups, which is just absymal. Hopefully it's next ...
The law of war imposes limits on cyber attacks too
24MB of GIFs… I hope the author has a generous bandwidth allowance.
For instant messaging, I suggest using one-time keys which aren't stored and not keeping any logs. In effect, once your client is switched off, any data collected is impossible to be decrypted, since the keys are lost and you never knew them yourself in the first place. For data you want to hide, use TrueCrypt (or similar) to encrypt most of your hard-drive and set up two keys - one which unlocks the illegal data and one which unlocks the legal data. It is important that you keep as much of your mostly legal data under the first key and only store truly problematic data (like pirated mp3s, the map to your secret hideout, etc) in the other. It's really hard to fabricate a ton of clean data and I think it's best if you simply encrypt everything you can and keep a tiny portion hidden.
At the risk of taking a pithy dismissal a little seriously:

Different categories of books offer wildly different experiences, and the marginal utility of great literature goes down the more literature you read. By reading the best books in different genres you get a far more richer and rewarding experience than by reading only great classical literature (or only the best biographies, or only the best scientific literature).

hpmor is at a local optimum, or at least close to it. It is clever, contains tons of in-jokes and obscure references to geek culture and the book successfully subverts many tropes. So if you liked reading sci-fi or fantasy as a kid or if you like geek culture you probably will like hpmor as well. Try the first chapter or so and see for yourself.
Lost two nights to this one. It is definitely the best fan fiction I have read and more so. IMO JK Rowling's version pales in comparision to this, but without the inconsistencies of the original book, this HPMOR wouldn't have been possible. If you've read the original, you owe it to yourself to read this.
then I don't understand why you brought "left wing" and "editorial slant" into it?
How many users does it have?
I think you are probably not open minded enough to enjoy it anyway, so in your case I'd recommend to skip it and sticking to something with more complicated words and more obfuscated and mysterious messages that allows you to sustain your airs of high culture and intelligence.
Snowden withdraws Russian asylum bid after Putin says he must 'stop harming' US

This title strongly implies that he seeks to harm the US. Let the media marauding begin. I really don't feel that Snowden looked to harm the US, but rather hold the country he was serving accountable for what it was and still may be doing.
Well, I don't have an actual list, but I usually choose books I think will still be read 500 years from now.
Man Invents New Language for Turning Graphics Chips Into Supercomputers
I've had a similar thing happen to me (I live in Croatia). It happened a few years back so some details are hazy now. It was a rainy evening and I was picking up my brother and we were to drive home for the weekend. His girlfriend was also with him. So, I pick them up and drive to this small parking space to turn the car around. The moment I circled the car around the parking, an unmarked Octavia reverses in front of me, with two bald guys in sport jackets running towards me. I didn't know how to react, in a second or two all sorts of scenarios went thorough my mind. Were they robbers? Then I saw them moving their hands towards their hips. Going for guns? Should I put the car in reverse and try to escape? They pulled out what looked like badges and started yelling to turn off the engine and step out. I still believe t was a leap of faith on my part, trusting them to be the police and I'm afraid of what might've happened if I acted differently. They asked us to empty our pockets, patted us, searched the car and just left, no explanation, no sorry, nothing. They didn't search the girl, I guess it's against the law or something. My brother jokes how one of the officers persistently asked him if he had something in his pants, and all he thought was "yeah, shit, because I almost shat myself". I suppose they were on a stakeout, probably looking for narcotics dealers or something, who knows. It wasn't a pleasant experience at all.
Whilst that is a harrowing case, it is hardly the same as the routine pulling of guns first and asking questions later attitude that you were replying to?
Once everyday normal Americans realize theres nothing to be afraid of these clear violations of the 4th amendment will stop.

Problem is everyday normal Americans fully support these programs.

I really wish people were smarter in these situations and rallied around specific, actionable requests e.g. get rid of FISA courts and have the normal legal process with full transparency. Requests that ordinary people can think are sensible, common-sense improvements to make. But hey I guess people just want a fun day out instead of actually implementing meaningful change.
> Removing the chalk, according to BoA, cost a few thousand dollars.

