skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree (and have posted in this very thread) that having controls for detecting spam/fraud is good. Also, I have posted that the primary problem is, no way to either a) avoid this problem by adhering to some guidelines b) no way to directly contact the developer to figure out the problem to resolve it.

Every update to the browser can potentially change the model that affects a large number of the users and the only way to figure out the problem is using some sort of trial and error method.

This would have been fine if the product in question is a niche product or a exotic browser. But the fact of the matter is, with Chrome (being one of the dominant browser) and Google being the product owner, the reach of Google's opinion is far reaching and can easily destroy a product (akin to killing a person based on some assumption).

Also note that, the "communication channels" listed earlier were completely useless for this type of problem where the client side is throwing the error (Not related to a specific domain or even url included in the page).

Understand that, being a commercial product, ALL possible methods were tried (obviously) to resolve it by using those methods and could not resolve it. You can see that, this specific instance gets triggered by simply having a button with the name "Connexion" instead of "Login" (purely detected by backtracking the changes).

So the frustration is not meant to belittle Google's effort at combating spam/fraud but to point out the effect of such wide ranging blanket solutions.

While "Collateral damage" is a very nice way to de-sanitize and make things palatable for all parties involved except those getting to be the "Collateral damage".

At the end of the day, I am sure folks understand that Google being Google can do what they want and probably even bury the whole issue from getting any traction.
about China, I think there are more worying things than governemnt-operated surveillance programs that have to be reveled.

People there know there is an extreme censorship and corruption.

IMO the higher government needs to take extreme measure against corruption.
He probably called someone and read them the statement over the phone. That way he wouldn't have to risk exposing his laptop to the internet, assuming he even has a laptop or access to the internet.
wishful thinking. My bet is that police will turn tables on him (like they did with that girl assaulted by police at night for buying pack of bottled water) and charge him with something like endangering of a life of an officer - 3 counts.
It looks to be the plain ole Google Maps API:

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...
"and neither is the extralegal penalty of exile"

Okay, so this guy keeps saying some pretty strange things. If he came to the States, he would no doubt be tried in the legal system. He is putting himself into an extralegal position. I think it's probably the best thing for him to do at this point, but to say that the government has in any way forced him out of the legal system is pretty silly.
You should definitely never rely on others to change, but you can engage in a dialogue with the public through writing and speaking, which has the potential to change others.
Well, possession might work better if it were a chip you'd implant in your body. Then at least it wouldn't be prone to theft.

You'd just need to convince people to implant something in their bodies.

In any case, you're free to your opinions and the market is the ultimate decider of what floats and what sinks. Good luck to you and your project!
> Obviously Europe doesn't feel the same way (and didn't with ECHELON)...

Their people or their governments? Their people disagree with this, as we do. Their governments have long appeared to be cooperating, even if they drop their monocles into their drinks every time something like this comes out.
I absolutely think that you can and should make contracts that provide for restitution, if possible. It's up to each individual what sort of restitution they would require for leaking certain pieces of their data.
This is the argument that many subreddits on Reddit took in the beginning - the content that is voted up deserves to be where it is. What ends up happening is that the low hanging fruit, the stuff easily consumable gets upvoted 'faster' because you don't need to think about it -- you digest it, upvote it, and you are done.

If you do this with enough banal content, the users who care, the users who want the site to be about interesting and important stories, leave, and the cycle continues. It ends up turning into an "Eternal September".
Yoga: RESTful but Flexible
Their story is going to be some nonsense about how everyone has to be cuffed for any interaction with police, this is standard procedure, just doing our jobs they way we were trained crap. The Police Department will regret the unfortunate necessity of shooting the dog, admit no wrongdoing, say officers acted according to normal police procedures in place in departments all over the country, etc. etc. ad nauseum. The city will wind up paying a whopper of an un-disclosed settlement, and nothing will change.
What exchange is going to list a fund that trades an unregulated market? The potential for manipulation is off the charts.
Trees come out of the air (2:10)
> I imagine it's pretty easy to be "technically, guilty of eluding police and such" when you haven't done anything wrong and half dozen people in street clothes come barreling at you screaming and jumping on the hood of your car.

Yes, but in other cases, they've turned this technical guilt into actual guilt by charging them. That's why I'm glad they didn't do that this time.
Well, here comes another 7 figure settlement. The city spends so much in settlements, it is getting ridiculous.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jun/30/local/la-me-0701-pol...
Exactly. I live in Japan and the inkan is the bane of my existence.

I can go to the bank teller, offer them my driver's license, citizenship card and can recite the PIN code to them but they won't believe I'm me and let me access my money.

