skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The NYPD fly helicopters over the city pretty much all day every day. And they are probably armed with something or other. The FBI drones are not. Drone surveillance can never be illegal by definition since they can only observe things in public view. I wish people would stop worrying about specific tactics, be it drones or decrypting SSL traffic, and worry about due process.
A chrome extension to enable toggling of comments on hacker news threads.
But he/she never specified they verbally agreed. In fact it seems that he/she made it pretty clear to the lesser that they didn't know if they agreed.
> he would just tell the court he had neither seen nor signed any contract

If he claimed he didn't see the contract, he would be committing perjury. They wouldn't bother to forge his signature because even if both parties legitimately forget the story about the fax machine, the court would likely still find the contract enforceable.

At absolute minimum, they'd have an oral contract. However, that oral contract is probably "You pay, and we'll both abide by the terms of my standard contract."

Now, that's not to say that the court will find the 90 day clause enforceable. The court may decide to enforce the contract as limited by industry norms, which may be 30 days. I don't know, but he certainly won't get away with paying nothing.

I should probably add, IANAL, but I'm also not just making this shit up.
The Hacked-Together Index of Tumblr's Lost Porn
From a footnote (#5) on "Brief History of the Internet":

"It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started
claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building
a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the
ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered
nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize
robustness and survivability, including the capability to
withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks."

http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/histor...
Don't cry for the internet, it's already gone.
There are literally tens of thousands of armed government agents on the streets of every municipality of America and have been for hundreds of years.
When I play ring game (non-tournament) poker, I'm attempting to maximize my hourly rate, not minimize my variance. Therefore I am pushing every edge I have, even when small.
Yes, this article is shockingly reductionist -- even downright incorrect -- to anyone who knows something about poker. Run back through the 2+2 archives, people were analyzing plays based on hand distributions since the beginning.

Sklansky's seminal text The Theory of Poker revolves around discussing distributions of hands -- how to guess at an opponent's distribution, how to mix up your own distribution to be harder to read, how to determine optimal (in the game theoretical sense) distributions. TOP was published in 1987. Galfond was 2 years old at that time.

Galfond simply took a concept that already existed and popularized it. He was successful at popularizing because of his idol status in online poker circles, circles in which Sklansky is something of a pariah.

An entire industry has popped up around taking already-existing technical concepts in poker strategy, dumbing them down, and relabelling them. See the rise of video coaching (cardrunners, deucescracked, et al) and more recently poker coaching (wherein people pay 3-figure hourly fees to have pros analyze their play) for examples.

None of these strategy services offers anything new because the math and theory behind poker has not changed. The structure of the game is the same now as it was in the 80s, and the 50s, and 20s, and so on.

The vast majority of modern strategy content is a restatement or application of the content from two canonical texts: the aforementioned Theory of Poker, and Chen's Mathematics of Poker. Even most coaches who charge the three-figure fees admit this. It's just that most people don't want to put in the gritty analysis work, hence the coaches stay in business.
Curiosity rover's descent to Mars – the story so far
CoffeeScript's "do" syntax replicates the let semantics now :-)
Roger Dingledine and Jacob Appelbaum: Q & A Marathon (July 24th)
Presumably you'd then have many more possible patentable, innocuously "different" molecule patterns, ruining the competitive edge.
I'll pay them for the last month but I think 90 days is unreasonable. I honestly probably wouldn't have rented the unit if I knew that was the case but that's my own fault -- just like it's their fault they didn't make sure I signed the agreement.
Coffee buys me sanity, can easily parse it vs. the giant syntactic mess that is JavaScript.

Coffee is to JavaScript as Scala is to Java.

Compilation blazes with GruntJS as well so overall it's a complete and utter win [for me].
I love pascal, but once you move beyond the turbo pascal features of Free Pascal and start trying to use the Lazarus IDE and the Delphi look-alike features the going gets really rough. The documentation is terrible. There's a lot there, but it's all fragmented and half baked.

They need to freeze development and go look at the documentation for python, perl, racket or a whole host of other languages.
And tis should be a wakeup call; if the system was actually built correctly, they would not have to be worrying about their next meal or paycheck!

Take all the MIC funding and redirect it into education, infra, science and social services.

Make the world better rather than weaponizing idiocy to defend a farked up system.
"HN comments are always a cesspool of people trying to prove they're smarter than the author of the post..."

They frequently are smarter or better-informed. Just because someone writes a post on a blog doesn't mean they're smart or have deep knowledge about their subject matter.

And referring to peoples' comments as a "cesspool" is not particularly civil.
The whole idea of surveillance truly doesn't bother me because there is literally nothing I can do if the higher end government did ever decided they wanted me. Since the 50's they've had the ability to listen into conversations via a laser on a window: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone and if anyone really ever believed that the internet would be much different they probably didn't think it all the way through.

