skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Man, I really don't want to come off as a hater at all, but I never got the dropbox hype. They seriously have a developer conference now? Yikes.
So our tax dollars are not only paying the TSA's jack-booted thugs to harass us at the airport, but they're also paying for TSA dorks to sit around and post on Instagram? Jeeeeebusssssss....

And people wonder why I'm such a government-hating Libertarian. sigh
> One of the pictures has a clear visual date stamp with a "/90."

It's part of the vintage look.
When I've been in Munich, I've seen they have there dedicated lanes for bike traffic, which are not a part of general street and designed so that cars never go there - they are part of the same space as pedestrian walks but pedestrians are not supposed to walk there either - it is an exclusive bike space, with higher barriers for bigger danger (cars) and separation from lower danger (pedestrians). I think it works much better than what is here in California, where bicyclists share space on the road with cars. Each time I drive by a cyclist on the road, I can't help thinking how small mistake it would take - either from his/her side or from driver's side - for a tragedy to happen. That's why I am very reluctant to go on such shared spaces when I'm biking - I'd much prefer to have a space of a sidewalk than on a road.
Weirdest Things Said and Done in Job Interviews
> It's pretty obvious when a bicyclist is at fault and they are often held responsible when they cause an accident. In the case of most city accidents, police routinely pull video from nearby buildings to establish fault.

This is completely untrue, at least in NYC.

"Historically, nearly half of motorists who kill a New York City pedestrian or cyclist do not receive so much as a citation for careless driving."

http://www.streetsblog.org/2012/08/03/nypd-7371-pedestrians-...
You’re Not a Genius (Yet): How to Rewire Your Brain
I'd be rather surprised if the radar could be useful in this capacity. You'd have to build a large database of all aircraft approach speeds, taking into account all the various factors (different weights and configurations) that could change. You'd also have to take into account wind speed and direction, since radar will measure ground speed, but airspeed is what matters. And not just wind, but wind at their precise altitude, which your ground weather station is not measuring. (Wind speed and direction can vary enormously over altitude, especially close to the ground, due to friction.) Finally, you'd have to catch it and communicate it in time to do something useful, which seems tough in this case, since the airspeed didn't get low until fairly shortly before the crash.

I wonder if a simple and effective thing to do here would be to simply display a velocity vector, either in a HUD on the windscreen itself, or on some kind of video display in the cockpit. Just a symbol on the screen that shows exactly which way the airplane is headed at any given moment. When it's on a runway, that's where you'll touch down if nothing changes. When it's on a seawall before the runway, that's where you're going to crash unless you fix things. Maybe I'm underestimating the difficulty, but it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to construct one based on GPS and a forward-looking camera.

Edit: thinking more about that last suggestion, more recurrent training for visual approaches would probably be a better idea. A normal human has a built-in velocity vector already. You look out the window and find the point on the ground that isn't moving relative to your view. That's the point you're headed toward. This is Aviation 101 stuff, literally one of the first things a pilot ever learns about landing an airplane. High and low comes later: the first thing you pay attention to is whether that non-moving point is, in fact, on the runway where you intend to touch down. (Or, because of the flare, slightly before where you intend to touch down.)
As only one example, Michael Hastings is a warning. Political dissent and protest are now being met with death and prison. Barrett Brown is another example. Smart, literate and technically proficient outspoken people are in danger if they fall afoul of the Powers That Be.

I'm not saying that this is what happened to Seth. I'm merely saying that it can't be discounted.

> I answered what I always answer: “I’m going to write a story; some of the stuff you’ll like, some of the stuff you probably won’t like.

> Jake came up to me. “We’ll hunt you down and kill you if we don’t like what you write,” he said. C. will hunt you down and kill you.”

> The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan

> by Michael Hastings
I note that every single one of them caught by running your bag under the x-ray and/or a metal detector. The TSA provides no evidence that grabbing your nutsack or fondling your wife's breasts has found any weapon or threat that a simple bag x-ray and a walk through metal detector wouldn't find.
From personal experience, it seems like YC may no longer have an interest in funding RFS #5. Our entire interview was spent trying to explain why someone would possibly want to code on a handheld.

Full disclosure: Our demo and Altair BASIC was a way to develop native iPhone apps in the cloud, from a tablet or other device. We wanted to expand to Android apps, and eventually be a general cloud compile/debug/run service.
It won't stop the government from getting at your data if they have time to spend actively targeting you. But it will stop them from passively slurping up your communications (possibly along with many other users') as part of an everyday protocol, which is surely an important difference.

