skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>What's so evil about requiring a small form to be filled out?

What's so evil about requiring a 20 minute form to be filled out in order to cancel?

>The questions are directly relevant to the act of canceling

For The Ladders, and not for the user. The user is done with questions and just wants to cancel. The website is demanding that the consumer do free labor for it in return for the privilege of canceling. It's not tricking you, it's simply extorting you. Combined with...

>[...]say, The Ladder's decision to auto-renew monthly subscriptions while hiding that fact at the bottom of the page in small gray font[...]

...it's a direct statement that if you don't participate in our consumer research program, we will withdraw $25 from your account every month until you do. I don't even think that's legal.
> ... our politicians (and technology providers) are a bunch of disgusting LIARS.

I never thought otherwise.
Cities Might Not Be as Prepared as They Think for a Bioterrorism Attack
AFAIK the Gutenberg Bible was in Latin.

The protestant reformation put that technology to use to disseminate laymen readable translations 80 years later. The new technology (presses), the new theology (Martin Luther) and social change (literacy) cross-pollinated and together changed the world. Most of the positive changes seemed pretty incidental. I'm not sure Lutheranism in itself was much of an improvement, but that's besides the point.

Not sure if the analogy here holds, but I think what we have is the technology. It has changed culture. I'm pretty sure public attitudes towards sex are different now because of the internet. We don't have the ideology though.

IMO, the american right hog the "freedom" banner and give it all sorts of connotations that most of us want to keep at arms length. It would be good if they'd put it down and let someone new have a go at it.
How to benefit from Microsoft's reorg
"We should have solutions to this problem, at the router level, where we can be in charge of the blacklist."

We do have blacklists available at the router level. Blacklists at the router level compiled by parents don't work though, for the obvious reason that there are well over 4 billion pages to check. Is a bit like trying to guard what books your children read when they work out about the inter-library lending agreement. I used to cause havoc with that.

The best thing to do is to go on the internet with your kids until you think they have reached a reasonable level of understanding about the world, rather than putting a machine in their bedroom and trusting a filter to work.
Exactly. With a diameter of 4m on this, even if they could get 1g at the edge, would still leave the astronauts heads at almost 0g.
Makes me wonder what kind of scientists worked on this.
My high school history teacher taught us something that politicians know:

"My enemy's enemy is my friend".

I'm sure there's a concise Russian saying for this.
Work at Google AND Microsoft - for Facebook is possible
Completely agree. Objective-C with ARC and blocks has the perfect blend of dynamic language + static typing that i'm looking for (although the syntax really feels like a hack).

Now, libraries for the server are clearly not there, and i suppose that you would need to write them in C to get descent performances, which is unrealistic i guess.
He and other writers at the Guardian have written about Snowden on multiple occasions. I haven't seen any other news outlets reporting that Snowden has been cleared or is on the verge of being cleared.

Edit: I just found some additional sources.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/24/us-russia-snowden-...

http://www.businessinsider.com/report-edward-snowden-is-now-...
At current levels they need more than 30,000 people to commit to buy an $830 dollar phone which is not expected to released for at least 10 months and with next to no marketing clout.

I'm not saying it can't be done but I'd be very surprised if they meet the target.
It won't matter, now he will have to keep watching his back every second.
IOS 6 Application Development For Dummies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM: Snowden's next target.
Ubuntu Edge Clears $4 Million Mark
Great post. It's one thing to want to 'make a difference' but the vast majority of successful entrepreneurs set out to make their business as financially valuable as possible which is why exit strategies are crucial and prevalent.