Sure the internet had that possibility not to be monitored and for a time it probably was, but clearly no longer. Further, I think the idea of mass data collection is monstrous however there is nothing I, nor you can really do about that except perhaps hiding as much of our data as we can (via encryption). Even if our data is encrypted in the end if they want your data they can get your data.

The thing I find interesting about this article is the idea that eventually the internet could be closed off only to a few nation states. I disagree this would ever happen because Pandora's box has been opened and some communication will always be allowed via wireless connections, hidden cables, or some other method. Obviously, the average user might be affected, but just like the soviet union fell so would what ever country decided to block off their nation.

People don't care about surveillance for the most part, as someone already commented: "I've talked to two people about this issue. Their answers were "Whatever, I don't care" and "honestly, I get it. If they're catching terrorists..."" They do however care if you disconnect their internet, and if any country was to do that in the end it would fail. The point being, the article stated that nation states of internet would develop and my reasoning points to that not happening (at least based off what i've seen). In my honest opinion, the internet has always been a place to communicate, but about as secure with my data as a friend you never quite trust with your secrets. What scares me is not the internet surveillance or my government hunting down (in my opinion) an innocent man. What horrifies me the most is that no matter what we do the surveillance will only become more intense (as the price of computing/computers gets lower) and there is no going back. 50 years from now, what am I going to be faced with and will I be able to continue to just ignore these B.S. laws we have, or if I unlock my cell phone will I really go to jail for 10 years?

That's what thoughts keep me up at night, not the idea of my data being collected at mass online (although I would stop it if there was any way I could), but the idea that even offline walking down the street or in my own home I may be required to follow the laws which are outright ridiculous.
Unfortunately, for a customer today, paying with a phone has barely any benefits over paying with a credit card. Mobile payment systems need to offer more benefits to people to get them to use them.
This would be an excellent service for the EFF or any of the other internet defense groups:

(Downloadable) one page sheets, with the most popular pro (NSA) opinions and very simple, fact based rebuttals. Just fighting fire with fire - isn't the NSA prepping news commentators with similar taking point memos?
Another major problem I have with the Datastore deprecation is the precedent it set. Datastore was a GA feature AFAIK. So, there's no real distinction between GA and experimental now. If something doesn't work out for Google, experimental or not, they're going to can it--that's the message they sent. They should've grandfathered people over and just bit the bullet. Maybe come up with a rule like: if you don't write to the old Datastore for 90 days, you never get it again.

With that being said, long grace periods don't matter when you've got a terabyte of data in that thing--For me and a lot of developers, it's going to be risky business to migrate from Datastore to HRD, and I dread it. I'm not paying them to dread their infrastructural issues. No. That's the opposite of what I'm paying them for.

The problem with at first having practically unlimited e-mail and then the new restriction is it limits the type of apps you can build without their permission. I understand the need to protect against misuse, but you'd think they would've gotten it right from day one since they manage the largest e-mail service on the planet.

I don't know if you were there during the early days or not, but one of their strengths was support was very accessible. You could write about an issue on the newsgroup and an engineer would contact you personally, go into your app, unstuck your indexes or whatever. Going from that level of service to $500/mo once you're hooked stinks. It's the old bait and switch all the way.
> more people seem to care about Zimmerman/trevor type media sensation

which is because they understand the implications of it. Most people, from my experience, have limited understanding of privacy and the consequences. The way I think of it is this: most people in this country don't realize they should be playing at least checkers while a very few people are actually playing chess.

The thing that gets is the crap that you pass under the banner of "Think of the children". Once the investment and infrastructure is done "in the name of the children", then it takes a very few (and highly paid) individuals to turn that technology and infrastructure into anything they want.

It's a slippery slope.
If he didn't sign it, then he didn't agree to the 90 day clause. If they charged him, then he has the right to use the space for a month - no more, no less. But, they could lock him out at the end of the month and not auto renew the 30 day lease.

Contracts exist to protect both parties.

Now, that being said - this would be a small claims issue and it probably isn't worth dealing with for $120.
Do you consider yourself apathetic, or only cynical? I find apathy and cynicism to be close cousins, and equally damaging to democratic government.
Nicely made. Some frustrations:

- while, until, retry (and others?) not allowed.

- not being able to see the class of something. Its more ruby style to do 'space.is_a?(Enemy)' than 'space.enemy?'. This would also help to build case statements rather than lots of ifs.

- no 'print' or 'puts'. How am I supposed to know what 'look' returns when it never really tells me?

- I prefer a single set of rules rather than adding rules as you go. When first I have to use :backward but later this becomes basically redundant as 'pivot' is added, it just makes me frustrated in having to refactor. Same thing for feel/look.
What about the McCarthy era in the 1960s?

