skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Wow, that never occurred to me. Analyzing Metadata really is a lot like "pre-crime".

I thought that's why everybody's freaking out. I mean... that's why I'm freaking out. I haven't even seen the movie.
The Tricky Business of Innovation: Can You Patent a Magic Trick?
A Filthy History: When New Yorkers Lived Knee-Deep in Trash
If you make your `db.load` method resolve the promise with `this` (where `this` is `db`), and do the same for `setupDB` and `collectData` you can easily chain them without having to have a reference to `db`.

db.load()
.then(setupDB)
.then(collectData);

That way it looks much more like your blocking code.

You are currently basically throwing away the value you `resolve` with, where you should instead resolve with what would be the return value if it was a sync function so you can `.then` the function that takes the return value and returns a promise to be resolved with its return value.

// Sync
var foo = function () { return 'foo' };
var addBar = function (foo) { return foo + 'bar'; }
addBar(foo()) == 'foobar'

// Promise using Q
var foo = function () { return Q.resolve('foo') };
var addBar = function (foo) { return Q.resolve(foo + 'bar'); }
foo.then(addBar).done(function (result) {
result == 'foobar'
});
PHP CRUD Tutorial (part 2)
Ask HN: How do you stay uptodate with all the tech?
Im a webdev, doing websites and apps for my employer, and i have a hard time keeping up to date with even just a few technologies im using, i use twitter, read on HN and Reddit, but still it feels like im constantly missing imortant stuff.

Right now im learning AngularJS and Laravel, so i have a back and frontend framework to learn. Still theres tonns of other stuff im interested in.

So how do you my fellow devs stay up to date no matter what your intrests are?
rlab (Reading Hackspace) have also recently upgraded their premises and are looking for new members.
Ask HN: my idea for a side project: social events reminders.  
Hi All,

Yesterday I got an idea for a side project and I would like to ask your opinion about that. The plan would be to develop a website to share worldwide "non-private event reminders". For example: Nov 21st at 2pm China F1 GP, Jun 23rd at 9pm Metallica concert in NYC etc.

As a user you can use the service in three ways:
- post a new reminder (event) that will be published
- subscribe to a reminder and receive a notification by email few mins/hours/days before the event
- simply look at the published reminders in homepage

I am calling them "reminders" and not "events" because the idea is to keep them very short and simple. They should be just a reminder of events that users can subscribe to and not full event descriptions with pictures, links etc.

Further iterations will add features such as filters (by category, by regions, by city, by time etc.), user registration, multiple notifications etc.

Does it make sense? Are there any similar services?

Thanks!
Is it a framework? or are you looking to apply ai / nlp to a particular problem
Wait – maybe JavaScript IS the top programming language
I'm on a very old 2008 Macbook and it is perfectly fine for me.
I liked the explanation at the beginning of the Strings chapter in the Dive Into Python 3 tutorial:

http://getpython3.com/diveintopython3/strings.html
Sadly, this is a classic sign of a bubble :(
Again the common mistake to confuse codes and encoding.

ASCII is an encoding which can represent a very small subset of Unicode.

UTF8 is an encoding which can represent all of Unicode and it is a superset of ASCII.

UTF32 can represent all of Unicode, but is not a superset of ASCII.

Therefore, something can talk Unicode via UTF32 without being able to talk ASCII.
The New Normal: Big Unemployment
SIMD for Java is a long time coming. It doesn't change my statement though, because obviously, you can write small snippets of code, or benchmarks, where C beats Java. I was saying that for a large program (and there are few large programs whose performance depends on SIMD), Java usually beats C.

Actually, there are other changes that would improve Java performance more than SIMD, like value types. The lack of value types causes many unnecessary cache faults in Java programs.
Would like to see a mention of alternatives to commercial mobile networks.
[edited to keep this thread constructive]
I don't think you can achieve #1 without a bit of #2 and #3. Milage varies depending on what you're programming, but I think people are too quick to dismiss CS.
The library in my town (pop. < 5,000) has a reasonably well appointed maker lab.

http://fflib.org/learn/make/ffl-creation-lab/creation-lab-in...