There really is nothing wrong with being money driven. Ultimately, it's hard for your business/startup/company/corporation to make any significant difference to anything if they aren't established as a financially valuable organisation.
Likewise. Although I quickly realized they were talking more "the bear from AI" than "the actress who played Siri on The Big Bang Theory."
How Engine Yard applies big data to improve customer application performance
Perhaps, but look at what she accomplished.
10 Great Inventions Dreamt Up By Children
No, if the campaign doesn't succeed, Indiegogo won't take your money. The campaign is only funded if they raise the full $32m, so there is no worry of not paying and not receiving the phone.
Running Fedora 19 on a Galaxy 10.1 - works.
Video of boot process at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TaPelfyRCE&feature=youtu.be
We're moving the garbage-collected pointers (@) out into a library, so by default we'll have only a single pointer, ~ (and there's no mutable version of this). We'll still have & and &mut, but those aren't pointers, they're references (it's our own fault for calling them "borrowed pointers" in our documentation).

So depending on how you count, that's either one or three pointer types, which I'm happy with. The "unsafe" pointers exist only for C interop and have no bearing on normal code, so it's inaccurate to count them.
Well being under their control implies you will do what they say. True, he will be protected but in essence he is 'buying' this protection through submission not 'getting' it.
Does anyone really think the $32 will be reached? The trend seems to me to be against this

(and I'm not jealous, I actually gave $630 on the day one)
That's an over-simplistic view of things and implies that Snowden is perforce the lesser fool. I think it's rather more the reality that Snowden has been quite wise in his planning: he is aware that he is putting Russia in a position where Russia will try its darndest to be on its best behavior in sustaining that "asylum-giving, human-rights protecting" image it has recently gotten.
Guess relations between Russia and the US aren't as important after all.

Always found it odd (possibly ironic?) that he left to countries infamous for not being well known for their love of free speech. Then again as one poster here put it, where else would he go that isn't as restrictive and doesn't have an extradition treaty with the U.S.?

Wonder if this will inspire whistle blowers in Russia now?
A great deal smaller, I imagine. :P
Show HN: Compare Lift.do habits and look for simple trends
Hey all,

Last weekend I spent some time building a little web-app to place my Lift.do habit check-ins on a chart to look for any simple correlations.

This was useful for my partner and I as she tracks her back pain and other activities in Lift.do so we could see some correlation between them.

Thought I would post it on HN in case anyone else finds it useful. Feel free to give any feedback or comments as well.

Source is on GitHub: https://github.com/lukemurray/lift-trends

Check it out live here: http://lift-trends.herokuapp.com

For the devs, it is a real simple app using AngularJS and a tiny Node.js backend (using express).

Note: you have to upload your exported habits because Lift.do does not have an API currently. And to be honest I didn't want to invest too much time in this. Check the source I'm not doing anything with the uploads, they get deleted. Also you can run it yourself instead if you wish.

Cheers,
Luke
They have about $500 million a month in revenues:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=FB

So that is something like $1 per user per month (depends a lot on how many users you want to say they have...).
Find Your SaaS Key Metric in 5 Mins (video)
If someone has changing the world as their primary goal, and they decide that a startup is the best path toward that goal, I don't really understand why they shouldn't do that? To me a startup is an amoral vehicle for achieving its founder's ends, so if they want to have changing the world as priority number one, and are satisfied with just breaking even, that is up to them (and similarly if turning a profit is top priority).

Of course if it doesn't at least break even eventually, a startup is not really a useful tool for achieving anything.
Eventually Consistent - Revisited (2008)
Kind of a silly tangent, but: it looks like Keith Alexander is wearing a Casio F91W, which is infamous for being the watch of choice of terrorists, particularly Osama bin Laden and numerous Guantanamo detainees. It's also popular with hipsters and hackers. I wonder if it was some kind of dog whistle? Or the same wardrobe people that put him in an EFF shirt to make him appear "relevant" did it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F91W#Claimed_use_in_terro...
How Criticism Creates Innovative Teams
Fuck, how the hell can this be the first comment at the top?!
While this is true, I think most people treat Kickstart/Indiegogo et all as pre-order services. They're definitely "buying a phone" rather than donating to a project, you only have to look at the comments section of overrunning projects to see people demanding to know where there "order" is.
Clickies:

https://github.com/lukemurray/lift-trends

http://lift-trends.herokuapp.com
I do plan to change the world, actually. I'm only taking baby steps to it :-)

I don't take the hierarchy as prescriptive either, I just noticed that it matched, mostly, my baby steps to change the world.
You can't be serious? wise? You think he planned to be in Russia?

