skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
3. Don't tell American citizens that their government abuses its power, or you'll be charged with espionage

Point 3 is patently false. All of my Facebook friends, and I, regularly say that the United States government abuses its power, some from the right, some from the left, and many from a general freedom-loving perspective, and we all go on posting as we please. All of these statements are exaggerations. Many of these statements refer to problems that are much worse in other places. (If you think that arbitrary abuse by the police is the worst it can be in the United States, you haven't traveled very much.) Sure, protest fearlessly about any abuse you find anywhere. But don't lose sight of reality.

AFTER EDIT: People who follow my comments on Hacker News

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tokenadult

will be well aware that I participate in public protests here in the United States, in full view of TV news cameras and police observers. (The last protest I participated in was across the street from the headquarters of the Minneapolis police department.) I am an equal-opportunity democracy movement activist, desiring more power for the people in every country of the world. As one of the grandchild comments to this comment has now said, it's silly to exaggerate conditions in the United States, as that just robs a comment of credibility. If you want to establish a better trend line for United States policy, be specific in your policy proposals, and make your policy proposals public fearlessly, early and often. Don't be an anonymous coward. Put your name behind your convictions.

People power democracy movements that nudge countries from dictatorship to democracy can really work. I have seen it done. A successful movement for greater freedom requires great courage, and a degree of social trust among the movement participants that is not easy to find. Allow me to repeat advice I have shared here on Hacker News before. If you really want to be an idealistic but hard-headed freedom-fighter, mobilizing an effective popular movement for more freedom wherever you live, I suggest you read deeply in the free, downloadable publications of the Albert Einstein Institution,

http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html

remembering that the transition from dictatorship to democracy described in those publications is an actual historical process with recent examples around the world that we can all learn from. You can find publications in more than a dozen languages there to share with your friends around the world.
While it doesn't involve solving equations on paper, a lot of times when I'm driving I tend to muse on how applying my foot on the pedal influences my acceleration, how that translates into velocity, and how that in turn determines my distance traveled. I use this to restrain myself from the strong temptation to drive aggressively and weave in and out of traffic since, unless I'm driving long distances, the difference in arrival time is negligible.
I'd love to be trapped in a padded room with you for 10 hours so that I could crush your mind with my mind.
I don't live in the United States, but the LAST thing you want to do over there is to film an officer.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2008566,00.ht...

By the way, my father recalls from when my country was a dictatorship that "you couldn't take photos of police or military, or you were arrested". Democratic U.S.A. is doing the same..
> It's an interesting idea that a country (that is, the people living in a certain country) should have some kind of "original sin" for things that happened before they were born.

Interesting, but not at all controversial, especially here.
It's funny you say this...

Back when the idea of a corporation was first formed (I do not remember the time frame) one of the requirements to complete the process of incorporation was to prove what you were going to do for the community around you.

I wonder how this idea got lost in the process...
"American Indian" is an official term, and moreover it is a term DESIRED by some aboriginal rights activists in the United States, like the founders of the American Indian Movement (AIM).

http://www.aimovement.org/
Yes I understand that. What I was suggesting is that the poor people in Tower Hamlets haven't all been displaced, just the people in the Shoreditch triangle, which is tiny in population when you compare to say, Bow, just next door.

So the amount of money brought in from the Shoreditch gentrification and subsequent business tax breaks leading up to the Olympics was so great in that one concentrated area that the ENTIRE Tower Hamlets looks decent statistically but the reality is very different.
Dependencies on commercial software (e.g., that package for the sound system, purchased as source and modified, without which the product won't even compile).

Dependencies on specialized build tools; porting to something free would not be easy.

Exposure of security holes in existing deployments by revealing bad security practices.
I did paleo for 9 months. No wheat, gluten. Veggies, some sweet potatoes and nuts, lots of meat (lean and non-lean). I lost 30 pounds (I wasn't really overweight). I don't know my body fat % at that time but I pretty sure it was lower than 15%. Exercising 3 times a week (Weight training).

I had carb craving all-day long even after eating 2000+ calories. I was between 50g and 100g of carb per day (as recommended by Mark's Daily Apple and some others). At the end I feel bad, always tired (exact opposite than at the beginning) and I got very sick for a month (first time in my life).