I've yet to make use of it... but there a few projects I'd like to try out when I have the time.
For reference, Vala looks like a bastardised C# which compiles down to C which then compiles to native. The whole thing is built on top of Glib and GObject, the latter being akin to gouging your eyes out with a fork.

IMHO: use something else...
On an individual level you’re probably right, if the government wants to track you, they might find a way—so this is more about doing the right thing because you hope more people do it. Google analytics, for example, is mainly problematic because everyone uses it, which creates a graph where at Google’s end, ip numbers can get a very detailed surfing history, as users hop from GA using server to GA using server. One person using Piwik changes nothing, many people using it will.
Well, that was an interesting comment, and I read all of it, even though I only understood precious few words.
Truth 2 is important. Formal academic training in it might not be.
Oh yeah, this couldn't have possibly been captured with one of the millions of cell phones capable of recording in HD. We're all doomed now that they stuck it on a pair of glasses.
What Lazy Evaluation Really Means
If you want them to have less power, you need other powerful entities to tell them to stop abusing their powers. Boycott the tech giants and you'll see it happen. it's way more effective than any protest or online petition.
I believe Fayetteville, NY was the first public library in the country. (At least they made that claim).

EDIT
The first to have a maker's lab.
I love Sketch, it's a great Fireworks replacement. A few tips:

⌘ + cursor right or down: nudge width/height

in preferences you can set it to zoom into selection, which I prefer

when elements are grouped, hold ⌘ to select elements in the group directly

right click a layer and select mask - this will mask any layers above it. If it's in a group it will only affect the elements in the group
"Companies like Siemens and Bosch aren't exactly known for low prices or efficiency."

Which products, exactly, are you referring to? Siemens is a huge company that spans transportation, energy, healthcare, etc. I know their sub-critical, superheated steam turbines are pretty cost-effective. What's your experience with Siemens?
Ah... thanks. I was about to post "why does being good at a particular language have anything to do with mastering computer programming?" Admittedly C++ is a language with enough historical significance that any "master programmer" should at least have passing familiarity, but the article seemed to make "programming C++" synonymous with programming as a whole.

But hey, it's Forbes. (aka hardly authoritative on software mastery)
The article also makes clear that it's a standard fencepost error. Freakishly poor crypto, but not bush-league programming.
Solar headphones can charge mobile phones
Ken for Android: A free programming news reader
That's literally the first sentence of the OP article.
The three dirty little secrets of eCommerce success
> What’s a byte?

> A byte is a set of 8 bits.

Nitpicking, that's octet, not byte. I believe the distinction was lost and don't think byte has a proper definition anymore.
I thought the government already had it? :) :)
[Show HN] Community curated interactive guides for the web.
whatfix is community website, where anyone can create, share & execute interactive guides on any website or web applications.

Here's screencast http://youtu.be/xm2ly9qTXkM

Any comments/feedback on whatfix greatly appreciated!

If anyone is interested to try out private beta, you are most welcome, just add your email id to http://whatfix.com/ & you would get invite in couple of days.
Oh, hello PommeDeTerre. Haven't we had roughly the same conversation last week on another thread?

> Firefox OS will need to successfully compete against BlackBerry OS, Windows Mobile, [...]

Yes, a new product needs to compete with existing products. That goes without saying.

> And how exactly is it "different"?

Frankly? Try it, you'll see. For me, it's different insofar as I can write a small game and self-publish it in a few hours. I don't have to pay anyone, I don't have to wait for anybody's permission (compare with iOS), I don't have to download a SDK, and my users will be able to run/install the self-published app immediately (compare with Android). Oh, and of course, my students can do the same, which is a big deal to me.