Russia protecting human rights? OMFG
I would not trust everything the article reports.

Slightly off topic, but for those unfamiliar with news.com.au it is a low quality sensationalist outlet who frequently post link bait material.

Some of their stories are shared from their News Corp partners but the rest is celebrity gossip and reddit reposts.
National Archives bought $430,000 on license plate scanner that didn't even work
Yes you are correct. I screwed up by pasting the wrong FAQ item.

What I was trying to get at is that there's no guarantee of a phone even if the project is funded.
in a backwards twist of fate... Russia is protecting people from the United states for freedom of speech.
Why do they have the same exact item/reward point at $625, $675, $725 and $830? It seems to me they're realizing there's no way they can reach they goal selling at the $830 price point, but why have all other levels simultaneously? Are people really going to pick 725 over 675 for the same thing?
In fact they do: Phil Schiller himself on 10th June at the WWDC keynote mentioned that we've ported Mari to OS X, and he was extremely impressed with it and the fact that we've ported it.

It's heavily Qt-based, and doesn't really follow any Apple design guidelines. But it's the best 3D texture painting app in the world for high-end work.
For an example of a good (or at least unique) usage of Times New Roman on web design, take a look here: http://seedconference.com/seed.php
Does that mean he accepted the demands of Russia of not being able to disclose any further information anymore?
Founding rate: http://ownu.net/rate.txt
Why does Google search do this?
Every time I mis-type something, Google offers a suggested correct spelling, by showing a link titled "Showing results for <i>Foobar</i>". I always impulsively click this link.

When I do this, it refreshes the entire page. Why doesn't clicking this link just hide that part of the page? I'm already being shown results for that term - why do the search again and waste 2 more seconds of my time?

E.g. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=exmaple
Slightly OT, but do you know where you stand from an import duty/VAT standpoint?

A quick google suggests you could be liable for around £90 in duty & VAT[1]

[1]http://www.dutycalculator.com/popular-import-items/import-du...
IBM and Pivotal Announce a Joint Collaboration on Cloud Foundry
> "Contrast Washington’s animosity against Snowden with the pardon that Bush gave to Dick Cheney aide, Libby, who took the fall for his boss for blowing the cover, a felony, on a covert CIA operative, the spouse of a former government official who exposed the Bush/Cheney/neocon lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction."

Political newbie here. Could anyone with an idea of who Paul Craig Roberts is [1], and what his political bias is, comment on this claim? I.e. is it possible/fair to compare the two events M. Roberts does compare? Is today's Washington (under Obama) so much uglier and more aggressive towards whistle-blowers than previous governments, or more of the same?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Craig_Roberts
SSH client for android with better keyboard support
That's an impressive business, I didn't realize they were doing so well.

Cisco obviously has a long history of buying network appliance (no caps) companies, including those that sell competing products. Sometimes the product lines are incorporated, sometimes they're run in parallel, and sometimes they're squashed (after Cisco's internal EOL promissory schedule, hopefully).

What Cisco does not do often is buy companies with open source products.

I think it's clear that Cisco needs to make big changes to their organization. I wonder if this signals that they are heading toward an IBM-style services model, or an Oracle-style scorched earth model...
Wow, you're like the anti-me.

People (with a few exceptions, usually the result of excellent breeding, education or culture) are much weaker and worse than that.

It's important not to forget that all people have limited potential, though some are much more limited than others.

Do you know Plato had a name for the man who was ruled by passion? Every man has to place some principle on the throne of his heart. The true aristocratic man, the philosopher-king, is ruled by wisdom. The timocrat, leader of a warrior state, is ruled by honour.

