skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whenever people mention Microsoft as only a "Windows and Office" company, I know they have a very outdated perspective of the company. Look at all the billion dollar divisions they have that are not Windows and Office. Sure, almost all their other products such as SharePoint, AD, Exchange, SQL Server, .NET are based on Windows, but people buy Windows because they want those products, not the other way around.

Also: Ballmer was absolutely right when he made that comment about the iPhone. The iPhone did not sell phenomenally well at all when it was introduced. It did alright, but nowhere near what it does now. The average Joe could not afford one at $600. I know, because I had the original one (only because my employer bought it for me, of course), and and I was the envy of people everywhere. Random people on the street and at restaurants and airports would ask me wistfully how I liked it.

When it did take off was when AT&T started subsidizing iPhones to the tune of $400 per phone (and then make money off the contracts, because the average Joe is a short-sighted chump). That's when suddenly everyone I knew had a brand new iPhone (and later, Android phones). I would credit that business model for bringing about the smartphone revolution more than the revolutionary design Apple introduced.

Did Ballmer absolutely miss the alternative strategy? Of course! But so did Apple / AT&T initially. It was probably born later out of desperation when the iPhone wasn't selling as they hoped.
There is no built-in authentication right now. But usually, since a gunicorn app is usually recommended to run behind a webserver (like nginx), I usually put it behind an nginx, then nginx does auth + ssl. http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpAuthBasicModule

Probably at some point it'll make sense to build built-in auth to have a user base in a database for instance.
I'm very curious about the music experiment described.

I think that present 48 ordinary songs to 8 sets of ordinary people leads to wild fluctuations because it's an artificial setup.

As someone who discovers unknown music regularily without social recommendations: not all music is created equal, there is no "just music" that is listened to by "just people". Music is a result of coevolution of tastes and styles. If you give some random un-self-selecting people some random non-hit songs, they would most likely give on at all.
It seems that as long as Yahoo has resources at its disposal, it will buy and destroy everything it can. Even worse, their addiction to failure transcends management shakeups. I used to simply not care about Yahoo; now I actively want to see it fail.
The government's legal position is that indiscriminately dumping large datasets of metadata into a database is not a search. But later looking things up in that database is, and has to be supported by further warrants.

Thus under the theory the government follows, the activity that you can prove happened is not a search. So you have no standing to sue. And if they look you up later (of course filing appropriate warrants with the FISA court), then you can't prove it happened, so you still can't sue.
> One of the goals of courts is to streamline the law

And one of the goals of (relatively) rich plaintiffs who sue (relatively) poor defendants is to drag out the case as much as possible to impose costs and inconveniences on the defendant.
Are you studying those topics as a biology major, or as a student of some other major subject? There actually is a lot of criticism among biologists about how far behind the textbook representation of those topics is compared to the professional literature of biology. If "cladistics" is not a familiar term to you from your undergraduate education, that would be diagnostic of a poorly designed biology course, for example. See

http://www.evolution-outreach.com/content/6/1/11

for a discussion of this issue and other issues about problems in biology education.
Wow, I didn't see that one coming </sarcasm>. I just hope the patriot act gets killed or significantly rewritten for the better in 2015 when it is up for renewal.
So the client knows how to do authentication?
Thanks for the feedback!

I have a super-simple REST API setup for the site (documentation isn't online yet), so if you can roll out your own service how you like and use my endpoints for the storage/synchronized access.
Kafka would be proud.
Given JVM and CLR's age, I doubt there is any library for node that doesn't already exist in a similar way for the other platforms.
Gnuplot, Matplotlib, Google Graphs, DOT format, RRD frontends, sparklines libraries, Excel, etc.

It depends on what kind of data I'm dealing with.
3-D Augmented Reality Games For Your iPhone
super edit: i'll seed fund it. i'm old, bitter, and have money.
>who gets to try to repeat those results? Experiments don't do themselves, and they're not free.

Scientists are from all walks of life and funding comes from many different sources.

>Who gets to publish results so they can be peer-reviewed?

I think this is how it works... Anyone with a paper can submit it to a journal, then the journal decides if they are going to publish or not. There are many journals with different amounts of specialization and reputation.

> Who sets the "consensus" about if a "model makes a prediction". Who gets to decide whose opinions are included and disincluded in this consensus?

You will find the answer to those questions in the definition of the word "consensus".

> What is the punishment for making an incorrect prediction? Do you get to be disincluded from "consensi" for a spell if you get it wrong?

Its kind of like other communities (including this one)... the better your reputation the more seriously people take your input.