It's different insofar as an application written for FirefoxOS will also work on Android (and hopefully on iOS) and, in many cases, on your Desktop/Laptop. By opposition to what you seem to believe, this is not a design flaw. This is called not locking in your users. It's the kind of thing that Mozilla does.

It's different insofar as much of the development is done by the community of users. Not a privately-held company that decides what is best for us in terms of features or performance or privacy.

Oh, I almost forgot: it's different insofar as said company does not own all my private data by default.

> It's hard to see how it'll compete on vague notions of "openness" that most consumers really could not care any less about [...]

In the US, maybe. In India or Africa (or parts of China or Russia or Turkey ...), for instance? Not so. People care a lot about having a phone that they can use, which means first and foremost a phone that works in their language, even if that language is not a big commercial target. That's what openness is about, not about people like us squabbling on some high tech news aggregator.

> It can't even really compete on price, given the existence of Android.

Of course it can. On low-powered phones, FirefoxOS tends to outperform Android by a large margin. This means that you can have the same experience with cheaper phones.

Caveat: I'm a Mozillian.
Forbes has the feel of a place where a loosely knit group of people have been given the keys to post whatever their whims desire.
> ("you are under arrest" is a contract offer, legally),

Could you, uh, expand on this?
Neither does iOS, for that matter.
It's helpful to consider neighboring France as to why the total energy consumption is a more meaningful indicator. It has relatively cheap electricity due to the abundant nuclear power and as a result much larger percentage of the households use electricity for heating.[1]

In Germany, they prefer burning fossil fuels and therefore need less electricity during the winter. Should those burned fossil fuels be arbitrarily excluded when considering the total energy dependence of the country, considering they could be substituted with other energy sources?

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/14/europe-power-suppl...
If that's the case why did the heavily subsidized US solar firms that received DoE grants fail?
Somehow I missed that sentence, read the rest of it. But it maybe sunk in as I remembered seeing some figures recently on that...
>ASCII really should have been named ASCIIWOA: the American Standard Code for Information Exchange With Other Americans.

So he thinks Americans are the only people to use the English language does he?
My concern is substantive:

In the process of handling an embargoed disclosure, Silent Circle groomed (perhaps aggressively) a Github pull request thread. Handling a coordinated disclosure on a Github pull request is tricky under the best of circumstances, but the Silent Circle team was dealing with an unplanned partial disclosure and was, with Dowd's cooperation, trying to get the genie back into the bottle long enough for (from what I can tell) their competitors to get patched.

This was, as is evident from the thread, a problem for Cryptocat's uninvolved, un-implicated lead developer.

Meanwhile: I cannot immediately tell from the record which of the independently discovered vulnerabilities in Cryptocat correspond to which CVEs or which advisories and which severity descriptions.

The problem isn't one of demeanor; it's that I can't tell what's going on with this project. Does this sound fiddly? Let's make it more concrete: did an exploitable vulnerability get reported to the Cryptocat project, mitigated in a public Github commit, and sit there for months without any acknowledgement from the project?

Cryptocat's project leader is an HN commenter, and if this confusion is my own doing --- totally possible --- I'd be happy for some clarification; not about Silent Circle, but on how someone would get a record of what vulnerabilities were disclosed in Cryptocat, when, and what the timeline was for each from discovery to public disclosure. It's plausible that there's a clear record somewhere and I just missed it.
I think you need to compare these to whatever low end android you are likely to find in a local retailer: galaxy mini, Xperia tipo, etc.

My guess is that Mozilla see the low end as the most vulnerable angle. Apple aren't going low end. Android aren't excluding it, but <$100 phones are an afterthought.

There is always demand at the lower end. Handset makers are happy to fill it. Android might be the best current option, but Google aren't focused on this segment specifically and I think most app developers are developing for high or midrange phones first. A lot of stuff doesn't work well on a cheap android. By focusing on less power and smaller screens, they will encourage developers to make simpler apps that run well on this hardware.