(At least, for the present! I could totally imagine a near future where the government had a standard method to collect the data of various self-hosted services from VPS providers.)
I'm a cyclist who has never sat behind the wheel of a car (well I'm lazy now so more of a taxi-ist, but a cyclist at heart) and completely agree with you. But that doesn't change the fact that yes, while cars may be far more dangerous to bikes than the other way around, a bike still can be very dangerous to a car.
Can the Saver Drop-In be used with arbitrary third-party URLs? To me this is what was being described, so if not, then no, it's not describing the Saver Drop-In.
Thank you for the additional clarity on what you meant! Yes, I wrote this. I'd like to tackle a piece on the exchanges themselves too, at some point, but that would be another feature, not least because of the diversity of state approaches and the fact that the federal version isn't done yet.
Big players aren't interested in anything that reduces lock-in. Seamless integration is one of the keypoints they have to get you to use their services.

Obligatory presentation by Bruce Schneier on the online feudalism: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/cloud-security
They have avoided government regulation and control in
that area by choosing not to accept Medicaid or Medicare
payments.

I don't understand how the government itself is causing lack of price transparency, but this should be addressed by any president or congressman who imagines he's going to do something about healthcare costs. If you don't have price transparency, you have no chance at cost cutting.
That's exactly the idea of Remote Storage [0]. The problem is here that the lowest common denominator of functionality isn't actually very much.

Anything but fairly trivial apps quickly run into problems with application data (how relevant), file patching, file intents (Google have this),

Google have, IMO, the most advanced solution in the space, so you could argue have the most the lose from standardising. But in fairness, some of their stuff (I'm thinking the real-time collaboration part of the Drive API) is so complex, there's no way you'd ever see it in a common standard.

That said, it'd be really nice to see a common API over the lower stuff.

[0] http://remotestorage.io/
>You originally said, "TDD has no benefits," which is a definitive claim and not supported by evidence

No, you don't have to prove a negative. If it has not been proven, then it does not exist. Until TDD has proven benefits, it is correct to state that it does not have benefits. Just as until unicorns are proven to exist, it is correct to state that unicorns do not exist.

>Because the research I've read doesn't support your conclusion that "TDD has no benefits."

Yes it does, you just want to pretend that proof needs to work in reverse. It doesn't.

>But that shouldn't inform your opinion of TDD (or any other subject), because there are others in the world whose business does require them to be scientifically honest. And they're the ones whose words you should read to form your opinion

My opinion is based on the evidence, that's the point.
How would system-wide caching work unless the HTTP server dropbox requested the file from sent a checksum of the file being requested? Just because something has the same URL doesn't mean that it's the same file at the other end (http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz for instance)
This was definitely more than a minor mention :)
Moscow to Caracas - the Scenic Route
And they addressed the question. Unlike the letter to a 7-year old boy at the bottom of the article:

> “I heard that you are sending two people into Mars and I would like to come, but I’m seven so I can’t,” 7-year-old Dexter Walters first wrote to NASA. “I would like to come in the future. What do I need to do to become an astronaut?”

> The response, from the agency’s office of communications, told Walters, “NASA wants you to know that your thoughts and ideas to further space exploration are important, and we hope that you will continue to learn all you can about NASA's space programs, missions, and accomplishments.”

They didn't tell him what he needs to do at all, just that they hope he continues to learn about it. Sad.
> to help remind people to put guns into checked baggage instead

I have to wonder how many of the firearms they stop are just regular law-abiding concealed handgun license bearers who, in their rush to get to the airport, forgot that they keep a loaded firearm in their purse, briefcase, or backpack. Since the penalty is a $7,500 fine and not 20 years in jail, I have to presume this scenario is far more common "malicious guy planned to hijack plane."

This would be a very easy statistic to publish, too (only 10% of the people we stopped were even licensed to carry a handgun!), but since I haven't seen that statistic advertised, I would presume they find most of the stopped citizens to be guilty only of carelessness.
I'm talking about things like Philips hue and hardware with a 70MHz CPU, or Arduino even.
Nanostructured glass mimicks the 'Superman' memory crystal data storage
Yeah I guess what I mean was the post I was replying to called it the most useful tool powering the internet. I have not seen that before. I also like to ask people on HN who seem extremely passionate about something to explain why they are passionate because you often learn something new, that you often would not from articles etc.
It's also in very bad taste. Even if things were being brought on purposefully... it just feels wrong to have authorities sort-of bragging about catching law violators.

It feels immature. Law enforcement is supposed to be serious. This kind of thing should only really be a number in a report, not a picture with a comment trying to be funny. It should be objective, neither heavy-handed or lackadaisical.
"Buzzfeed is the most innovative publisher we have"

Strong disagree. I am not sure I would call the New Yorker the most innovative and yet buzzfeed has nothing comparable to strongbox[1]. Vice? Quartz? Medium?

Its possible that I am letting my opinion of Buzzfeed's "content" cloud my judgement of their innovation. What do you think BF is doing that is innovative?

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/strongbox/
> Be negligent on a bicycle and a vast majority of the life and limb you are risking is your own.