Show them my plastic stamp and I'm magically me! I could give it to another individual and he could withdraw money from my account, no questions asked.

Possession is simply not security.
Three Health Tricks That Take The Pain Away
As disgusting as it is to see the cops shoot the dog, this video appears to show the dog's owner making a series of poor decisions. "Oh, here's a SWAT thing going down, let me pull right up in my car, and then get out - with my huge dog - and check it out up close, while letting my car stereo blare."

Within his rights, sure. Intelligent, not so much.
I'm not saying it's necessarily right, but:
1) It relates to the general anti-gov't sentiment with Snowden , NSA, et al
2) The man was recording the police with his smartphone
Beating a dog (or person, for that matter) into submission stands a better chance of leaving them alive at the end of the day than shooting them repeatedly does. But neither were necessary. The dog snapped at the cop when the cop reached for it in a high-tension situation. The cop is a complete moron.
I had the same reaction ("Huh?") but from the other direction. Centi-millionare implies a worth of $10,000 each, or $14 million for everybody.

I guess the moral is that people shouldn't try to be cute when using metric prefixes.
With a nice little spot on the space needle too.

And hipster covers the pike/pine/broadway area of capitol hill. It's very accurate.
Live in California? Own a dog and a cell phone? Enjoy Constitutionally protected freedoms? If none of the above then feel free to ignore/downvote.
I was referring more to the "stop funding concentrated surveillance programs" part. Just because your own government isn't spying on you doesn't mean you are not being spied on. It just means you have deluded yourself into believing you have privacy. Far better, in my opinion, to accept that privacy is no longer possible in the 21st century so that we can start figuring out how to live without it.
Filip: a smartwatch for young kids to call home
The arrest was bullshit. But the shooting was self defense. The dog (what appears to be a Rottweiler... which is one of "those" breeds) made several aggressive lunges that the officers. It appears right before getting shot, it made contact with one officers arm.

The situation should never have started, but once it did, they didn't have much choice in protecting themselves. If that dog had been a dude with a rudimentary weapon on the level of a vicious dog bite, dude would have been laid out just the same.
Brown eyes and blue eyes racism experiment
Caterpillar-like robot inches up bridge cables to check for defects
This is a really distressing trend, right?

The growing size of cities and the creation of suburbs (especially those which do not support walking) have caused the beat-cop to become somewhat deprecated--in my home city right now there is a shortage of officers and dwindling pensions for the ones that are still on board.

So, instead of having Officer Bob the friendly cop who patrols your street, you have nameless squadcars driving seemingly at random--much like the beetles of Bradbury's literature. You have cops that are never seen, and when they are seen they typically are bad news.

This, taken in combination with the horrific perversion of justice that can occur in our adversarial system, causes a very definite sense of the "other". We have trouble feeling bad for these cops, because in a way they do not blend in with their community in a meaningful fashion. We do not help them, we do not like them, and they generally seem to return the favor.

Worse, we see an increasing attempt to bolster the average power of the cop with tools grossly out of proportion to their intended function in society: note that the two officers in this video appeared to be carrying submachineguns. What. The. Fuck.

With police seen as distinct from our communities and friends and families, and with government increasingly aloof in regulations and faceless bureaucracy, I very much fear for the next decade of the American experiment.
Are you prepared for an enjoyable hobby to turn into a daily grind?
Programming is great when the you're just toying around, learning new things, or you're working on something interesting.
Debugging some corporate accounting app or pet-care website is much less so.
If the little girl had smacked the little boy in the face when he knocked down her castle, I bet he wouldn't have done it again.
1. Don't reach for an angry dog.

2. Take the cuffs off the guy you're kidnapping.

3. Let the victim of your sociopathic aggression calm his dog down.
When I posted my comment, it was Brain's.
Also it's pretty well understood, I'd imagine especially by police officers, dogs' reactions to their owners being threatened. They either could have foreseen this, or more cynically, they wanted this to happen.
The reason it makes people angry is that "creeper" has become the male equivalent of slut shaming. I was thinking long and hard about this and it suddenly hit me.

1) It entirely a judgement in the head of the person making the claim. There are no objective agreed upon standards for it, so there is no way to refute the claim. When someone calls another person a slut, they are using their own standards of sexuality, something about which there is no universal standard, and judging the person against that standard. Because the standard is the accuser's own there is no way to claim that they are objectively wrong.

2) Because of the above, it is entirely context dependent. As others have brought up, this means that the exact same behaviour from two different people can be called "creepy" in one instance, and desirable the next. Examine the difference in reactions between a person who does not fit the idealized marketing body type making themselves sexually avalable and a person considered "hot". I have seen women called slutty for the same behaviour that was proclaimed as "awesome" all because they were seen as less conventionally attractive than the other woman.