It's still early to tell if they have an advantage over android in this market, but it makes sense in theory.
I felt the same way; although, I did try out Immersion anyway and it was cool, but I prefer the NodeXL plugin for excel. It doesn't do Gmail yet, but you can do everything Immersion does and much much more on your local machine without having to hand over account access to a third party:

http://nodexl.codeplex.com/

Here's a write-up I did on it in 2011 analyzing the Science Online Conference tweets and my Facebook friends. You can see it's very robust and extensible:

http://ideonexus.com/2011/01/17/social-network-mapping-fun-w...
Dedicated camera button is one of the best decisions Microsft ever made.
I came across http://uptodate.frontendrescue.org/ few weeks ago, they give valuable advices and many resources to keep getting up to date.

About web standards, frameworks and related tools, I recommend you to cast a glance on http://webplatformdaily.org/
Mark Shuttleworth: Two weeks with Mir
> Ironically, things like wage controls, rent controls, and welfare have locked these very people into a cycle of poverty out of which they have trouble escaping.

Uh what? Things like rent control and welfare allow people to have shelter and eat when they otherwise wouldn't be able to. Systemic poverty occurs not because there is a welfare program, but rather because of classism, racism, and capitalism. That's not hyperbole, this is well understood in logical argument and through real world evidence.

> Continuing communities that are perpetually in blight is not the an obvious good. Allowing the system to change naturally with healthy commerce would seem to be an improvement.

Except that said development skews heavily towards white people and heavily disfavors black and hispanic people. This doesn't address livability for people and communities, this kind of attitude is a direct endorsement of systemic racism and classism.
If you're, for example, rewriting an obviously correct but slow piece of code X into a faster but not obvious code Y, how do you know if the two are functionally identical without at least some knowledge of program algebra?
This reminds of the emphasis Apple is putting on depth in iOS 7 interface.

Lots of interesting things to be done with this sort of tech.
That system us actually a (usually) government mandated subsidy.

Think about it: when you pay for power you pay not just for generation but for distribution as well. When you feed it back and your meter runs backwards the power company should be paying you only for generation (at a wholesale rate, so they can turn a profit).

In some countries they measure your power in both directions and give you a credit based how much you put back into the grid. This would be much lower than what you pay to buy power.
it seems to have some problems with my gmail account and just want to go five years ago and not further. Maybe i have to much emails for him ...
You want some criticism, because we have too little of that here on HN? I'll bite. ;)

"A byte is a set of 8 bits. Computers typically move data around a byte at a time."

A byte being 8 bits is ok. Historically, a byte might have a different number of bits, but all modern architectures use 8 bits. Since this is an introductory article, this is fine. (more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte)

Computers do not typically move data in byte chunks. You could say "a byte is the smallest unit of data a CPU can load or store". If you talk about moving data, the question is between what. Probably memory. However, there are caches nowadays, since bandwidth is cheap and latency is expensive. Data is moved in cache line chunks, which means 4-64 byte chunks depending on architecture and cache level. Bigger chunks in upcoming architectures.
Technology was supposed to make our lives easier and allow us to work less. Instead it gave us new ways to judge people.
> I was saying that for a large program (and there are few large programs whose performance depends on SIMD), Java usually beats C.

That goes counter to my experience. Care to share your anecdata here?
But the collection of Unicode codepoints is an extension of the ASCII codepoints, isn't it? (Regardless of how they are encoded).
While that does make sense, there was a period of time over the last few years where people were getting charged with violating wiretapping laws in two-party consent states for recording police, who did not consent: http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/07/the-war-on-cameras/sin...

That said, my understanding (IANAL) is that "ACLU vs. Alvarez" upheld that, in legal terms, this is bullshit: http://www.aclu-il.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Alvarez_ru...
I remember in 2001 a friend of mine brought his black Apple laptop at work because he wanted to work with it to do a web application in Java. Everyone laughed at him. Now if I see someone with a thick Dell or IBM laptop it's the exception.
But for historical encodings that kind of matters. Because a byte was not always 8 bit we have to deal with utf-7 and had to ensure things where 8 bit clean. And utf-9.
Not a framework yet. For now think of it as NLP interface to your content.
> I can't feel sorry for the guy, only for the animals harmed before and during the police raid.

