skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure why you're picking on Microsoft.

One of the key facets of the the Xbox One is the Kinect as an always on device. As another poster pointed out, Microsoft has been quick to answer the privacy related questions that have been asked about this situation with the claim that the system has been built with privacy as a focus. As such, the reliability of those claims in light of this new leak appears to be relevant.

For example, given a court order, would Microsoft be required to:

1.) Provide law enforcement with Kinect data. (everything from as simple as "there were two people in the room" to "here is a live stream of the room"

2.) Be bound by gag orders not allowing Microsoft to reveal the existence of item 1.

3.) Be forced/coerced/enticed to provide bulk "wiretapping" of Kinect data.

Additionally, there is the question of "expectation of privacy". Many of the current privacy laws are based on this concept. However, could the courts decide that there is no expectation of privacy when a video and audio recording device has been placed in a private area, with full knowledge of the owner, also with knowledge that the data will be sent to a third party?

While these items might seem fringe (and before these leaks, I may have agreed), the scope of the current leaks seems to imply that these questions should at least be considered (even if a person chooses ultimately to accept the risk).
Ok, sorry - I just learned that average is used as a synonym for arithmetic mean only in "colloquial language" - I thought it was actually a synonym (probably because in my mother language average is translated to the the word "media", that is "mean"). My mistake.
"..and equating their actions with theft and rape is dehumanising and should not be considered acceptable!"

He didn't.
I would expect, if this was even possible, that it wouldn't be turned on by default but only when requested. Otherwise, it would be too east to catch for the reasons you mention.
I love your attention to detail. Why weren't these details in the article? The dumbing down of the news.
Baking a cake probably makes a candidate stand out about as much as bothering to write a cover letter. It might be more effort, though.
I didn't mean to offend - it was good natured teasing. I use Debian myself.
Yeah, iMessage does the same as Hemlis: end to end encryption.
This is more than a month old.
If you want your code to run as fast as possible, don't add needless bloat.

I guess I am failing to see where the argument lies? Isn't this still the first rule of Programming Club?
I ALWAYS forget about squeeze, thanks!
In addition to what was stated by RexRollman it can easily store video/audio to be sent only at the next start of the xbox. "Downloading update" or "Syncing savegames" and no-one is going to notice the encrypted few megabytes of MP3 compressed audio.
I took the time to read all of the first ten results and watch the video included amongst them.
There's two separate incidents, Halliburton subcontractor KBR and 12 nepali men, and DynCorp and Sex slaves in Bosnia.
Neither of which are Halliburton trafficking young girls to Africa, neither of which are any where near the continent.
Would you care to elaborate?
Need an Elevated View? Rent Your Own Orbiting Satellite
If you think that's the entire premise, you didn't read much of the article. Keep scrolling, it's a well well reasoned discussion of why Malcolm Gladwell's commentary on previous KA crashes was misinformed and possibly even distorted to prove his point. Gladwell's book was the source of the "Korean culturalism is incompatible with emergencies" myth you cite.

> With Airplane pilots, Crashes are so exceedingly rare, and the backups, both mechanical, human, and training so well designed to prevent them

Air travel is exceptionally safe, but it falls prey to the law of large numbers: 99.9% success still means some people die every year when there are thousands of planes in the air. This has everything to do with individual decision making on the part of the pilots, which will necessarily be faulty occasionally. It's basically just random chance that some planes every year will crash because of pilot error.

> the issues associated with a crash are typically systemic, and little to do with an individual.

What sounds better in an NTSB report: "the pilot fucked up and flew into the ocean, whoops" or "we recommend adjusting the height of the foo so the pilot can better see it while barring"? Obviously everyone wants actionable outcomes from post-crash investigations, even when they're just trying to explain away a random accident. Y
Can verify != can prove to a third party
Still, numbers are important.