3) It immediately associates that person with a negative societal perception and group. Because of this both words have incredible power, although much good work has been done to dull the impact of slut but it is still damaging.

Due to all of the above, calling someone a creeper is an incredibly powerful way to immediately disempower that person, place them on the defensive, and quickly impact them in a negative fashion. We recognize that a combination of the above three points makes the word slut an incredibly negative word that should really never be used, and I'm sure we'll get there with creeper/creepy. But if you want to know why it makes people angry, well just remember that question the next time you get worked up over someone casually dropping a "slut" bomb on someone else.
Google does accept patches for Android from third parties, but they must go through a process that isn't exactly obvious to those third parties. I believe there is also a contributor license agreement required, but that is becoming standard practice for things including the Linux kernel.

I base this on statements made in the #android IRC channel in the past by Google developers working on Android.

As for FirefoxOS, is it possible for a user to install XPIs or XPCOM components on their own handset? I can understand why limitations would be placed on third-party applications obtained through a web service, but not why owners of devices could not install additional components.
It's not stolen if you still have it.
Passing the Banana
Hmm,

Given the article's windup, I'd be a bit skeptical of the naive solution - at input n, with probability 1/n replace the current choice.

Once you've reached input number 10^8 or whatever, you've got all sorts of chances to have arithmetic overflow and/or the weirdness of that many pseudo-random operations screw you.

I'd rather keep a list of x's; let x1 be randomly chosen from the last 10, x2 randomly chosen from the last 100, x3 random chosen from the last 1000, etc and when termination time come do a little fixup. That'd take O(log(n)) memory instead of O(1) but if this matters, shouldn't you want some sample of what's happening?
Exactly - and it's been getting worse.

I usually don't comment on this since it may serve to just exacerbate the problem, but this last year it seems like there has been a stronger decline in comment/article quality on HN than usual. I'm not sure what's going on - when digg started to feel this way in 2007 there was reddit and when reddit started to feel this way in 2008 I found HN, not sure what's next.
this is a bit more high-profile I think.
Winkelvii will be Zuckerberg's boss someday
The Scent of Freshly Mown Binary
It's not that people that disagree are as a class nutters.

It's that nutters are disproportionately attracted to certain types of posts.

And yes it is a measured response, there are almost always a lot of annoying nonsensical shouters whenever the topic comes up.
Some of us lost our flagging privileges by flagging all the duplicative, non-hacker-related junk on the front page the past few weeks.
they could have used a taser
> Unless you have a real emergency and need assistance, it's best to avoid the police whenever possible, even if you've done nothing wrong.

You are assuming everyone's objective function is to minimize harm to themselves.

If you want to deter the police from using unreasonable force during an arrest, you can do that by filming them.
Or let go of the illegally detained man they took into custody and let him secure his dog. It's not like he was putting up a fight.
What if the website software has decided to turn your vote arrows and "flag" links into placebo buttons? I am certain my votes have no effect, nor do my flags; I've tested it.

Silently being relegated to a second-class account (not a "hell ban" at least, I guess) has made me less interested in participating at all. I don't even know why I'm logged in right now.
So cool! And quite a good article too - presents quite a mindbending topic in a graspable, compelling manner.
May I get a source for that?
Here is my question: if cops need to shoot barking, even mildly aggressive, dogs to protect themselves, then why are we allowing our brave workers in the poster service to go about their jobs so hopelessly unprotected from the angry dog menace? Clearly if dogs present such a clear danger to police, then postal workers should be packing heat as well.

Seriously, cops seem to be the only government workers that need to shoot dogs to protect themselves from them. Everyone else somehow manages, including cops in many other countries. Maybe we should contract with some european police officers to train our police...
See what the people and organizations you care about prefer.
http://www.photoficient.com/

Basically you follow people and ask them questions that they can only answer by voting for one of two alternatives. Each alternative is illustrated with a photo that you upload.

The vision is that whenever you want to compare something (for example Xbox One vs PS4), you create a "match" on Photoficient. Debating happens outside Photoficient. Photoficient is only about voting. So even if you post your match on multiple social networks (Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit, Facebook, Google+, etc) you would be able to see who voted for a particular alternative within the people and organizations you follow on Photoficient.

It's a Rails 4 app. The source is available on Github: https://github.com/frabrunelle/photoficient. Feel free to open an issue to request a feature or to describe a bug.
You can get a Seiki 50" 4K monitor for $1299 on Amazon.

Way better deal.

http://www.amazon.com/Seiki-Digital-SE50UY04-50-Inch-120Hz/d...
I imagine that somewhere out there on the internet is a Hacker News-equivalent for public transit workers full of outraged comments about 21-year-old tech workers getting $200K to eat free food and move their fingers back and forth over a keyboard.