I'm now eating fruits and protein (no wheat, gluten, processed food) and sometimes dairy. I feel far better for more than a year now (without fluctuations like with paleo). I've gained some weight (because my metabolism was really low) but I'm now dropping weight without any change. It is a long-term diet I'm not expecting to drop 10 pounds in a month (I've tried paleo again for a week recently and didn't even lost a pound BTW).
Armchair air crash investigator
Well, looks like I was the fool:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/edward-snowden-acc...
Who is going around the world exporting wars in name of whatever? I can't make petition for that, only you can do it. But I even can't make petition for that in EU because EU politicians are slaves, they just follow US politics even if it will be bad for EU. Most people are not happy about that. On the other hand it looks like you thing that EU wouldn't exist without EU? If you saying that -> just LOL
It is beyond me that you read my first paragraph and probably started thinking "close-minded." It's beyond me that you fail to see the sense of betrayal and defeatism in a person who feels cheated by his country.

Did you even read the post, actually ? You found ONE word, which I in fact tried to use to conceal the fact that I was talking about a person generally of the West, and not specifically American, -- you found that ONE word to harp on. Your entire response is nothing more than a turn on that one term, one word, which plays a very insignificant role in the entire post.

And the rest you ignored, unless you forget that America is the leading consumer power of the world. Did you actually read the post ?

Americans, for the most part, today behave like a large population of people who have been systematically acculturated with principles of consumerism. I am here sharing my grievances with that, and these effects of their personality will ultimately prove negative in the face of a world (a set of countries) which can easily and readily identify members of a (hyper)consumerist culture.

Just that. That. Read it twice if you have to. It's called a spade. If calling a spade makes you want to tell me to "leave," considering what the spade is: You leave, consumer-programmer.
I agree as well with your point.
I want to create a function that tells me the temperature - but also lets me know the temperature yesterday. Clearly, the best way for this function to work is to have a default value of the current time. Python default values simply won't work here, as the time will be when I first start the program up and not when I call the function tomorrow for the current temperature.

Why would I ever want to have the value from when I first launched the program?! Your argument that "this is how python does it" is not a very good one. Why should I have put it in the method? I want a default value! The reason for having the default value on a function in the first place is to allow me to make functions work with a default value. If this doesn't work, the feature is useless. As I said in the first post, the only reason the feature is usable at all is because, luckily, people nearly always use only numbers or strings for default values.

EDIT: Plus your observation that you rarely use default values is probably for a good reason: they don't really work. Maybe if they worked, you'd use them?
>but one of the comments goes to great lengths explaining that those controlling the data collection are duly elected.

I saw this too and thought how insanely naive it was. Also how nonsensical a response it is. The very point is that people feel betrayed by their government. By definition, then, those "duly elected people" are not representing the will of the people. That is, there is something broken about the system that must be fixed, but cannot be fixed by merely participating more in that broken system.

This dysfunction is also evidenced by the fact that much of this was done in secret by these elected officials and there is much effort to maintain that secrecy. A democracy cannot flourish in secret, as it relies upon an informed populace. But, if not for someone breaking laws created by "duly elected officials", we would not even know of these programs and hence the need to consider holding these officials accountable democratically.

In fact, that was the very point of the article: we have lost the reins and must now protect ourselves. And, the article itself was very thought provoking. Not so much for the technological solutions it suggested, but for the justification and context for their neccessity.
"Botched Paramilitary Police Raids": http://www.cato.org/raidmap
There's another side to that, which is that overfunding of the police is coupled to underfunding of other institutions; too many social issues are framed as law-enforcement problems, and tackled with a militarized version of the law enforcement mindset.
Also don't be black, poor, trans, or a sex worker (and if you're black, poor and trans, you'd better dress like a nun, or the police will read you as a sex worker). People in those categories usually don't even make it as far as an outraged Salon article.
Sometimes this is true, but many products are trivial to copy, like Instagram, or twitter. Most of us here could probably copy either of those in a weekend or two.
Watching Hollywood movies, I often wondered if they weren't exaggerating the diffusion of SWAT teams in the US. Looks like they are not.
I worked at 2 places in the '90s where this happened and it involved 3 products and 1 lawsuit.

Never mind that it was no longer possible to buy the tools that were used to build the products...
> 20 pounds in first 2 weeks...
> vegetables... high protein... no sugar...
> purposefully didn’t start exercising yet...
> Gary Taubes ...

I've seen exactly this a few times.
None of those people were very fat to begin with.
Doesn't matter from a chemical perspective, because the law of conservation of energy/mass is not violated. But it is true that hormonal response makes it easier or harder to stay with a diet.
Market share is completely irrelevant, what matters is where the profit comes from and iOS dominates that market. A lot of Android phones are just being used as dumb-phones.
T8 the Bio Inspired 3D Printed Spider Octopod Robot [video]
I didn't have to look hard to find bug reports for pipelining. An example is https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apt/+bug/948461 for Amazon's S3. I'd be interested if the problem is still reproducible now. Also, one of the comments mentions Squid 2.0.2 as being buggy.

