skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So out the window with the rule of law as long as a 'serious threat' is motivating an action? Out of curiosity, under what other circumstances do you think suspension of the rule of law is a-okay?

If a serious threat, how about this: get a warrant. It should be easy, because there's an objectively serious threat. Novel idea, right?

>I'm as anti-spying as anybody

No you aren't, as evidenced by your comment here. This is the "I'm not racist, but _insert_racist_sentiment_here_" line of thinking.
Worth noting here that K-9 for Android does not support the more modern and useful PGP/MIME. It only supports inline PGP. They've been promising it for years, but I'm not expecting to ever see it.

Hopefully somebody makes a good go at getting PGP onto Firefox OS so I can ditch Android.
Thanks, I've been looking for a Geo-IP API that supports both JSONP and SSL. Perfect.
Holy shit was Syndicate good. Probably the best experience I had playing games as a kid (and my intro to Gibson, Stephenson, and Sterling), with the possible exception of Populous.

Bullfrog was genius.

If anyone with any say in the games industry is by chance reading this, I would easily pay $99+ for a "Shadowrun Returns" style remake of the game, instead of sequels to the mediocre, Syndicate in name only FPS they released last year:

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/shadowrun-returns
I recently ranted to Marsh Ray of MS about anti reverse engineering clauses in MS EULAs.
It is real life, but is a problem.

Things don't have to stay the way they are now.
Ask HN: Which API should I use to build an high frequency trading bot?
I'm getting more and more interested in high frequency trading, and I'm in the process of evaluating an API that I can use to retrieve real-time information about the market and submitting orders. Given your experience, which API would you suggest using?
ab takes more CPU time than a decent web server too.
As of July 27, 2013, there is a 30% off code - "tnt7" - for all new account sign ups.
I wonder if Microsoft will ever get any credit for being the (relative) first company to serious push this form of design.

Probably not
Too bad they were largely abandoned because antibiotics were cheaper and easier to produce (a situation similar to electric vehicles in the early 1900's, in fact)...
Things that seem profound can be trite, and hallucinations can be misleading. If you look on the web (or particularly on YouTube) for outsider mathematics/physics you can find a lot of slightly unbalanced people are convinced they've managed to square the circle or invent perpetual motion machines. Drugs make such epiphanies far more intense and increase the risk of false positives. Stuff that may seem super-meaningful at the time may be just incongruous, which is noticeable with a lot of art done on drugs (as opposed to inspired by drugs); the mind wanders in many interesting directions, but it wander off into many uninteresting ones too.

But that's like anything else - you watch a classic old movie and it utrns out to have a few (ro even many) scenes that just drag, or a book turns out to have some excellent ideas but also a fair amount of filler, a scientific paper is a theoretical breakthrough but also contains some conjectures that turn out to be wrong. Einstein went to his grave a frustrated man insofar as he was unable to articulate a theory of everything that would have made relatively consistent with quantum mechanics, but we don't think of Einstein as a failure.

Think of it like a prism for your mind. A prism allows you to see light and color in a wholly new way, but you wouldn't want to wear prisms in front of your eyes like spectacles because you would be constantly misjudging things and banging your knees. Doesn't mean that what you can see with a prism is false, it's just not optimal for continual use.
There is very little reason to get an S4 over an HTC One or Xperia. Except marketing and hype.
Use UUIDs in Rails 4 with PostgreSQL
This is also useful to read the previous discussion and to see whether it has been debunked or there is some additional information. I prefer more information. My favorite format is:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3958627 (516 points, 442 days ago, 234 comments)
Bitbetex Jumps on the Bitcoin Gambling Bandwagon After SatoshiDice Exit
OK, I'll try to document my journey. It'll be at extendedsubset.com, which is down right now, but I'll bring it back in the next few days.
I realize that this is FreeDOS, but when I see "package manager" I think about RubyGems and Secure Apt and how if this package manager sees enough users or time that one day it too will probably have GPG signature verification built in.
0 - if you've ever drank coffee, you've done a drug
Heh, I also say everyone should be allowed to take amphetamines (i.e. make them completely legal). But that ain't gonna happen when the idiots at the FDA label even Piracetam as a schedule drug.
"That which does not kill me makes me stronger."

It's possible to learn quite a lot from bad trips. Some would argue that they're more valuable than good trips, where you may not learn much at all. Bad trips can involve facing unpleasant but important aspects of yourself, your life, that of your friends or family, or the world around you. Try to learn from them and use the insight you get from them to grow and improve your life.

That said, I personally think that strong psychedelics are best used under the guidance of a good therapist, who can help you deal with the very powerful and sometimes unpleasant experiences that many people have trouble assimilating on their own.