If you have a better approach to understanding the universe, I am extremely interested in what it could be. I do like the idea of open journals (aaron swartz style), but i honestly don't know what the ramifications would be.
How a Tesla Model S is made
New Ubuntu Edge Phone Photos Leaked
> The Obama administration for the first time responded to a Spygate lawsuit, telling a federal judge the wholesale vacuuming up of all phone-call metadata in the United States is in the “public interest,” does not breach the constitutional rights of Americans and cannot be challenged in a court of law.

Oh, this changes everything. It's in our public interest, so we have nothing to worry about, guys. We can all go back to arguing vim vs emacs now.
couple notes:

- did author himself followed some formula (essay, etc..)writing this article?

- after watching many Hollywood movies during last decade, i recently re-watched (as i had almost forgot the content of the movie, it was almost like watching for the first time) "For a fistful of dollars" - about half the movie in i was ready and felt like it was the climactic end with the showdown (bank robbery) and was genuinely surprised that it continues well beyond it
But ... the social imposition! Christ, what a socially awkward penguin the author must be. Here's a tip: You don't need to respond to a message just because someone can see that you've read it. Full stop.

Email, SMS/iMessage, Instant Message are all inherently asynchronous communication methods. Where applicable presence, read receipts, and typing notifications serve to provide metadata about the conversation.

Without them you get other pointless communications -- "Did you get my text?", "Did you see my email?", "Hey, are you busy? Hello? Are you there?", "I'm not sure if you're getting these... I'm going to call you."

They key take away here is that the author can no longer blatantly ignore people by pretending that he/she did not receive the messages.
Oh, it's worse than that. You don't have standing even if you know you were surveilled:

https://www.eff.org/cases/al-haramain

As long as all possible proof is classified, nobody will ever have standing, and as we've seen in the Snowden case, classified info does not lose its classification when it's released to the public.
Thats part of the service you get by paying for a credit card. You have the opportunity to review your expenses that month and contest any that you disagree with before you pay for it. On the other hand, if you made the purchase with a debit card, you would have a much harder time trying to reverse the transaction.
Infuriating? This was exactly what everyone expected them to do. Of course they are going to rigorously defend their own spying program and using the best legal tactics available to them.
The notion that scale is irrelevant in terms of surveillance operations fails to recognize serious issues raised by the advent of new technologies.

In the past, actual manpower has been a meaningful limit on the size of surveillance operations. The government simply cannot have every person in the country be monitored and watched. Instead - theoretically - the government only has enough resources to surveil those who it actually suspects of a crime.

I direct you to Justice Sotomayor's insightful concurring opinion on United States vs. Jones: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-1259#writing...

These quotes, in particular, are extremely releveant.

--

"And because GPS monitoring is cheap in comparison to conventional surveillance techniques and, by design, proceeds surreptitiously, it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: 'limited police resources and community hostility.'"

--

"The net result is that GPS monitoring—by making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track—may 'alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.'"

--

In my view, this opinion sheds much needed light on how the perception that technology and scale does not influence the legality and constitutionality of government practice fails.

As a footnote, Sotomayor also discusses privacy in a digital age, and she provides a refreshing outlook on how new technologies can force a society to re-think its beliefs on the expectation of privacy.

--

"More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties . . . This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks."
Interested to hear what HN thinks about social responsibility in startups.
I'm also into UI stuff, and I found this article really interesting: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/controldeck.php

It was linked to in the Star Citizen forums, in a thread that talked about adapting a HOTAS (throttle and joystick system) to be used in space simulators, but it goes into a bit of the UI design of various real-world spacecraft (and the language is heavily influenced by Heinlein, which I kinda love).
My memory is that MS were ready to go with an actually decent, capable release of Windows Phone (WP6.5? maybe?), which then got clobbered and reworked into a consumer OS when they panicked over how well the iPhone was doing.

Apple didn't come at them in an unavoidable way at all - Apple was going for a small sector of the consumer market, where MS could have ripped the business market away from an already-floundering RIM inside a generation. It's just not Apple's way to target enterprise functionality the way MS can.
I'm really interested in switching email providers but is there a solution for calendar? I really enjoy my calendar syncing across multiple devices and sharing with my friends and family.

Anyone have some good solutions?
Has Xbox actually been profitable? I understood that overall, they're still down a net few billion. I can see how entertainment and taking over the home and living room (especially after their moronic handling of Media PC) is important, but I don't think it's been a cash maker by itself.

A quick search turns up one article[1] claiming 3BN loss over 10 years.

As far as Azure, I'd be surprised if they've recovered all the money they've put into engineering and so on. Maybe if you consider they had to do a lot of similar work for MS online.