Also, see https://insouciant.org/tech/status-of-http-pipelining-in-chr... for a link to Firefox's blacklist of buggy servers (and a good discussion of pipelining in Chromium).

Most of the improvements in SPDY are latency improvements, so if you're downloading sites with netcat and then viewing them in a browser, I'm pretty sure the overhead of that would dwarf anything SPDY would save. That having been said, there's ample evidence of SPDY improving things. From http://bitsup.blogspot.com/2012/11/a-brief-note-on-pipelines... :

"Also see telemetry for TRANSACTION_WAIT_TIME_HTTP and TRANSACTON_WAIT_TIME_HTTP_PIPELINES - you'll see that pipelines do marginally reduce queuing time, but not by a heck of a lot in practice. (~65% of transactions are sent within 50ms using straight HTTP, ~75% with pipelining enabled).... Check out TRANSACTON_WAIT_TIME_SPDY and you'll see that 93% of all transactions wait less than 1ms in the queue!"
Opportunity's Improbable Anniversary
Isn't there a risk that releasing a product too early could cause a negative first impression and by the time you have gotten around to improving it, everyone has lost interest?

Also quality is something which is difficult to define and pin down, and will also vary depending on the product.

For example , a backup solution which blows away everything else in terms of innovation and usability but corrupts my data 1% of the time isn't going to get bought.
And even if they fix the 1% corruption bug I'm going to remain skeptical for a very long time.
Arduino Event-Driven Development
May I infer from your post that you use Caps Lock at least semi-regularly?

Myself, I abhor it. I've always just held Shift, even for long runs of capital letters. As far as my usage patterns go, Caps Lock serves only to foil my attempts to type my password. :/
> This argument is spectacularly stupid because based on the rise of exactly these kinds of incidents, you could justify the production and distribution of automated turrets to negate the use of current SWAT tactics.

Then it's a good thing that most states have laws that prohibit owning fully-automatic firearms then.

> You can't just stop at the perceived consequences of your supposed equilibrium point, you have to follow it all the way to the logical conclusion.

Don't be absurd. If I use a semi or fully automatic weapon to protect myself against police brutality, it will only ensure that I won't get out alive.

Nice slippery-slope argument by the way, do you work at FOX News?
There's a massive signal-to-noise issue in the fitness world, particularly because there's so much value to be made just by making some noise.

For anyone reading this post and inspired to lose weight, I recommend you keep the following basic tenets in mind when researching a plan/regimen:

1. You lose weight by eating less calories than your body uses. (As a corollary, you almost definitely consume more calories than you think you do. Get a calorie-counting app.)

2. Being active isn't necessarily crucial to losing weight, but it is crucial to being more healthy. In particular, lifting weights will help your overall physique even if you're eating at a caloric deficit -- but the most important activity is the one that you like enough to make a habit. (Mine is biking, and occasionally soccer.)

There are a lot of huge fads right now -- in particular, intermittent fasting (eat once per day), ketogenic diet (eat lots of fat, eat no carbs), and liquid diets (drink lots of things) seem to be the rage. The reason fads can be successful usually have less to do with the specific mechanics and minutiae of their gospel and more to do with the fact that you're conscientious about what you're putting into your body and diligent about treating it well.
Just think of how fun the bottom 1/4 of the U.S. will be once the border patrol gets to double its numbers.
It's for your own protection, Mr. Kafka, unless of course it's for someone else's protection.
I observed something quite strange that readers might find interesting. When I first tried to learn Dvorak two years ago I found that it completely destroy ability to type qwerty. I simply couldn't type either layouts! I ended up giving up early and regaining my qwerty powers. But then just last year I tried to learn it again and found that it had genuinely no effect on my qwerty ability. I could switch between them like a fluent multi-linguist. Naturally I gave up again :P until last week when I decided on giving Colemak a proper go. I have been on Colemak for 3 days without changing back until right now when I wrote the second half of this with switching back to qwerty, and observe no difficulty in typing, except for backspace where I keep occidentally hitting the CAPS key which is what I use as backspace for Colemak. Not sure why my brain seems to treat backspace differently such that that happens... I also have no idea how my strange experience happened, but for those concerned about forgetting their qwerty ability, know that you don't need to even if at first your mind turns to spaghetti and you can't even type with any layout
They did the same thing in Toronto after G20 in 2010 (where 700 were arrested).

The police petitioned to keep all the CCTV cameras and all the equipment they spent millions of dollars on to prepare.
A fundamental rule of classified information is that disclosure of said information does not cause declassification. You aim to make it unclear whether there is any truth in the leaked documents to cast doubt on the information.

Imagine if these were nuclear secrets. You would prefer it to be unclear so that replicating groups would not feel confident jumping into a nuclear project.