I didn't think I had to repeat myself on HN.
the Secret Service hasn't really been ordered to release anything other than a stack of black pieces of paper.

Wouldn't that de facto qualify as a contempt of court?
Silicon Valley Idealists
I'm surprised nobody mentioned this, but AWS offers one year of free EC2 usage.
> Caveat: I'm a Mozillian.

Oh. If your view resembles that of the most of mozillians then I think Firfox OS is already doomed. What you wrote might appeal to some developers, but it means little to users. And I am not sure how many developers are interested in platform in which users are not interested.
Looks like when Blake Ross left Mozilla so did understanding the user.
If we ignore this artificial restriction, we can use arbitrary lengths, turning UTF-8 into varint encoding.

I.e.:

Oct.1 Oct.2 Oct.3
11111111 110DDDDD DDDDDDDD (7 octets more)
\_________/
10 bits

("D"s represent data bits)

This is what'd be necessary to use UTF-8 if we'd need to go beyond the current limits of 0x010FFFF upper bound.
Meet the Egyptian boy who explains his country’s crisis (video)
Baudot, baby!

Had the advantage that an open carrier (all zeros) mapped to NULL so you didn't waste paper (either tape or roll).
Man I was hoping to see one in the Virginia/DC area
Sure, and the iPod won't change anything. People can already use their walkman to play tapes wherever they want. Why would they need an iPod?

People don't walk around with their phones out in the air recording everything because it isn't convenient. The more widespread this gets and the ease with which we are able to store every second of video has very obvious privacy implications.
Delhi Metro Porn Scandal: Cant Trust Government
How exactly do you think Germany (as a whole) could profit from this? With the EEG (Energie-Einspeise-Gesetz), the German government created an artificial solar bubble which is costing electricity customers several billions of Euros each year, only to fill the pockets of (mostly Chinese) panel producers, homeowners and companies who install that stuff, and last but not least the banks (most installations are financed by credit).

The amount of electricity actually produced is almost neglible (a meager 3.1% in 2011), whereas the consumer price has almost doubled since 2005, and is now one of the highest in the world.

Even if you assume that this giant experiment in planned economy would somehow lead to technological breakthroughs, making producing electricity via solar economically feasible in the long term, Germany would still have to recover the cost of 20+ years of subventions (which already amount to over 100 billion €, and that's only a fraction of the total sum which has been guaranteed by the EEG), while other countries with much better climatic conditions would be able to reap the majority of the profits.
> In some countries they measure your power in both directions and give you a credit based how much you put back into the grid
That would be perfect. No need for extra administration and extra taxation.
I wonder about that.

I see around me a few people replacing their work computer with a cellphone. That cellphone is more useful for them, cheaper, easier to carry and, with respect to what they manage to use it for, more powerful.

Of course, that's just a few samples, so I have no idea about general trends.
IIRC, the IBM System 360 is the machine that really set the 8 bits == 1 byte convention in stone.

Before that you had CDC machines with 6-bit bytes (or Nybbles if you owned an Apple ][ with a floppy disk)
A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit. -- D. Elton Trueblood
I used it. It was a very interesting experience, but a little hard to get used to. The position of alt is not comfortable for the quasi-mode required. CAPS is more accessible, but then you can't use your pinkie. Raskin's idea was to use a special keyboard with two spacial keys, LEAP FORWARD and LEAP BACK near SPACE.

It's so sad that the project died. The interface was very promising and I long for that keyboard I never used.
Candy Wrapper for the Earth's Inner Core
the article hardly says anything... (more than dont believe what media provides, which again is nothing new)
It doesn't?

All recent MacBooks I have seen insist rather hard to be paired with an account and a credit card number. I have never done the initial setup of an iOS device, but I would have assumed that it was the same or worse.