1: http://www.neowin.net/news/report-microsofts-xbox-division-h...
CyanogenMod and SELinux
I read the article. The author started by whining that he lost months of notes. His solution was to beef up his syncing. I still have no idea how he came to that conclusion when backup technology has existed since the dinosaurs. I guess that technology just isn't new or exciting enough to blog about.

I think the author really just wanted an excuse to use his Raspberry Pi.

I do love to tinker. But I don't do foolish things like replace backups with fragile dogshit.
sorry, paul graham gets first the option to seed fund it. thats the gentlemanly thing to do, since this is his bulletin board. i'll explain to you how the world works in exchange for equity in that case.
I thought they're already making a billion a year on Azure?

Xbox could be seen as a loss-leader to grab a place in the living room, where they've done better than most other players in the space.
HPMoR is apparently nearing its conclusion, so if you start reading now, it may be finished by the time you catch up (depending on how quickly you consume books).
I was responding to the original commenter's claim that Richard was a sociopath by painting a plausible alternative. I was not trying to muster a case for that alternative, except to point out one would just as justified in jumping to my "effective argument" conclusion as one would be in jumping to the "sociopath" conclusion. And, hey, as long as we're jumping to conclusions, why not give the author the benefit of the doubt?

If you misunderstood what I was doing, well, c'est la vie. I'm not actually interested in convincing you so much as not having a friend of mine called a sociopath in public without sticking up for him. ;)
Project Loon's target audience.
I wonder, has anyone tried visiting them naked ? At the very least, what would their reaction be ? Also, maybe sending a party of black-skinned people would accomplish something ?

As for my personal opinion, I would be most pleased if we could make enough contact to talk with them for at least 1 day, then leave them alone. To learn their beliefs and outlook of life.
Arguably it existed before we had language.
In a continental Europe-style multiparty system, it would probably be possible for some 5% or 10% minority party to position against the current government and rise to above 30% in about a decade, thus rising to power. For example Fidesz in Hungary grew from 7% in 1994 to 53% in 2010 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidesz ).

In the more stable US two-party system, you may need to resort to somewhat older methods, which are still widely used around the world even in present days:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_the_U.S._involve...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Revolution_of_1989

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_protests_in_Turkey
http://www.phoronix.com
> the courts always rule in favor of the executive branch. every single ruling. don't even bother reading the opinions; there's nothing useful in those. if you see "United States" at the top, you'll immediately know the victor.

United States v. United States District Court, 407 U.S. 297 (1972) [1] -- particularly relevant in the area of domestic surveillance -- disagrees with you.

[1] http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/407/297/case.html
I think it means it's a ruby gem you install to manage your cloud environment. Technically you would be using a ruby gem via the command line. I suppose it could just say "via command line" but I don't see it as incorrect in its current state.
Thanks. I've just created an account at lavabit.com. Will consider paying for this as well, maybe for a custom domain. Nice tip.
If the freedom of the press is infringed, and the infringement was legal, that must mean Congress made a law infringing on the freedom of the press, right?
Your first step might be to visit NASA[1] and take a tour of what astronauts might go through. There's a lot to take in with regard to human psychology in stressful/critical situations. What may seem intuitive and obvious on the ground with your "normal" orientation (which means nothing in 0g) may feel completely different.

Try to walk in their footsteps to see how information should be displayed to them first. Then you can go on what that information might be.

It will be a feedback loop of constant improvement and you will need to tie a lot of that into the backend as well. There was a project called Open Flight Linux[2] which was an effort to duplicate the objectives of Flight Linux[3]. You may want to take a browse at the documentation to see what types of information would be useful to display.

You'll need some sort of existing reference to see what additional data can be pulled up.[4]

Edit: With regard to ChuckMcM's recommendation (which is very useful!) The NASA Tech Briefs should be on your path to glance at what might be in store for you.[5]

[1] http://www.visitnasa.com
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20100306001043/http://openflightlinux.org
[3] http://web.archive.org/web/20080102134626/http://flightlinux.gsfc.nasa.gov/
[4] https://www.google.com/search?&hl=en&tbm=isch&q=orbiter+cockpit
https://www.google.com/search?&hl=en&tbm=isch&q=spaceshiptwo+cockpit
[5] http://www.techbriefs.com/tech-briefs
Rackspace is worth about $6bn, so I doubt some new startup with a tiny market share is worth more than twice Rackspace.