What's most? 50.1%? 70%? 99.9999%?
I also find it a bit strange than a Human Right Activist would just put the letter on her frigging facebook wall
Wow, talk about missing the point.
"[...]At the moment companies have to back up their archives every five to ten years because hard-drive memory has a relatively short lifespan,” says Jingyu.

Since when hard drives die after 5-10 years? Are there some new physics laws that I'm not aware of, or what?
Some things are better to be standardised than diversified. eg networking protocols and display managers.
This whole thing makes me very suspicious of Apple's and Microsoft's whole disk encryption technologies. I can't help but wonder if back doors have been inserted into the products.
3-D printed rocket engines could make space travel cheaper
Intuition in software, concurrency and wood
This stuff is really fascinating to me. Will we ever hit a point in data storage where you can fit all the data about a volume in space, into a smaller volume of data storage? I'm sure the Uncertainty Principle plays into it, but theoretically could it be done--store 1 cubic meter's worth of data into a 1 cubic micrometer of storage?
Cultural differences do exist, even though discussing differences that have negative consequences or are viewed negatively tend to make many of us uncomfortable.

"The Pedometer Test: Americans Take Fewer Steps"
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/the-pedometer-test-...

Does reading that article or even its title make you angry?

Would you disagree with the results of the study on which it was based? If so, on what grounds? Do you believe that it is wrong in some way to even conduct such a study?
Trying to control people's reproductive rights goes against eons of human nature and evolution. And creating a "market" where you can sell these rights sounds like a horrible mash of Ayn Rand and Huxley.
I got 99 problems but Bootstrap ain't one
Another great article about Bootstrap development by the guys behind Flip.hr. Nice weekend read.
> I think the hard part is coming up with an way of setting yourself apart

Do stuff.

It's really as simple as that. Do stuff. And by stuff, I mean stuff beyond homework.

So when I ask what have you done, you can share stuff with me.

If you don't do anything, why would I hire you?
You can't "spread the wealth" if there isn't any. Printing more money doesn't make more wealth, it just diffuses it more. If I stop working, you can't tax my now-nonexistent income.
Arguably, a properly constructed set of 11 robots should be able to pass the ball to somewhere about half-way down the field fairly quickly and unstoppably, and would then proceed to shoot in exactly the right corner of the net from halfway down the pitch.

Blocking shots taken at the robot goal (if such a thing ever happened) would also be a piece of cake given the ease with which we can already program robots to catch things thrown at them.
Case in point: duckduckgo
As soon as I read she got her inspiration from a scripted reality show, I closed the page.
A half-serious conspiracy theory: The feds "encouraged" Microsoft to acquire Skype so as to obtain decrypted access to the communications.
The behavior of grabbing their bags has been observed on numerous occasions in commercial aircraft evacs across many cultures, including western ones. It is a real problem and a concern. But it's one that no airline or regulatory body has really done anything about for 50 years.
I'm guessing this is with MTFB rates given by manufacturers. With continuous use, it's not that uncommon to for hard drives to reach EOL fairly quickly.
Is Quantum Computing Practical?
The point is well made. Any sort of deviation from control that exhibits a pattern will directly influence the outcome of your results.
Good idea, I may make the switch more entirely as well. I already have started with DuckDuckGo
Twitter bot that answers programming questions
You should ask XKCD.

(Really! This seems like a very suitable question for that treatment.)
Among US-based news sources covering this: The New York Times, NBC News, New York Daily News, CBS News, NPR, Chicago Tribune, ABC.
This seems kind of silly. When would a person ever want to remove a file but not check that the changes didn't break anything?

In fact, as much as I like GitHub, using it entirely from the web interface seems a little dangerous in general. The only scenario where I see it being useful is for changes along the lines of fixing spelling mistakes. Everything else it's stupid not to test it before pushing...
"Our data abuses are better than Google's!" Innovation at work.
People don't typically inject frequently changing, unvetted advertising code into their ruby runtimes. Generally, the most frequently that the ruby code in your runtime changes is each deploy.
Sure you can. Just don't reach out to an old friend who you've lost contact with. That just seems sketchy.