Unfortunately, psychedelics are currently taboo and illegal in much of the world, and most therapists either don't want anything to do with them or are ignorant of their incredible therapeutic potential. However, there are still some theraphists out there who are knowedgeable and willing to work with these substances and with the right clients. It may take some work to find them, but could be very worthwhile to do so, if you are serious about self-discovery and constructive use of these substances.
Ask HN: Freelancers, how did you find your first paying client?
Whether you're just starting out or have been in the game for a while, how did you go about getting your first payed client?
Would introducing probiotics after disinfection do anything?
My first payed client actually found me. I received an email one day from someone that was interested in me building an iOS App for them. We shared a few more emails, and then had a Skype conversation to move things along. Their app idea wasn't huge, but it was a week-long project, which was perfect for me at the time.

A week later, they had a new app ready for submission, and I had a Paypal notification of their transfer to me.
The Hardware Revolution Is Upon Us, And Why It Matters
Hooray!

But this isn't going to stop me from taking 200 pounds of physical Byte with me to every new home I move.
Crackdown In Egypt Shows Shift In Military's Approach
Also, if you're starting with rails web design, maybe it's a good idea to start with just vanilla rails?? All the tools you mentioned are pretty indepth and you generally can't just "walk on" to using them well.

I might suggest going through the learning curve this way:

- Rails + regular JS

- Rails + jquery/underscore (I'd moreso recommend jquery because everyone knows it)

-Rails + jquery + knockoutJS (it's pretty small, and does one thing, after using jquery, you should start to notice the problem it solves)

- Rails + angular (angular is complex, but by the time you string together pages with jquery and knockout, you'll start to see why you need a system like angular to really step in and handle things)

I just think it's important to experience/understand a problem before using the tools that solve it.
While these cases don't sound bad, this argument is.

Manned aircraft are large and obvious, and as you say they are prohibitively expensive, naturally limiting the extent of their use.

Drones can be expected to continue to get smaller and smaller and less noticeable. They can also be expected to become cheaper and easier to deploy in larger numbers than manned aircraft.

In general, the barrier to monitoring by obvious means ought to be lower, as if it is generally going to be noticed, it can be challenged - whether in person or through the courts.

And high costs of manned aircraft also creates a natural barrier that makes excessive surveillance of this type less likely and so less problematic.

The less obvious monitoring becomes, and the easier to becomes to employ en masse, the more oversight it needs because the resulting abuse potential is substantially higher.
And this is why I started boycotting Apple products.

Honestly, I agree with about 99% of the 'pro-apple' arguments here, because it is frustrating that companies aren't stepping up their UX game, but that's just peanuts compared to this type of nonsense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6092875

Luckily, my Nexus 4 has given me a smoother experience than even my old ipad 2 so far (can't say the same of my nexus 7 unfortunately), so it isn't that bad either way.
Real-time path traced high detail character animation
This is a lot of fun. Well done! :)
This is an example of engineering by lawyers.

To get rid of this, I recommend the follows - a mandatory "minimum reading period" given for any document, that prevents it from being turned in, calculated from the average HS graduate reading speed.

Also, before any meetings regarding revisions of said document, everyone involved in revising the document must A: be present, and B: serially, read a copy of the document, invoking the reading penalty multiple times over.

Optionally, to avoid this process, the document can be totally scrapped and replaced with an entirely new document, provided the new document is limited to 1/10th the reading length.

This would greatly reduce the amount of stupid long documents, and I see no downside.
Again, Ubuntu does _not_ force you to have a 1-single device.

It is only an _additional_ option, which, I guess, is supposed to be the thing that creates revenues for them, by giving you an incentive to use their cloud service.

(Personally, I will certainly refrain from using any type of cloud, after Snowden's revelations, but that's another story.)
Company idea to anyone that wants one- a website that just sells fitted sheets.

I pick my bed size, and see a list of the various type of fitted sheets. Then I select a type and pick a color.

This might work as a dropship company.

I do not want to buy a sheet set. I don't use flat sheets.

When I look on Amazon, some bed sheets list "1500 thread count" in their title, but there are one star reviews explaining that it's microfiber, not cotton. At my local Bed Bath & Beyond, all the fitted sheets available are for Cal King beds, not King beds.

In fact, as of typing this post, "buyfitted.com" is still available!
>On the other hand, I do believe in her as a CEO. I think she is precisely the kind of CEO material Yahoo! needs. I don't think she is VP material.

Why, BTW?
"Most human beings spend >99% of the time in their normal state of consciousness rather than a mushroom state of consciousness. So from a practical perspective, the question whether the insights actually produced something tangible in the real world is perfectly legitimate."

But the very question of "whether the insights actually produced something tangible in the real world" can itself be evaluated from many different perspectives and states of consciousness.

Sure, the question itself is perfectly legitimate. I'm just not sure how to evaluate the answers.
Here is the relevant kickstarter for you: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/5livesstudios/satellite-...