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:RAX
If it is authorized its not a leak. That is not to say the White House doesn't position releases of information as leaks to journalists, but even so, those releases are not actually leaks despite what they would have you believe.
I love them: Why? Because if I don't reply to someone, it's because I'm either too busy or intentionally ignoring them and if it's the latter, I WANT them to know they're being ignored.
googlebubble makes google a bad source for this kind of estimation now, I guess.
"Many companies are hesitant to offer a trial extension, but the cost of doing so in most cases seems absolutely trivial."

I totally agree with you that this is crazy. Not only is the cost trivial, but you've potentially spent a ton of money to get them using your app! Recovering this sale is unspeakably cheaper than acquiring a totally new customer.

The counterpoint could be that by asking for a trial extension, they've clearly signaled that they value the product. Perhaps with a nudge they will get out their credit cards.

But if the app is doing its job, they'll be more engaged at the end of 2 months, so it should be an easier sale and one month's revenue will come out in the wash. This seems to match UserVoice's experience, where conversions from this group were 2.5x higher.
for real. 2k USD/month for 5 months for anyone who puts this together. think of it as pre-ycombinator funding.

promissory note.
"Each about one micron—a thousandth of a millimeter—in length, the newfound genus Pandoravirus dwarfs other viruses, which range in size from about 50 nanometers up to 100 nanometers."

That is a horrible use of units.
Constitutional freedom of the press is the right to publish information, not a special privilege of members of the professional media to avoid generally-applicable legal duties.
They published the code : https://github.com/xenph/foaas
The MODO UI is /much older/ than that; it's heavily based on the Microprose game from 1997.

http://lparchive.org/Magic-The-Gathering/Update%2011/img-23....
As a practical matter, that's not a situation the federal courts encounter very often. It's usually poor plaintiffs suing rich defendants, or rich plaintiffs suing other rich plaintiffs.
> the Supreme Court decided in the government's favor

If you close your eyes really hard, you can convince yourself that the Supreme Court isn't part of government and that therefore this phrase isn't completely ludicrous.
Who said I was using the general population as an authoritative source of film critique?

"regarded by many as the greatest "action" movie of all time" means just what it says. I never claimed nor even implied that the view was authoritative simply because it was widely held.
See KLF's "The Manual", which did the same thing for pop music.

http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/07/19/the-manual-hollywood-editio...

Intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle-eight, chorus, chorus. Verse sixteen bars, others eight or sixteen bars.

This didn't ruin pop music at the time (1988) because it was describing what was already happening. But the Manual damage over the next couple of decades is another question.
How accurate? Pretty sure the bit about "Combined with video surveillance, those stores also collect your gender and demographics" is total BS, and is probably based on someone's misinterpretation of something or someone saying it's theoretically possible that it could be done. Combining wi-fi tracking with video surveillance of any sort, even just computing the movements of simple shapes derived from background subtraction, is hard, and doubly so for general-purpose deployment. Now you want to do face-to-demographics? On a little tiny face from a MJPEG feed of a camera mounted to the ceiling? Of people who are wandering around the store, some of whom may be traveling in groups without a one-to-one face-to-phone mapping? Eh.

Give it another three to five years, maybe? At least? Until then, I strongly suspect shenanigans. If you did want to collect demographic data, you'd find a way to correlate a more high-quality source of demographic data with the phone MAC address (e.g. customer checkout data, possibly with attached loyalty program, which could be done on a purely statistical basis with just two or three visits for most cases). Or use a smartphone-based app connected through the in-store network (offer coupons as an incentive). Finally, even then, if you did want to do stuff based on faces, you'd put a camera at eye level in strategic locations to maximize your data quality.

Now, as for tracking in a courthouse: a high-quality wireless network NMS will in fact record general details about your connection times and dates, by MAC address. These NMSes, last I checked, generally do NOT record unconnected clients, though Euclid Analytics (mentioned in another post here) does. There may be legal issues if you do, doubly so since non-connected clients haven't accepted any guest-wifi terms of service pages - you'd have to ask Euclid what their theories are; this hasn't seen court yet.

Speaking of NMSes, here is one generally-available NMS that does detailed client-historical data, including general client location history: http://www.arubanetworks.com/products/management-security-so... -- see the VisualRF link: "Plays back a user’s location history over the past day to aid in troubleshooting and recovery of lost devices. Last known location of each tracked device is stored indefinitely to help find lost or stolen devices". In addition to that, detailed association history (MAC-to-AP without a computed geographic location) can be kept indefinitely. Again, this is mostly focused on connected clients for now. But the wireless network is capable of reporting non-connected clients, so this is subject to change.

More worrisome for government tracking, though: subpoena the cell phone company.
Apple Said to Buy HopStop, Pushing Deeper Into Maps
How does the other person differentiate between the two cases?
Exactly what I was thinking of - "This is How To Write a Love Song"