Suppose we had a repeat of that in 2030, and the US wanted to purge everyone who believed in some "bad" ideology, summarized by a single word, like "communism", except which we can't hope to predict now.

Imagine further that this purge is being enforced by halfwits who don't actually understand the ideology in question, who get wrapped up in their own hysteria, and who are looking for any excuse to burn witches at the stake.

And finally, imagine that said halfwits have an indexed, fully searchable database of all the Facebook statuses you've ever posted, all the Google searches you've ever made, and all the e-mails you've ever sent.

Scared yet?
Scientists Make Mice “Remember” Things That Didn’t Happen
While I agree that elliptic curve cryptography is the near-future (not necessarily because of new attacks, but mostly cost-effectiveness), I have trouble seeing how you'd explain the possible pitfalls and attacks to laypeople, without taking an unreasonable amount of pages.

It's one thing to explain the Weierstrass equation, the chord and tangent rule, and how group structure comes from that. But the details get really hairy really quick: anomalous curves, MOV/FR attacks, Weil descent, etc. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's certainly very very hard to reasonably pull this off.

Another note about elliptic curves is that the safest choices are often not doable by developers because of external pressures. For example, ideally you'd want to use a curve (like Curve25519) that has complete addition formulas, so that you could avoid checks for explicit doubling or points-at-infinity, like you do with Weierstrass curves. Montgomery and Edwards curves allow this, but you can't use them if you need to support standard NIST curves, since they are not reasonably convertible to Edwards form (you can do it, actually, but the arithmetic is now in F_{p^3} instead of F_p).
My phone has NanoStudio and can synthesize multichannel audio without noticeable latency. It might be a niche thing, but it's still not a bad argument.
Exactly.

If I hadn't read the document (they clearly expected that I wouldn't and were quite surprised and perturbed when I did), they would have had absolutely no problem taking $138 from me for a service I wasn't using (the last 90 days).

Why should I feel bad for managing to keep $92 of my own money!? If I walked in on the last day and then they told me I signed the contract and was on the hook for the last 90 days of rent, do you honestly expect that I could simply say "oh, wow, I didn't realize that" and they'd let me out of it.

Please. It would have been "sorry, should've read the contract!"
There are competent doctors here but my impression is that the typical level of training is pretty low.
Errm, you are aware that people got these infections, and died in droves from them, long, long before the age of antibiotics, or "germs exist", let alone are "bad"?

This is a grander version of the hygiene hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis), but unlike it I don't see a phenomena to explain.
Code Is a Liability: Emotional Detachment From Code
Github: What does the "Gold Star" next to my repository (in Explore page) mean?
On the (https://github.com/explore/week) page, my repo's been on top of weekly list for a while now, and today, I started seeing a star next to it.

http://i.imgur.com/0q7JCYU.png

Not on any other repo, and only in the weekly listing. Hovering over the star, I see this:

http://i.imgur.com/GilEHdt.png

What does this star mean, and why is this there??
Then you may be interested in this: http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/
Link to Spolsky's critique?
The definition of a "big" input size is somewhat circular, yes.

"The big O performance of an algorithm only matters for a sufficiently large value of n."

"Define a sufficiently large value of n."

"Large enough that the big O performance of the algorithm starts to matter more than the coefficients of n and constant time operations."

So yes, that could be 10 or 10 million depending on the nature of the problem, the constants and coefficients of the algorithm, the language, the hardware, etc etc. You could have an algorithm that takes factorial time but maybe you're only using it in a problem domain where n is always < 10 so you'll probably never notice or care that it's O(n!)
Payment in this case constitutes agreement.
How Americans Said No To Cocaine After Years-Long Addiction
I'm aware of that; it's a subconscious habit. Did you have something useful to contribute?
Looking at one of the responses, the user might have cancelled their service instead of downgrading back to the free plan.

http://productforums.google.com/d/msg/apps/tevkcnsb7-w/CQkhb...
I do not consider mushrooms to be a party drug. neither do I consider weed to be a party drug, but that's just me. historically, I have been addicted to smoking for quite some time... but, you know, there's an interesting thing that happened after I started to take mushrooms.

in comparison to smoking a joint, I would previously smoke before programming, and what would sometimes happen is I would end up smoking another, and another, and another; chasing that dragon until I felt inspired. however, if you were to do a few g's of shrooms instead, the last thing you're gonna be thinking is, "wow I'm gonna drop another few g's" like you'd be thinking after smoking a joint ... I'm usually so overloaded by the mind expanding experience I just had, that's the last thing I wanna do. I won't do them more often that once a week, and I'm a highly addictive personality. actually, I've noticed that I tend to not want to drink alcohol, or ... well really anything addicting, and watched all addictive behavior reduce every time. I just want to create. I now neither need mushrooms anymore. the changes seem to be permanently enlightening.