26 hours left.
Online Settlers of Catan Registration Stop
Shapeways Introduces Gold Plated Brass to 3D Printing
Is this guy a google engineer because he thanks the people at Yahoo in his blog. Not that it matters, just happy he told them to go fuck themselves while accepting the award
fine, fine, but does it have to be an interface from the future made of glass and perfect happy shining people?
Apache's Cassandra deb that a similar behaviour and has a greater impact than ES's super-hero node names. A newly started Cassandra node will absent a token declaration in its yaml file, auto-assign a token. This is never what you want in a cluster distribution. So the workaround is either to patch the deb to not autostart or let it start, stop it, and blow away the data directories. This allows cluster management tools (such as Priam) to control the token allocation first, and then re-start Cassandra.

This is effectively how Debian/Ubuntu work. Once you know it, you can work around it. That said, it would be nice to have packages that don't run their service.
Category error: the topic is the federal and state governments, not the age of things you personally require for existence.
For a sufficiently large salary/light workweek I will dig ditches and like it.
A country starts a war, fundamentally, when they see a resource (land; oil; people) that they think they can claim without destroying its value in the process. However, all the technologies we've developed since WWII that make us more efficient at mass-killing (chemical/biological weapons et al) are politically-blind; Anthrax will infect the conqueror as much as the conquered. The only real advance we've made in the "things that will kill the enemy but leave you alone to sit in their houses and farm their land" field, in the last 70 years, are drones--and, tactically-speaking, they haven't increased the difficulty of war much for the side of the invaded, just made waging a war safer for the invader. So, it's not any easier to win a war against a nation at technological parity with your own than it was 70 years ago.

On the other hand, over the last 50 years, besides there having been built within every world-leader a strong awareness of the "final solution" (nukes) available to the major powers to put down any sufficient threat, a true global trade economy has also emerged, with strong economic interdependence between the major powers (China holding US debt &c). Every power is now just as much beholden, economically, to each other power, as if they were an export colony; the US going to war with China, for example, would be cutting off one's nose to spite one's face in the same way that Britain choosing, without provocation, to start warring with America in 1775 would have been. In this situation, I don't see much chance of a major power instigating an empire-building war.

Also, unlike in WWI, a country that isn't a major power doesn't have the political weight to instigate a major war--nobody will follow it into battle. Attacking a country in a union with a major power is implicitly attacking that power, and military strategists now treat it that way, instead of thinking they can "just" take the country. Instead, we merely see individual unallied states getting nasty to their unallied neighbors--free radicals bumping into one-another--and having to be calmed down by some third party. I would guess future "wars" all across the globe will look more like the US's dealings in Afghanistan/Iraq than it will like some sort of confrontation between NATO and some new Axis.

Another way to put it, is that national political borders across much of the globe have basically annealed down to a rest-state. The resignation to this fact is what seems to have spurred the EU into existence; if you can't invade your neighbor any more, you may as well cooperate and trade. I see this sort of idea spreading (though perhaps without the shared monetary policy aspect, which doesn't seem to be working out too well) as more regions of the world "settle", leaving basically four or five pretty-similar political bodies in a de-facto world-government union, and individual break-away states here or there which are filled up with "peacekeeping forces" by the one or another of the powers.

I think this logic is pretty common to people who don't have a dystopian view of the future. Do you see some major flaw in it?
Exactly so. Maybe, maybe not during surgery (depending on how benign we're talking), but perhaps at the first sign of non-responsive infection. Stop the IV antibiotics, and start up the 'good' bacteria drip.

This may of course be totally silly, but I'm just wondering if anyone has done any research on it.
You can't read and understand the GPL? It's pretty short and clear.
Did we have tighter controls, or were they just better at keeping their work out of the news?
This is a good read. James Bamford has been at this for many many years.

I'm surprised that nobody has commented. Is this a dupe, or is there "spying fatigue" here on HN, because of all the stories?
If I may also use this opportunity to advertise a Pascal-like language, as it is also severely underrated. The language's name is Nimrod [1], it compiles to C so it is also very portable, uses whitespace to delimit blocks, is statically typed with generics and has great support for metaprogramming. I am developing an IDE for it called Aporia [2], it is written in Nimrod, it definitely doesn't have as many features as Lazarus but it works well as a simple editor. Other nimrod projects can be found in the nimrod-code organisation on github[3].

[1] - http://nimrod-code.org

[2] - https://github.com/nimrod-code/aporia

[3] - https://github.com/nimrod-code/
This is really great, but it would be even better if it showed where the error it's finding is located. I am getting some weird errors that I can't spot-find.
I agree that there have been times where Apple has not allowed an app in the app store for dubious reasons. For example, not allowing Google Maps for the longest time was ridiculous and blatantly anti-competitive.