Full disclosure: I'm a government worker.
When are you going to add bitcoin? :)
Getting started with machine learning later in career
Hi Hackers,
Is it good idea to give up on .NET and try to learn "machine learning" along with maths and technologies needed for that?

Is there any places for average programmer in this domain ?
Did they grow on the back of cheating Reddit, however? If this was a more recent desperation tactic, then it did explode in their face rather spectacularly, seeing a much more dramatic decline than they would have likely seen with simple competition.
Billionaire title doesn't make scientific claims any more true. Tom Cruise may be billionaire too, but claims to believe in some crap, for whatever reasons.

Just to make my point clear, I'm not against J. Simons. I'm against using billionaire titles for defending scientific theories.

The article seems to be published in the Journal of High Energy Physics, which is considered seriously by physicists [0]. That title would be a valid response to schlagetown, of course.

[0] http://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?area=3100&category=...
Or, maybe ask the owner to calm the dog?... like any sane person would do?
I think the content here has shifted from the original focus long ago, lots of people are interested in discussing the context in which technology and the work they do takes place.

Actually, refreshing the thread now (this has taken off pretty quickly) there's very little relevant discussion, so I agree with you. I would have liked to see some discussion around the role of sousveillance but it's mostly just the typical reddit 'police are scum' discussion.
I think interviews can often be a dicey proposition since ultimately an interview should be explicitly focused on the person. So if you just want general advice from them, an interview works well. But if you want to find out what the think about Thing X that you're making, an interview isn't really appropriate.
As a [large] dog owner, this is a gut wrenching video. Watching that dog roll around in agony after being shot multiple times sent me over to my dog to hug him for just being alive.

With that said, this guy is an idiot, the cops overreacted initially, and this huge ass dog let off a dozen warning barks. Once he went to protect his master from 'harm' the cops reacted in a way that put the dog into fight or flight mode.

They should be better trained to deal with dogs, and also should be brought up on criminal charges for arresting a man who did nothing wrong, and consequently killing an animal that posed no true threat to the half dozen officers on the scene.
Ask HN: is this the way to submit new thread of "Ask HN" section?
It could be argued that the alternative for the FirefoxOS devices that have been announced are Android devices with similar hardware, but running either outdated versions of Android or suffering the limitations of running a platform built for newer devices on a device with more limitations.

This is a similar position to the one Microsoft is taking with WP7 through the less expense carriers in the US, the speed and responsiveness of WP7 is put up against Android 2.3 on a low capability CPU and GPU. WP7 seems to have been designed to render the "tile" display fast on lower quality graphics hardware.

If Mozilla and partners are positioning these devices against entry level devices from companies like Motorola and ZTE in less developed countries they could do well.
> I can't remove, for example, my NFL application (which came installed by default)

Settings - Apps - All - NFL Mobile - Disable
We do have a very serious problem. We have a paramilitary force patrolling our streets, largely fighting a fictional "war on drugs" and locking up whole swaths of our population. The poor-ish, brown-ish swath.
It works for everyone who isn't a cop, it should work for cops too.
Thank you, Edwin Snowden. In the end, you have made us more free.
If he returns to the US he will be tortured, as Manning was, prior to trial for much the same charge.

It's not self-imposed exile if returning to the US is a non-option due to their DEMONSTRATED TENDENCY to deny prisoners their basic human rights.
The cop is likely following the training he was given, which is to shoot attacking animals--it's a lot cheaper to replace a dog than to hospitalize a cop, and ultimately the officer's life is worth more than the dog.

I love dogs, I've lived with several (medium and large), but you don't mess around with something like that if it decides to get dangerous.

This is the same reason that cops are trained to shoot center-mass and until the attacker is down; this officer responded quickly under stress and safely dispatched his attacker, preventing possible serious injury to both himself and his partner.

If you want to argue that the cops shouldn't have cuffed the guy, I'd absolutely agree. A polite "Now, son, why were you phoning at us?" would've avoided all this nonsense. I can't in clear conscience disagree with the self-defense the officer used.
The Federal Whistleblower Act does not cover Snowden.
5 U.S.C. § 2302(b)(8)(A)-(B).
For disclosures not made to the Inspector General or Special Counsel

"if such disclosure is not specifically prohibited by law and if such information is not specifically required by Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or the conduct of foreign affairs;"

Also
www.aclu.org/pdfs/safefree/disavowed_report.pdf‎
(Page 10)
Please stop throwing around numbers without citing them. It's not helpful at all. Also, I don't think paid overtime should be considered controversial.