Going further done the list, the oligarch is ruled by desire for wealth - which at least gives him the motivation to work hard, if nothing else. The democratic man is ruled by freedom, and his life therefore involves being blown around his own whims.

But the lowest of all is the man ruled by passion - the tryant. People here should read The Republic (or knowing HN readers, skim the Wikipedia article describing the 5 different types of polis): he describes modern culture (including Occupy Wall St) pretty well, which just shows that human nature hasn't changed.
They have now. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/24/edward-snowden-m...
Petition needs 100,000 signatures for UK porn filter to be debated
As a brazilian, I personally have the impression that the teachings in humanities in the USA is very biased towards neo-liberalism, pro-market and right-wing ideologies when I compare what's produced in brazilian and north american universities. This is probably because in the USA the universities are private, there's no free, autonomous and statal universities. And probably it's consequence of the cold war years, when left wing ideologies were seen as suspect. If I could choose a place to study computer science, engineering or science in general, I would choose some north-american university like MIT. But if I could choose a place to study humanities, specially economy or social science, I wouldn't choose a north-american university. Just my (perhaps equivocated) opinion. But it's an opinion shared by many people in humanities here.
Forgive me, I cannot believe that even the most basic choices take a lifetime of training, reflection, and listening to criticism.

Sorry if it came across that way, that wasn't the intended message at all. There are plenty of little pieces of advice in this book, a couple of which I highlighted in my reply - those I'd indicate are good rules to live by if you don't want to have to dig deeper. They don't answer your question directly, because choosing a font is only one choice amongst many important choices you make in presenting information, and probably middling in importance. So don't only ask that question, and note that it's only one chapter in this book - there are lots of little decisions which go into typography which I'd learn first.

To say that isn't to imply that it takes a lifetime, or that no-one should learn, or that non-designers somehow threaten designers (!), just that it's a complex topic which rewards study. I'd absolutely encourage you to learn a little about typography, designer or not, it's a fascinating subject, but like most subjects rules of thumb vary depending on who you ask, and it's hard to condense it into just a few rules (though this book is one such attempt). Here's some refs on typography:

Just My Type - a fun introduction to the subject for the layperson

Counterpunch by Fred Smeijers - perhaps a bit dry, but I found it engaging, a history of type

The Elements of Typographic Style - perhaps a bit dry, but informative

Those books go into detail about different types of fonts and their meaning (which is tied up in their origins), but also all the other little things that dictate the form of our thoughts on the page.

If you want a more superficial guide, then I'd simply say just pick one mainstream sans and one serif, and you won't go too far wrong in your font choice. You're unlikely to find a more useful summary of where to use which fonts without lots more detail, because the right answer is it depends, and there are other more important choices you make when styling text.
The problem is how permissive PyPI is. I can upload a package called django2 with the description that this is the new generation of the Django framework and run arbitrary code on a whole lot of machines of many unsuspecting developers. The reason Linux distributions do not generally have this problem is that there is an air gap between the upstream developer and the repository in the form of a maintainer who reads the code and verifies that it is not malicious. Incidentally, GitHub has the same problem as PyPI. With good SEO I can create a repo called django and have it be the first thing that new developers find.

One possible solution to this is to have a core group of maintainers verify the most popular packages. I place my trust in the maintainer and the maintainer signs a specific version of the package. This will not scale to 100% of the packages, but that is fine. As long as django, flask, psycopg2, etc. are signed I can take responsibility for reviewing django-pretty-snarfs-with-smiles myself. That is essentially our trust model with GitHub already: you blindly download large official looking projects but read through the code of small stuff (right?). Perhaps after a while some developers become trusted and get to have their signing process fast-tracked.

At the end of the day if I could have one improvement it would be a big fat warning that pip gives you that says "what you are about to install is likely malicious code. Do not do it without verifying that it is not by manually downloading it and reading the source."