When I was a kid I used to wash cars for $8-10. A few thousand dollars? Pay 10 year old me a few hundred and I'd wash it every weekend. Forget the car washing business.
Yeah, I can answer that. Here in Hawaii they showed interviews with his neighbours (since he worked here).

Here, quick Google search found this:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/nsa-leaker-edward-s...

and this:

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/06/girlfriends-blog-...
The Value of Bets
I really like the "OPR" thing to subtly avoid UA sniffing :)
Thanks a lot. We are based out of India and most of us can speak english but have terrible grammar. But I will get it corrected.
Which work of literature is it, I wonder, from which you got this idea that min-maxing your life is the way to happiness and fulfilment?
When are they planning to release Opera 15 for Humans?
Is that a litmus test for quality, or do you plan on being alive five hundred years from now?
> Unless you're Dr Evil, you probably won't call your hired mobsters "assassins" either, instead you might call them something neutral like "Situation Specialists"...

Private Security Contractors.
Snowden is nothing more than a pawn for Russia. They will grant him asylum if it suits their needs. If Russia think they can gain more from handing over Snowden than granting him asylum/sending him off to another (friendly) country they will. He has become a pawn in the political game, unsurprisingly.

Is it worth more to annoy USA or reaping potential benefits from handing him over for Russia? I don't know, time will tell.
Why would they need to have that? Everyone (especially the Russians) know it's faked already...

They are slapping the Russians where they hurt most - their wallets. They are probably threatening to lock or freeze Russian head honcho's accounts.
Sorry for my typo, I've meant to write tens of thousands of police officers. Would have been funny if Germany has only ten thousands with a population of 80M people.

In 2010 there were 243k police officers in Germany. Could not find 2012 numbers.
You know this how? You're son isn't more familiar with this case than we are is he? The fact that the charges are dropped is somewhat telling.
Firefox OS: Start To Develop Your First App
"Although most users don't use bookmarks"

Wow. I'm sure they have the data to back that up. I guess most people now get the news from their Facebook stream perhaps.
Yes there was a case in the UK local to me where one of the armed response team put a magazine on the roof of the car and accidentally drove off - I think some one found the mag the next day

He was suspended from the team immediately - the UK police do take fire arms training very seriously.
Tesla: almost at 100000 votes
From Tesla e-mail:

As you may know, Tesla is under attack from a number of car dealer associations in various states who are challenging Tesla's right to directly serve our customers at Tesla Stores and Service Centers.

Their efforts are protectionist in nature and infringe on the right of the consumer to choose how they purchase and service their vehicle.

An anonymous Tesla enthusiast created a White House petition to allow direct sales of cars to consumers in all states. We want to thank the tens of thousands of fans who have voiced their support and have already signed the petition.

We want this petition to succeed. For that to happen, the petition needs 15,000 more signatures by Friday, July 5, 2013.

Please act now and take a moment to register, sign and forward the petition today!

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/allow-tesla-motors-sell-directly-consumers-all-50-states/bFN7NHQR
You can, at least about Gmail. Especially since there is no way to export your Gmail data using Google Takeout.
Encrypt a message with a one time pad and destroy all copies of the original message. You can literally "decrypt" the ciphertext into anything that matches the same length. The only way to recover the message is to know what the pad was.

I am not sure how well the idea translates down to more practical forms of encryption though, but I can understand the idea in the case of perfect encryption -- you can just make up a different one time pad and decrypt the data to whatever you want it to show, and there is no way to prove if it is really what was originally encrypted.