I don't think that's true. I haven't personally witnessed any accidents, and I admittedly don't have any data to cite, but I have witnessed many bicyclists cause complete chaos in busy traffic.
That could cut both ways. Easier to affect in both good or bad ways, I mean. I do agree that simply delineated systems are at least easier to understand and hold "accountable" though.
There's this really annoying ip filter that blocks non japanese ip from connecting though....
There's a lot of talk about culture, but as the article mentions, it's difficult to define exactly, something that has irked me for a while now - lots of advocacy, but do people really understand what they're advocating or is this another cargo cult?

But the article also links a blog on culture [1] that actually makes a decent attempt at explaining it, and it not just through a single manifesto type statement, but over a long series of blog posts. Good read.

[1]: http://awesomeculture.com/
Are you being deliberately daft? Yes, the people in the cars are safer than a reckless person on a bicycle, but that doesn't mean the bicyclist isn't still putting them in some danger - those metal cages don't always succeed - as well as putting pedestrians and other bicyclists in more significant danger.
So am I -- and a lot of other folks who cover tech & public policy!
Sorry, I'm willing but appear to be unable at this point.
I think fundamentally Dropbox's move away from the filesystem by exposing an API like this and through application acquisitions (music and mail) is about trying to become the Apple of personal data.

Dropbox has done a phenomenal job of taking a complex challenge (file sync) and making an incredibly simple user experience. Extending that strategy into other common tasks with new and purchased apps could be very successful. The big element missing is BaaS (back-end as a service) for data and events that aren't files. Given the poor track record of services like iCloud, you can imagine a lot of developers adopting the Dropbox API and in a few years most iOS devices might be running a combination of official Dropbox apps (replacements for itunes, mail, and maybe calendar) and many other essentially stateless apps that use the Dropbox API for sync and storage.

In the short term this could be very convenient for users and developers, but in the long run it creates another monolithic, centralized platform. This kind of functionality needs to be delivered as a protocol so users can choose service providers who compete on price, features, and privacy instead of being citizens of a particular platform (Facebook, Apple, Google, MSFT, or increasingly Dropbox).
>I think it will join WebOS in a few months.

You're comparing apples to oranges. WebOS was closed source with limited hardware vendors. FireFox OS is open source, open to all hardware vendors.

Good platforms tend to do well in the marketplace because they attract investment from the outside world. Android is beating iOS because it's a better platform for vendors. FireFox OS is not only a better platform for vendors than iOS, it may turn out to be a better platform for devs than both iOS and Android.
Doesn't SCTP run over IP as a layer 4 (transport layer) protocol? Why would you need to change routers (mostly layer 3)?
Grammar check: "These days, your app need to store and sync more than just files."
Not to be snarky or anything but in short: we're currently working on the new ideas. Please give us a little bit of time before you ask Mr. Graham to give us a synopsis of the most logical projects to address. Trust me, whatever he wants done: there are people working on it. "What do you want to contribute?" is the more relevant question. What are your ideas for "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund"? and start working on those.
The Don’t Be An Asshole Rule
But then, everybody you know in the city will share the same food photos every day :)
The author of the linked article himself says:

as a fellow bike commuter, this story has impacted me more
than I would have anticipated. I commute by bike, I get
around a lot by bike, and learning that somebody I admired
was killed in this way so close to my home has really
struck a nerve.

It struck more than one nerve. It is extremely easy for the bicycling Hacker News user to imagine themselves in Seth Vidal's shoes. This is the sort of thing we all have nightmares about.
Disclaimer: I'm a JS JIT developer.

The use of Sunspider performance to talk about JS application performance is unfortunate, and undermines a significant part of the argument made in the article. Sunspider is a great benchmark to use to talk about web _page_ performance.

This is how JITs work:
1. Javascript code starts executing in a slow environment.
2. In this execution mode, a lot of overhead is spent collecting type information so that the hot code can be optimized.
3. After some period of time, the hot code is compiled with an optimizing compiler, which is a very expensive task.
4. The compiled code starts running.

For example, in Mozilla's JS engine, these are the actual numbers associated with optimization:
1. A function starts off running in the interpreter
2. After it gets called 10 times (or a loop within it goes around 10 times), it gets compiled with the Baseline JIT, which performs heavyweight bytecode analysis on the javascript code, generates unoptimized machine code which is instrumented to acquire information about the executing JS.
3. After 1000 iterations (most of that running within Baseline jitcode), the function gets compiled with our optimizing compiler, IonMonkey.

How does this relate to Sunspider?

Well, if you actually run Sunspider, you'll notice that the entire benchmark takes about 0.2 seconds or less on a modern machine (about 1.5 seconds on a modern phone). It's an extremely tiny benchmark (in terms of computation heaviness). Comparatively, the Octane suite, while containing fewer benchmarks, actually takes 100 times or so longer to execute than sunspider.