BTW, simply running "pip install foo" will let foo's setup.py run arbitrary code on your machine. It is such a giant security hole by design that I cringe every time I have to use it.

Edit: another potential model is for PyPI to punt the verification onto outside entities, such as GitHub, Bitbucket, etc. Basically instead off building my packages on my (potentially compromised machine), I would tag a version of it on GitHub and instruct PyPI to build it. It is easy to establish trust between PyPI and GitHub, so the guarantee you get with PyPI is "this package came from exactly this source" where you can read the source before installing it. Like I said above, GitHub also has a trust model problem but this would reduce the amount of work one would need to do to verify a package from two places to one.
Do you mean you think that sustaining your family is mutually exclusive from doing a startup?

If so, then I don't think so. I am running a bootstrapped startup (https://www.wisecashhq.com) and sustaining my family right now (and I expect, 99.9% sure, that the startup will make a better future for them, as well).

This just requires picking a model where you can sustain your startup and your family, there's no need to dichotimize between both here.

I didn't understand what you mean with "it doesn't account for planning into the future"? I do believe that securing resources, health and property does account for planning into the future, actually.
People were picking the 830 instead of the 600, so yes.
Long-Distance Quantum Cryptography
I think I'd rather do 2 years at Club Fed in the US than be under FSB control in Russia. I mean, Putin straight kills journalists.
We use a wiki (Dokuwiki) for internal docs, probably going to either make it public or perhaps switch over to Daux.io once I'm satisfied it doesn't hate America.
It's safe to assume that most of us accepted that the mass surveillance programs existed. This doesn't diminish the importance of what Snowden did.

It was more of an emperor-has-no-clothes moment than some unexpected, shocking revelation. It forced a lot of people to stop avoiding the problem and to actually start talking about it openly.
Presenters and Play
Thank you. We will explain this somewhere. About the VAT and currency, at this moment we decide the currency based on your location. So if you are a EU-based company we will charge the price in €.
I wonder if his next target is Wladiwostok. It seems less complicated to get to Latin America from there, if he still wants to.
IANAL, but I'm purchasing the OP's other book, "Typography for Lawyers" ($10 on Kindle) http://www.amazon.com/Typography-for-Lawyers-ebook/dp/B005JV...

Partly to thank the author for writing the OP, but also because I find it just fascinating that he found a niche not just in typography, but the importance of typography in the legal arena.

Seems like there should be an equally important niche for a book, "Programming for Lawyers", much of which would involve batch document scanning and analysis.
Germany should, as explained here:
http://ind.pn/12ix0rD

But unfortunately it won't :-/
The porn filter could be debated in the House of Commons if this petition got 100,000 signatures > http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/51746
Snowden is just a guy, he doesn't need to be some flawless saint to point out that the US government is lying and spying on it's citizens.
There is no way on God's Great Green Earth I am letting some random bunch of strangers program a Teddy to talk to my children without me reading every line of code, and having every conversation recorded.

Am I paranoid or is there this slippery slope way too steep?
I wonder how much pay he would get as a sys admin in Russia. He might want to leave that bit about stealing secrets from his employer's client and leaking them to the world off his resume.
Its says free shipping in the US and UK, so I'm guessing, as Canonical is based in London, they'll do the importing and deal with duty, so the price you see is the price you pay! I'm guessing.
Many thanks for your comments :)
to be fair sneaking out of russia is probably not that hard given the huge land borders of the country.
Congress to probe lethal SEAL crash
Query and Visualization of Multidimensional Databases - Prior Art Request
Agreed. I think the difference is nowadays everything is very user friendly. There's no need for the kids to learn how to use a DOS prompt or know about IRQ values to get sound in games working. Apple's "it just works" phrase applies to so much that nobody needs to know much to get things done.

I am around kids at work and their technical knowledge is amazingly limited. Who needs to know stuff when 'there's an app for that...'?
HTML5 components: Implement standard components
Boosting Android Apps Performance