Edit: I meant to point out that this is in the "what color are my bits?" sense; multiple pieces of data can be "encrypted" to the same result differing only in the "key" (one time pad) used to "decrypt" it. There is no true message in the "encrypted" block without interpreting it in terms of a specific key; how you made the encrypted data tints your bits to the "proper" decryption. It's not a property of the block of data itself.
Actually I agree with him. Let's say you encrypt a jpeg. You end up with a blob of bits that doesn't contain anything resembling jpeg data - the specific arrangement of bits that make what would be recognised as a jpeg file doesn't exist. It's recreated by decrypting the file - you make a new blob of bits arranged in the way a jpeg file looks. Technically speaking, the encrypted data is not a jpeg, but an input to a function that creates a new file which itself is a jpeg.

You and I both know that the encrypted data is only useful for generating the decrypted jpeg and in that sense the two could be the same thing, but I definitely see the sense behind his argument.
Watch 3rd-graders learn in 2 days what most of us can't learn in a lifetime.
Billing for bug reports is a common practice in the commercial software world to avoid overflow of bogus reports.
It has nothing to do with being a hipster, just different tastes.

If you come to Amsterdam and go to the Red Light, Museumplein, and Heineken brewery, that's one experience, but most Amsterdammers are never at those places. They're having a picnic in Westerpark, and beers on a terrace at Browerij 't IJ... Same with SF... I grew up there, but I've never been to Alcatraz, and I think I've been to Pier 39 once when I was 10.

Not that those places have no value, but some travelers are more interested in lifestyle than photo checklists. If you only have a few days in Paris, a day at the Louvre just getting in your way of seeing the real city, unless you are a big art history fan and love lines.
What if someone does not know Go and worked on Java only?
Google Reader JSON export to Evernote
Thank you! That splash screen slowed down development time so much. Add 3 to 5 seconds to every single build and run.
Can you at least drink beer once you are in the army? I can only imagine being in the army without beer could be very, very difficult.
Happy Startup Summercamp, London
> Of course, it still isn't #1, since that spot is universally reserved for Wikipedia

Most likely because both are classified "useful" not "vital".
And what's wrong with prolonging the story? If they had dumped all the documents in one go, people would be outraged for a bit and then forget about it. Then it would just be Snowden. I am sure that The Gaurdian is holding out until the focus shifts from Snowden to the leaks. Or at least, I hope they are.

As long as the story is out, so long will the US government have to play defence rather than offence. And that's never good in politics.
In the world as it exists today, whistleblowers against the US virtually forfeit their lives. He's a dead man walking, and by talking about him instead of the larger issues you give leverage to ignore the larger issues.

This is always the way it works - ad hominem, discredit the person, imprison/kill him as an example, roll cute summary stories in the press about what a deranged maniac he was, and the populace forgets all about the larger issues once the human interest drama is wrapped up.

So please, accept that he's thoroughly and truly fucked, and try to make the incredible orwellian surveillance state they've built the focus.
It never ended, at least not in the eyes of governments.
I don't know if Eliezer has said anything about how long he intends it to be. A new story arc just started, and it's pretty great. It seems like this could go on for a few more years.
http://reason.com/archives/2011/01/17/justice-for-sal

Sorry it wasn't a heart attack. They shot him through the heart (it was some heart related mishap). He broke the 1970 gambling act.
I have to admit that stories like that definitely factor into my travel decisions. From the outside, the US looks like a very scary place.
Perhaps it is all just overblown media stuff? But for the time being there are also other nice places to visit...
The 4 AM Army
What's real literature, then?
Amazon RDS now Supports MySQL 5.6 with Memcached and Binary Log Access
Actually, you've made a good pitch for Iain M. Banks, haven't read him yet, but if it's half as good... :)
Compiler does help with a lot of things that you'd require unit tests for with a dynamic language.