How many apps do you use that run for less than 1.5 seconds?

This is the problem with using Sunspider to talk about app performance. Sunspider doesn't measure JIT performance very well at all. When JIT engines execute Sunspider, they spend a relatively large amount of that time just collecting the necessary information before they can start optimizing. Then, soon after we spend all that effort optimizing the code, the benchmark ends, without really taking advantage of all that fast code.

Very often, JIT optimizations that speed up computationally heavy benchmarks actually regress Sunspider. This is because the optimizations add some extra weight to the initial analysis that happens before optimized code is generated. This hurts sunspider because the initial analysis section is much more heavily weighted than later optimized performance.

Sunspider's runtime characteristics make it a good benchmark for measuring web PAGE performance. Web pages are much more likely to contain code that executes for short periods of time (a few ms), and then stops. But apps have much different runtime characteristics. Apps don't execute code for a few milliseconds and then stop. They run for dozens of seconds, minimally, and often minutes at a time. A JIT engine has much more opportunity to generate good optimized code, and have that optimized code taken advantage of over more of the execution time.

It's unfortunate that such a fundamental misunderstanding of the characteristics and nature of optimized javascript is used to drive an argument about it.
New app for iOS&Android let you enter the magical world of Croatian cuisine
Yes I 100% believe it. He was in confinement/custody for how long?

What do you think they do in sites where people are renditioned to?
The first multiple-fatality crash involving a major airline in North America with an airliner carrying over 100 passengers and at least five kosher meals, not arriving on a Tuesday.
This happens only now? In more civilized countries like Germany, prices for procedures have been set since time immorial. There is a provision for surcharges from the physician, but these aren't common, and the physician will have to have a good cause or the insurer will not pay it.

Same thing for new medications: they are not permitted in the clinic unless there is a genuine advantage for the patient.

All this is of course due to political circumstances: medicine is just too profitable.
Not sure that your example proves that YC is no longer interested in RFS #5. I think RFS# 5 covers companies that could be huge, but I'm not convinced that I would ever want to code on a tablet.
Besides which, I'd really hate to be the guy scoping out the software that decides when to ditch an aircraft in the Hudson river. Avionics software is considered reliable because it doesn't try to do too much.
Maybe it's a trade-off to make developer adoption easy.
Don't confuse my objections with PHK's objections. There may be good technical answers to his objections; Thomas replied to them above quite cogently, but in any event, PHK's opinion carries a lot more weight than mine. I'm just a spectator.

My objection (observation, really) is that one expects protocol 2.0 to do more than address performance optimization. Simplifying the protocol is a good thing to do with a major revision; they didn't do that. Making the protocol more friendly for upper layer users is another good thing to do with a major revision; they didn't do that either. Instead they took an obviously different protocol designed to address a handful of extremely technical performance matters and rubber-stamped it as HTTP 2.0. Whether you like SPDY or not, it should be clear that this kind of "process" is going to leave people feeling disenfranchised. The spirit of HTTP, inasmuch as such a thing exists, is one of simplicity. SPDY just doesn't "smell" like the successor.

I think the comparison to R6RS is very appropriate to my point. R6RS was designed to address well-known shortcomings of Scheme. The process it took to get approved circumvented a lot of the community. A large segment of the community responded to this by essentially whining about it and ignoring it. We already see the whining about HTTP 2.0. I predict it will be followed by ignoring it, and some years in the future, an HTTP 2.1 or 3.0 that more closely resembles HTTP 1.1.
Every time something like this happens the rest of us have it just that much harder.
I found Box to be the opposite of this. While I obviously can't speak on their behalf, and I was discussing the issue with their developer relations people (not senior executives), they said they didn't see a problem with this idea.
I mean, that's nice and all, but it seems to be purposely obtuse. Again, just look at the current infrastructure. The width of the roads, traffic laws, signs and signals, intersections, highways, etc. I guess you "got me" in that, at some point, road construction was driven by cyclists, but that pretty clearly shifted some time ago. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
Highly knowledgeable people have commented on it and not said it was anything unusual, so, yes, I'd say it's reasonable. Jet engines don't change their output on a dime.
Most non-freeway roads don't have minimum speed limits, but I think they should. Based on my own experience, one of the most important factors for road safety is the homogeneity of speed. Having cars (or bikes) going faster or slower than the average flow of traffic have caused the vast majority of congestion and safety problems I have witnessed.
True, "Silence" is actually a book: http://www.amazon.com/Silence-Lectures-Writings-Anniversary-...
Sounds to me like they're very interested in funding RFS5 and that they were grilling you to see your response. Were you exhilarated and raving about all the advantages in a confident, persuasive manner, or did you stumble on why you might even want such a thing yourself?
iCracked is Banking on Your Cracked iPhone Screen