Being upfront ("I'm looking for a job, and I'd like to know what kind of platform you guys are using / what kind of skills you are looking for ...") is also good. As long as you're polite.

If a stranger asks you for help, your first response will be "sure, why not?". You're not trying to leverage a friendship by cold calling some guy at a company - it's just business. Cold calling friends, on the other hand, can seem sketchy. If you do want to cold call a friend, it's probably better to ask advice.

Actually, it's probably always better to frame it as advice, since the people you cold call won't want to give you a firm answer.
Seems like a rhetorical question, but it actually has an answer: Game console unit volume, even two generations ago when it was still growing, is less than 5% of mobile handset unit volume.

That said, walking past the Microsoft store at the Pru last night, the only display drawing a crowd was the Kinect darts game.
Air travel is exceptionally safe, but it falls prey to the law of large numbers: 99.9% success still means some people die every year

99.9% success would mean ~475 plane crashes during take-off and landing on Heathrow alone each day =)
The problem is in distinguishing Logic from biased Rhetoric. p → q is often an inappropriate conclusion based on correlation of two vectors. The common counterexample is (r → p) ∧ (r → q).

Rhetorically, "correlation (does not imply|is not) causation" is often a red herring to dismiss a hypothesis that warrants further investigation, as correlation is essential for establishing causation.
I use CrashPlan (http://www.crashplan.com/) for my workstations and am very happy with it.
Reddit user creates USA vs NSA animation, Pixar style
Why pedals make no engineering sense for human power conversion
Pedals and turning props make little engineering sense for human powered flight (helicopter, fixed wing, or pedal converted ornithopter), to actually fly, like Icarus, here is what to do:
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/143285-human-powered-flight-why-are-we-making-it-so-hard
Are you referring to the cases in the UK where people made jokes and ended up in court for it?

Because, we don't even have free speech guaranteed. Quite a few people are going to jail for their words. On top of that, we refuse entry to people and boot others out because of what they say. Merely their words and opinions.

See, now we have this scary notion of "hate speech". No one knows what it means, but people get arrested and charged, and end up in jail. Its on a whim. It's designed mission creep gone mad.

Any pretense of free speech in the UK is long gone.
The hominid diaspora occurred using feet and canoes. Tens of thousands of years ago.

Of course no individuals 'traveled the globe' in that era, but a gradual process was plenty sufficient to cover the globe with humans.
Huh.

My apologies, for some reason the only sites google showed on this issue were .co.uk.
This is a total tangent, but some of us in the USA look to countries with socialized/subsidized medicine programs as ideal. What country are you from?
Verizon joins forces with Ubuntu, but is there a US market?
Apply for lots and lots and lots of jobs. Make applying for jobs your job. The few times I didn't use a connection to get a job I probably applied to somewhere between 50-100 positions that I thought I might like.

Don't stop applying just because you get an interview. I walked away from a number of good jobs because I didn't like the people I interviewed with. Having more applications out there meant I didn't have to start the pipeline up again.

Don't give up on places that don't hire you within a couple weeks. In those cases where I did get a job this way, it was usually one of the earlier applications a month prior where I took that position. Some places, even fast and nimble startup like companies might take a few months to reach back.

Google usually takes among the longest in my experience. Months after I start my job search they finally get back to me.
Corporate crisis mismanagement
Well, that does it for me as far as non-fiction goes. Is it so much to ask to just be able to be a LITTLE bit lazy and believe something I read, without having to stay on the lookout for a complete tear down from an expert in the subject matter?

Maybe I'm just being naive, but I honestly feel betrayed by how badly one of my (perhaps now former) favorite writers twisted or conveniently ignored facts to make one of his essays more interesting.
You can't really, by definition. By the same logic you should be able to store 1 cubic meter's worth of data storage cube into a 1 cubic micrometer of data storage cube, which in turn could be stored in a smaller cube ad infinitum.