Swype however is kind of an obvious example of something they likely are not allowing not because of fear of competition but because Swype, if successful, would effectively fragment the text input mechanism on iOS. I can respect the argument that on iOS Apple wants to maintain control of the experience of entering text. Regardless if you feel this is an ethical thing to do, I think you have to acknowledge that in that case it is less about anti-competitive behavior and more about maintaining consistency, which is a core tenet of good design. I think overall the App Store process is largely about maintaining things like quality, consistency, and performance, and if you don't believe me you can look to examples like the Facebook platform where the element of human-screening was ignored and the place filled up with garbage.
"Is your view that that we have evolved for the ordinary state of consciousness a view that was made and evaluated in an ordinary state of consciousness? Should its worth be evaluated in an ordinary state of consciousness? How should we decide if it's valid? Why should something that is considered "most useful" be more valid than something that is considered "less useful"?"

Because the other states of consciousness, for one reason or another, had disappeared. Though it's entirely possible that many different states of consciousness exist in the human population now.

I interpreted the original post of yours as saying "altered consciousness helps us to see through the smoke of our normal/ordinary consciousness, and help us to perceive reality as it is (or at least, with less smoke)". Hence the reply was concerned with the similar idea. And with this interpretation, the Picasso's analogy doesn't hold: indeed, Picasso painting is great not because it's an accurate depiction of reality, but because it's a different one (in a great way). The value of his works lies in his interpretation of reality, and not the accuracy in replicate reality.

Now, if you meant that no state of consciousness necessary perceives reality objectively better than the others, just merely different, and they would have different values on their own - I certainly can't disagree on this.
If you put on a pair of polarizing sunglasses, things look different, and you'll notice things that you might not notice otherwise. Some thinngs are just artifacts of teh polarization, other things are actual characteristics of what you're looking at that were always there but weren't as easy to see. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarizing_filter_(photography)

It's not so much a question of being sharp or not - whether from lack of sleep or drugs, if you're tripping you may feel great but your actual performance on any objective measurement is probably going to be well below optimal. I mean, take a look at this art: http://flyeschool.com/content/repetition-rhythm-and-pattern Very little of this addresses reality, but that doesn't mean it's not interesting.
Congratulations on learning Ruby on Rails. JavaScript is a lot of fun and super powerful these days. I'm going to try to unpack your question to the best of my ability.

As you probably already know—JavaScript is a language and the rest are all libraries and frameworks built in JavaScript (Node also has a C++ core too, but I digress). Just like Ruby is the language that Rails is built in.

The first distinction is between client-side and server-side technologies. Client-side code (e.g. Angular, Ember, Backbone, jQuery) run the in browser on the user's computer. Angular, Ember, and Backbone try—to an extent—to apply the MVC approach (like in Rails) to your JavaScript on the client in an effort to keep your code organized and DRY.

You only need one of the three. Backbone is probably the most popular. Angular, which is built by Google, also has a strong following. Ember is up and coming, but it's built by Yehuda Katz amongst others. Yehuda is a core contributor to Rails and Ember shares many of the same values (e.g. convention over configuration). In addition, it's built to play nicely with Rails. Backbone is the most minimal of the three and Angular takes an approach that expands HTML in interesting ways. It's worth dabbling in all three and seeing which one tickles your fancy. I should note that you can use any of the three with Rails. That might be a good jumping off point as you explore the world of JavaScript.

Okay, now on to the server. Node.js is a completely different beast than Rails. It's a platform, not a framework. This a bad example, but it's probably closer to Apache, Nginx, Webrick, or Mongrel than it is to Rails or Django. It basically creates a server-side JavaScript environment based on Google's V8 JavaScript engine along with some basic modules for networking and filesystem IO.

A big difference is the community. The Node community tends to favor small, modular code that can be pieced together to create bigger systems. As a result, large monolithic frameworks like Rails haven't really gain any kind of traction in the Node community. The frameworks exist, sure—Sails and Tower are two such examples, but they haven't really taken off.

The best place to start is probably Express.js, a popular but lightweight framework for Node inspired by Ruby's Sinatra. If you're not familiar with Sinatra in Ruby, play with that first (along with Ember, Backbone, or Angular) and then try Express. Express is actually a little more robust than Sinatra (for example, it includes a solution for logging—Sinatra does not).

It's also worth getting comfortable with NPM (the Node Package Manager). It's a lot like RubyGems, but with some interesting differences—for one, it keeps your modules (gems to the Rubyist) in a directory local to the project. I like to think that NPM is what RubyGems would be if RubyGems got to start over knowing it's own mistakes.

I hope this helps. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (same username) if you have any further questions.
Yeah, I know about that, and I'm not talking about intestinal fauna, but rather infectious disease. Nevertheless, it is similar logic to what I'm suggesting.