Obviously since we are talking about something that may violate Amendment 4, things ought to be a bit different. Probably not from a declassification standpoint, but rather from a legislate-this-out-of-existence standpoint.
You may be harrassed if you film cops, but it is plainly legal[1], and the courts have recently begun to be more aggressive about slapping down municipalities that try to restrict it.[2] Normalizing it will go a long way to keeping police from thinking they can harass activist-types that are filming cops. I have been filming cops with copwatch groups from the days we had to carry big shoulder mounted video cameras.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glik_v._Cunniffe

2) http://reason.com/archives/2012/04/05/7-rules-for-recording-...
That's precisely why I found it fascinating. :)
Copy basic functionality perhaps.... I doubt the majority here could scale nearly as effectively as both of those companies have....
Ask HN: Project Electrifying flies
In the summer I am really annoyed by flies landing on my screen. I usually kill them with my electric fly swatter. But it's ineffective, I lack skills of catching them.

I was thinking of using my Arduino to build a remote controllable fly killer. You put some wires on top of your screen, connect them with your Arduino and wait. Once the fly is near, press a button send a few thousands volts and be done.

What do you think? Where are flies sitting most often in your office?
I seem to remember sending the Library of Congress a cd with source code on it when I did a copyright registration.

I guess we'll see what they've done with it when the first computer program copyrights expire in around 50 years (assuming Disney doesn't buy anymore extensions).
I can see passing on scalability, but security? In what circumstances does it make sense to build something with a fundamental security flaw? Getting security right doesn't have to take significantly more time than getting it wrong.
No, I think the logic is straightforward: If talking to "anyone, ever" can become a fatal problem involving the police, that makes talking to the police directly an even worse option. "You shouldn't talk to anybody, especially not the police."
I don't know. Scaling as effectively as Twitter doesn't seem like a particularly high bar. They spent a year or so after they got big being down almost as much as they were up. The "fail whale" was just about the most common thing to see on twitter.com.

Of course, now that Twitter is established, you cannot repeat their mistakes if you want to succeed.
UT on Rails Course
I think the thing that frustrates me the most is that in situations like the one you describe where developmentally disabled guy is killed and there were 100 ways to avoid it. Those ways simply are ignored after the fact because people feel such a need to defend the cop that they can't even acknowledge that they might have done something wrong. It creates a situation where improvement is pretty much impossible, because to improve one generally has to admit that there is a problem.
> If the crime involved is not violent and the suspect has no history of assaulting police officers (or perhaps any history of violent acts), it should basically be a criminal act for the police to initiate the use of force during the apprehension.

I think I agree.

> You are making a huge leap from the presence of weapons to the use of violence against other people.

I think police officers has to put their lives on the line. I'm not saying that SWAT teams have to use violence, I'm only saying that police officers should come prepared with semi-automatic firearms and body armor if there is a suspicion that the suspect will be armed.
Yep,

The negative impact of releasing an unfinished project is almost always enough to make a developer wait until their product is finalized.

Most intelligent people realize that they are most likely not the MOST intelligent person in the world; therefore releasing an incomplete product, when they unsure of a final release date, only opens them up to the risk of being copied and outdone.
This may be one beneficial side-effect of Google glass and related products.
Companies are usually improving the community in some way (that's why they make money in the first place). Grocers sell food to the community, hardware stores sell tools and supplies for making things, even the dreaded oil companies have sold the primary source of fuel for a century (and made money hand-over-fist for it). Random acts of kindness (e.g. open sourcing projects for no reason other than "We could"), while cool, are tangential to the purpose and specialty of the company.
(1) Our cold calls aren't completely cold. We dig/farm for people or businesses we honestly believe we can help! It's not too hard to find someone losing out on links or driving traffic away from their site who we can help.

(2) Each call is a learning experience (ref: lean startup?). We are not pressing for sales (as you may infer from our pipeline at the bottom of the article), but looking for their pain... setting up a demo (hopefully)... then selling if there is a GOLDEN fit.

(3) On a avg size bed with the A/C on 68F ;)
Today there is a great market for aluminium and glass mobile phones. I wouldn't recommend going into that market if you have limited financial resources.

If the first, second or third developer of mobile phones made them out of aluminium and glass rather than plastic do you think they would have been more successful? How about if they gave them away for nothing, or with a total return less than cost price?

If you want quality to be your differentiator, you need to already have easy access to a proven market for your core product.
A lot of the funding comes from seizures of cars, houses, cash, anything that can be grabbed. Then it's up to the citizen to "prove" it isn't ill-gotten goods.
Take a look at joining the Moves beta test for Android.
"Just open-source it" is not realistic