Going by the same logic you could store all entropy of the universe in an infinitely small cube which is not possible unless the universe had zero entropy.
Was it already featured on HN?

Also, the algorithms that we often talk about on HN everyday are decades older... ;-)
It's a bit off but in the ballpark:

Google's 2007 study found, based on a large field sample
of drives, that actual annualized failure rates (AFRs) for
individual drives ranged from 1.7% for first year drives to
over 8.6% for three-year old drives

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_failure

Memory, of course, has other problems:

http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/rl/articles/ser-050323-talk-r...
re: "Entire Premise" - sorry, I didn't mean to say that was the "Entire premise" of the article, I was just trying to say that his "entire premise regarding the golf game analogy" was off. Landing Planes is systemically guaranteed to be safe, it's no longer a function of individual performance, whereas there is nothing systemic about golf games - it's all about individual performance.

The OP was trying to compare and contrast a "System"'s behavior with an "Individual's" behavior, which was where the article went awry.

Re: Gladwell - Gladwell was most definitely not the source of "Korean Culturalism" regarding Air Safety. He simply wrote a popular chapter on an issue that already well documented.

The cause of any pilot error is not law-of-large numbers - pilot error has been, for the most part, systemically eliminated from flying. What's left now is system-flaws.

One of the obvious flaws at SFO was it's GlideScope Indicator was out of service. I have to believe that this will turn out to be a major contributor to the accident, and, in the future, Airport's may be much more cautious about disabling such safety equipment unless absolutely unavoidable.
Snowden live meeting with Amnesty and Human Rights Watch
Naming variables in national language is typically done by students or otherwise inexperienced programmers.
Hibernate adds OSGi Support
They will have to change the name before they market it. I can't imagine many people understanding anything with 5D in the name, regardless of what it means.
Hibernate Many-to-Many XML Mapping Example
But assuming the universe has an entropy smaller than one, couldn't the data be compressed ?
SQL Execution Plans in Javascript
I don't recall Cython's default optimization level, but you may be able to decrease compilation time by adding a -O0 flag for debug builds. This StackOverflow question addresses adding optimization flags to a Cython setup.py script: http://stackoverflow.com/q/16285011/1628916
Wait, that can't be correct, can it? :)

Was going off this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_busiest_airports_by_a...

Edit: Silly me, the stats are by year not by day as I was expecting. Guess it means only ~1.3 crashes at Heathrow each day
Actually, that is precisely why you should form a hypothesis based on correlation. A properly conducted experiment should elucidate any causative link between the elements and the direction of those elements.

Hypotheses are cheap. Create lots of them. Being 'wrong' about a hypothesis is awesome. It's the path of Reason.

(Yes, I woke up this morning wanting to capitalize terms for definitional emphasis. Sorry.)
There are a lot of potential pitfalls in coding JavaScript. Redefining undefined is only one of many.

One of the nice things about JavaScript is that it gives you the ability to accomplish things many different ways, but if someone uses that to shoot themselves in the foot then that is something they need to correct.
Does anyone realistically think this program will be rolled back?

Presuming for a moment that all the information collected by NSA is, in fact, public information, it seems to me that the primary problem isn't collection but asymmetric access and hence power differential between the state and those governed. Why should the government have exclusive access to this information while the general public doesn't? If this treasure trove of personal connection graphs, cell phone discussions, location information, is all truly public and not subject to a judge issued targeted warrant, then, why shouldn't this public information be available to any member of the public?