Example:
Runtime wouldn't be able to give you a protocol between how two classes would communicate. Say your service object that handles authentication. You would have to write unit tests so the two classes involved would know how to respond to each other.
All these page-long news articles published in the last couple of weeks usually consist of one bit of useful information - in this case the first paragraph - and then the same things over and over again. It doesn't even cite the source, let alone name it (no, "a government spokesman" is not a source). I feel like many news websites just use the issue to throw out as much content containing the word "Snowden" as possible these days, and I'm finding it hard to gather new information in this ocean of entropy.
At the very least he was indifferent to harming the US government. Despite the opinions of many commentors on HN this is not the same thing as defending the interests of US citizens (or indeed citizens of the world).
Edward Snowden's asylum options narrow
As an outsider looking in, I don't really see it as harming the US, just the US government, by exposing how the US government are harming its people. I think this is how Putin has worded it too, he hasn't said "harming the US" but "US partners". It's horrible that there is such a distinction because the ideal should be the government is the equivalent of the people.
I know so many ex-pats who moved to Dubai and constantly told me what a great pace it was to live, but as soon as they had a child moved (back) to the West; many of them not the country they came from, but just somewhere in the West.
I am glad to hear more like this because, frankly, a lot of people are blind to what the US is doing and think that we are just this honorable country--we do not wrong.

Clearly that is not the case and it's about time that things like this come out. Maybe nothing will come of it but either way I'm not really on the side that believes we're any more endangered with this information coming out. That's just what the gov't is saying to make us look at him as a traitor.
Download manager is still included. Other features will follow, although email has been split into a separate product, Opera Mail (http://www.opera.com/computer/mail).

The size increase is due to a complete rewrite based on chromium.
It is odd that a law school professor should take that view of the constitution; after all, it primarily regulated the duties and powers of the federal government and its relations to the states. I think that a lot of things are wrong with the way that the US does policing. But to pretend that the constitution gives a detailed description of the principles of right government is absurd, and done by one who teaches law implies either willful ignorance or sophistry.
This rocket was carrying three of the GLONASS (the Russian GPS) satellites, very bad news.

The RBTH has some more footage: http://rbth.ru/news/2013/07/02/proton-m_rocket_with_glonass_...
If surgery didn't involve risk to patients, you could probably teach quite a lot of surgery to almost anyone. They might not be as able to improvise in rare scenarios, but the could probably remove appendixes pretty successfully.

Some knowledge is inherently linear. Hard to teach multiplication to someone that can't add. Some aren't and a lot are grey areas where prior knowledge isn't absolutely necessary, but it's a big advantage. For example you can teach a lot of statistics without teaching the way things are calculated, but doing the sums with pen and paper will give you a better understanding. A confidence interval has a meaning that can be explained using words to someone without the mathematical skills to be able to calculate it. So is a statistical distribution.

Is it better to know who to calculate the probability distribution with a pen and paper? Yes and in some interesting cases, it's very important. That doesn't mean that a lot of useful statistics can't be taught to people who will take shortcuts using software.

Knowledge keeps growing like a tree with thickening branches and sprouting branches of their own. We can't tell new people where the last generation started. In the world of increasingly specialized knowledge and the culture of lifelong learning that I hope is evolving, its important to find ways of dropping people into the middle of fields. AI for not mathematicians seems doable.
According to Goodreads, I've read 438 books so far (it's probably way above that, since it doesn't have that many Spanish language books...), and I'm only 32. So, whomever is reading 12 books a year is being lazy :)

However, most are the literary value equivalent to your average sitcom :)
Ah I see.

Though I understand why you've spelt it that way (I'm guessing its for the .com domain name?), it might be a bit of an oversight to have a education company misspelling the word 'learn'...
During an acquisition the price on the shares of the acquirer goes down while the acquiree goes up. Since most mergers tend to be stock swaps rather than cash they would have to invest more shares than originally intended. If the merger falls through both would lose out as the acquirer would be seen as wasting a lot of money with nothing to show and the acquiree would be see as not so valuable.
Snowden surely has copies of the documents distributed around the globe; what's stopping others from continuing to leak after he stops?
Maps with 3 words
3 words to pinpoint a place within 3x3m - www.what3words.com - pretty good in the middle of Hyde Park, London never mind somewhere really remote.
Analyzing Big Data at Twitter (UC Berkeley Course Video Lectures)
Social Media in Plain English
A simple story that illustrates the forces shaping social media.