I've not tried LSD (cause I can't get it here), but I know that Jobs was a huge proponent of it. from what I can gather, the concept is similar.

I think, if you are somewhat grounded individual, I believe your experience will be something of exaggerated connection with nature, other humans, and your own creative ideas. perhaps it's a bit illusory, but I have never seen a detrimental side-effect to redefining your connection with your immediate world with that sort of illusory connection.

you cannot overdose on mushrooms. I also found I am less inclined to simplistic forms of thoughtless hedonism, focusing a bit more on the bigger picture. I find that creativity and novelty are forefront in my mind for at least a few days afterwards, if not permanently.

compare that with alcohol, and I think you may rethink your next few mindless sloshers.

@neilk, I believe that the negative-positive experiences are actually the best. IMO, it's just soo easy to smoke a doobie or go get smashed -- yet reality tends to come back with a vengeance afterward. however, if you're forced to look at something like that, and you can get past it, my best experiences have usually come about with that feeling of freedom after leaving behind a retarded mindset.
DOTuino, a minimalist arduino game
I wouldn't be surprised that Facebook guy behind the counter was stupid enough to forge the signature.
I should've been a bit more specific. I fully expect to pay for the last month (and I'm okay with that). The 90 day thing is a bit too much though, IMO.
Confirmed. TOP is one big discussion of ranges. Sklansky didn't call them ranges, but the concept is the same: your opponent holds a distribution of possible hands, and you're making decisions based on what you think the makeup of that distribution is (and also based on what you think your opponent thinks your distribution is).

Also, in 2006 Chen and Ankenman published The Mathematics of Poker which quite explicitly deals with the analysis of hand distributions (e.g. chapter 8: Playing Accurately Part II: Hand vs. Distribution, chapter 9: Adaptive Play: Distribution vs. Distribution).

So even if we pretend Sklansky's TOP doesn't deal with ranges, Chen clearly does, and came before Galfond's 2007 Bluff article [1].

[1] - http://www.bluff.com/magazine/g-bucks-conceptualizing-money-...
How is it that Xhibit has so many faces on it's About Us[1] page but they still had to hire an elancer? Did they make the iOS version and out-source Android development?

1. http://www.xhibitcorp.com/about-us
Came across TypeScript last month, looks interesting.

What are the limitations of the type checker? i.e. does the compiler fully have your back, or are we just talking validating whether or not a method param takes a String vs. an Int?

Coffee is a dream [for me], JavaScript, not so much.
Funny that the background music is the same as the recent Microsoft Outlook TV commercial.

It doesn't seem as exciting as The Social Network movie.
works for me: https://gist.github.com/sirpengi/609711
TypeScript is awesome. I tried Dart first and found I could bang out code much faster, but when you start to push the Dart team about JavaScript you soon realize they don't care much for JavaScript and really do want to replace it. I'm not ready to abandon JavaScript just yet. TypeScript adds type checking, code completion and easy refactoring to normal JavaScript code. It's all gain and no pain. I can only assume it's not taken off even stronger because it's from Microsoft.
I wasn't aware of the 90-day policy until after I had already bought the service, FWIW.
Any thoughts on Closure Compiler vs. typescript? One thing I like about Closure Compiler is that it lets you explicitly list the symbols you wish to export from your JS, which is a huge boon for code minification.
It's easy enough to run this as a non-root user and use your local software firewall port to forward port 80 inbound to whatever high port this server is listening on.
I have difficulty too I find if I put my nose right up to a stereogram stare as if at an object off far away then move back very very slowly I may be able to see it.
In my experience, most people who dismiss/hate on CoffeeScript have never tried it. I've personally never met a person who has used the language at length and walked away hating it.
Universal Forfeit License
That in the hands of an eager government there would be no Turing, no civil rights movement, nor speeches that go "I have a dream". The problem is that many in US heartland will consider these to be a good thing.

EDIT: could someone please upvote mkmkmmmmm. I think I managed to downvote his comment when trying to confirm it.
Who is claiming that microorganism-involved disease was nonexistent before the "war on germs"? My claim is that in light of what is now known about the human microbiome and its role in immune function, many common practices for "fighting germs" can be predicted to have harmful effects, particularly in the long run.

Do you have any reason to believe otherwise?
There was one company, Ripplin (basically a big MLM scheme) that did this, as a "look how special this is". If you then invited a couple of other people (without being able to say what it is) you got to the next stage. They did make it though, so that the NDA was to see a youtube video, which was a public video, so could easily be found on YT, it'd just make the average user feel like they'd been invited into something special. It worked, and they're doing well. YMMV though, what works for a scammy bizopp may not work for you.
Your users will still do it, and you won't be able to stop them.