This new information could be a boon for Democracy and completely change how we understand and interact with Government. Why shouldn't technology impact how we organize our society? Politicians and civil servants, who have the consent of the governed, take an oath to uphold the constitution and put the interest of the people above their own. If the general public should be tracked to such precision, at the very least, why shouldn't interactions in the public affairs of our elected and appointed and contracted officials, done on our behalf, be subject to the same level of scrutiny?
They wouldn't need to listen all the time, and how would you know when it's the right time to look? And even then most people won't be able to verify.
Some framing, usual comment section, etc. by him at the Volokh Conspiracy: http://www.volokh.com/2013/07/11/unprecedented-my-wsj-op-ed-...
indeed ... I'm surprised no one has mentioned "wat" yet :P https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
> The cobalt blue color comes not from the reflection of a tropical ocean as it does on Earth, but rather a hazy, blow-torched atmosphere containing high clouds laced with silicate particles. Silicates condensing in the heat could form very small drops of glass that scatter blue light more than red ligh

Are they using something in addition to a spectograph to know this?
you're not a "rich person" by your definition of whatever that means, but how do you live on $250/mo when just rent is $300/mo? You're short $50/mo and you didn't eat or travel yet.

For other people's definition of "rich person" magic money from nowhere that pays your bills is sufficient.
Lots of cheap web hosting providers offer webmail for one's own domain. Having never used Gmail I can't compare the interface, but I find it friendly enough and have no difficulty syncing the web view and Thunderbird (debranded as Icedove) at home. Even semi-technical people can do this with a little effort.

I do use the Google search sometimes, and sites that retrieve from GoogleAPIs, but frequently dumping all cookies, cache and such and changing browser details will keep you off the radar if you wish.

People speak as if it's a big hassle to avoid depending on big companies - or to avoid the tracking and wiretapping - and but it's really just a question of the relative values one attches to privacy and convenience.
I would agree.

I first started using Knockout.js and within an evening I was up and running and pretty much knew all I needed to know to get cracking.

Our whole team has been using Angular now for about 2 weeks and we are all still confused as hell about how we are supposed to get certain things working.

I can see the power of Angular, when stuff does click with it, it does really click. I think the problem is that thinking 'Angular' is completely different to working with jQuery and the DOM - for which I have years of habits deeply ingrained in me. The documentation really should make this clear from the start - 'forget everything you knew about front end development and start completely from scratch'.
> We are designing the new Kinect with simple, easy methods to customize privacy settings, provide clear notifications and meaningful privacy choices

Do you want your information to be given to the NSA?
[ ] Yes
[X] Yes
Korean/asiana airlines pilots were banned for 12 mos by the airport authority where i worked over a decade ago pending pilot training and english review due to numerous incidents of pilot error and communications problems. Those two airlines managed to ram the jetway 3 times, and even rammed the maint hanger causing millions in damage. One pilot tried to take off with the fuel truck still attached, one pilot had poor english ordering fuel be halfed instead of extra fuel and had to fly back because the pilot only noticed 1hr after takeoff, and two (yes, two) Korean reg'd AC tried to land on the highway instead of the runway.

Another Korean air flight misunderstood the tower and tried to land at the same time as an another plane almost causing a crash, which was only noticed by the other pilot who got out of there. I was there when they asked the pilot about it who was completely clueless he had almost killed everybody on both flights.

I dont know whats up with Korean pilot training but talk to anybody who has worked in a tower and they will tell you horror stories. Theres also the 911 incident where they broadcasted a hijack code for some reason and were almost shot down over the Yukon.
If there is nothing to build. Not everything version-controlled with Git has to be runnable software.
I doubt there are 475000 take-off and landings per day from Heathrow despite how busy it is!
The title is wrong (the article isn't, necessarily). The license, https://github.com/vvk-ehk/evalimine/blob/master/LICENSE, is non-free/open source.
Show HN: A Codecademy for data analysis (with R)
But don't try and drag the language down because you find it difficult.

Oh give me a break. My exact complaint about LINQ is the opposite -- that it makes expensive operations seem simple, which with all innovations in language means that mediocre programmers will start abusing it in all codebases.

LINQ has a place. To say that one should be using it "all the time", however, is exactly as I said -- a canary in a coal mine. The only time I've ever come across the extensive use of LINQ it has been in horrific code.