skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the threat of global conflict in this day and age has dimished but the cold war mentality has persisted.

While that's true, I think it is misrepresentative.

The Cold War was in some ways safer than the environment we have today. There were two (main) known players, and the threat of mutually assured destruction kept the Cold War from becoming hot. Now we have one known (main) player- the US, and a number of unknowns. You can't threaten mutually assured destruction upon Al Qaeda because it isn't a nation state.

So while the threat of global conflict has diminished, the threat of conflict has not. In many ways it has become a lot more complicated.
Well, it's not like the ideas were gonna come from inside Yahoo.
I know YC typically gives small investments which works well enough for web startups, but do they give more to hardware companies like Senic that need things like materials, machines and parts?
Well on the bright side, at least they don't have to worry about their ex-sysadmins becoming whistleblowers.
see my comments here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5968355 - basically the market is very illiquid and the volumes are small.
I think the language will almost never matter to a startup (unless you're using something like ASP.NET and MS technologies). Even if you're a pure tech startup, the core technologies is what matter, ie your secret sauce - such as advanced NLP techniques, a superior search algorithm, etc. All of those are language-agnostic
How does the autofocus work?
Yeah, there's a line here. Changing a title for the purpose of being MORE sensational and attention grabbing is a good reason to change. But if you're changing it to be informative, then to me its a reasonable change.
So I take it the author can fix any brand of car and would, without missing a beat, answer questions like "where's the expansion tank?"

I'm so tired of "tech savvy" people simultaneously sitting on their high chairs and large salaries dissuading anything that makes their trade less esoteric - and then talking down to those who can't pierce the veil for whatever reason (whether it by financial, intellectual, or just not giving a flying $#@! about where proxy settings are).

EDIT: Let's not build a generation of people who know how to navigate terminal. Let's build a generation of people who will never have to.
For Joe Kennedy maybe.
This is sadly far from true. There is plenty of talent to be bought for the right amount of money and plenty of talented people who can divorce morality from their job.

Besides that though there have been quite a bit of growth in nationalistic sentiment in the hacker community for some time. It seems that its been present in non-US/EU parts of the culture for quite some time, but I've noticed in recent years it becoming a bigger and more accepted part of US circles. Joking about popping boxes in .cn, seeing the whole country as an enemy, etc. It was a lot quieter on those topics in Vegas this year, but it was certainly a very present part of the dialogue 2010/11, etc.
Downward is the only way forward.
> “systems governed by bad policies and motivated by incentives will produce bad outcomes."

This can be applied to the entire US government, not just the police.
Yes, Python is slow.

They are not using Python for the phone version, but something coming from QT that runs at native speed.
If you mean a giant retail store, I think Costco will do fine. They have a lot more experience in that area, and they've done fine so far against existing cost-cutting retailers like Wal-Mart.
The TL;DR makes this guy sound like a prick.
That's an interesting example! Sorry I missed this until now.

I think you might have confused "getting married" with "being married". People who get married several times are probably pretty good at the getting married part. People who stay married, though, probably work hard on the day-to-day experience of being married. In the same way good writers work hard each day on the writing.
I have an experience to relate about the small town I grew up in (Bay Area).

While I was a youngster I had numerous run ins with the local cops. Nothing serious, but I remember feeling mistreated, literally manhandled by the officers to this day.

Tangentially, the town I grew up in is not typically thought of as violent, but several folks in my high school class were violently murdered over the years. We've also had the misfortune to experience a few other heinous crimes which don't deserve to be repeated in polite company.

The local police basically failed, but a few years ago the county sheriffs took over.

Whereas, as a youngster I had numerous bad encounters with local authorities, now the sheriffs wave to me when I drive through town and I see them with the local kids working more like local cops.

I've never been a fan of the police, but this has been a welcome change in my community. I realize the visibility of age can change your relationship with authority but I think there was a cultural change as well.

Now, on the other hand, I'm also painfully aware of the shenanigans that police pull all over the US. The incidents of police brutality are too numerous to mention, and the justice dispensed is a pitiable counterweight (I'm referring to the prosecution of police brutality, not the justice of the police action, for clarity's sake).

I think there are too many weapons in America in general, and the militarization of the police is just another example of that. There's always the part of this argument where someone yells "but why can we see people getting shot on the television but we can't see sex?".

I think the militarization of the police has become a part of American culture and that my experience with my local authorities is an outlier. I wish the culture of our police was based around community development and not militarization.
I hate these idiotic titles. It feels like I see at least 5 titles a day that are broad sweeping generalizations that all have the same tone. Of course kids can use computers, don't be stupid. Maybe a small subset can't. If that's not what the article is about, then don't put it in the title.

And also.. I went to read the article, saw the extremely arrogant TLDR and closed it.
You're right. I almost left it unattributed but went with the first link Google found.
Is a government mandated filter the best way to allow parents to go beyond just educating their children? As a childless person who isn't petrified of naked people, why should I pay for a service that's only any good for lazy parents?
Icomania : All the answers
Thanks! Our technical ninjas are working their magic behind the scenes!
Tomorrow’s politicians, civil servants, police officers, teachers, journalists and CEOs are being created today. These people don’t know how to use computers, yet they are going to be creating laws regarding computers, enforcing laws regarding computers, educating the youth about computers, reporting in the media about computers and lobbying politicians about computers.

I feel like this may worry some, but for others who have no power in the societies we live in today (increasingly employing the use of computers), might find solace in that there is a future where they might be valued…
A related earlier discussion with some interesting comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6022638

(That discussion is not about the same story, but both stories are about the same Radley Balko book.)
What's the one thing you dislike the most about OVH, if you had to choose 1?
HN Guidelines[1] state that original article titles should be used as the title on HN (though I agree that it's sometimes to the detriment of HN readers).

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The goal of Al-Qaeda's internationalist effort has been achieved, the image of the "Shining City on the Hill", of the U.S. as a beacon of liberal democracy and thus liberal democracy itself, has been tarnished, not to mention grave economic damage.

So, the obvious next phase is to shift to taking local control of various territories.
I don't get it. Their newly ex-sysadmins might well be motivated to blow whistles. There's still a 'Snowden is overstating the case' contingent out there.
SEO for Ruby on Rails (Complete Guide)
That is the expressed goal of the Scaled Composites "Tier Three" platform, which is what will follow the Virgin Galactic platform, which is Tier Two. (Tier One was the X Prize platform.)
[Musk] elaborated just a tiny bit on his future plans to build a “Hyperloop” that would be a “cross between a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table”.

There ya go.
Major Denmark paper claims we're heading for a little ice age
1. Algorithm to evaluate how blurred an image is.
2. Adjust the focus a little bit, is it getting less blurred? Keep going. More blurred? Other direction.
3. Keep adjusting until you find the point where adjusting either way means more blur.
The state are purposely allowed to break laws the citizens are not allowed to break.

It is illegal for a citizen to hack other persons and organizations computers and take their data.
It is allowed for the government to hack other persons computers and steal their data. The government now has professional teams of hackers doing just that.

Thus the same laws does not apply for citizens as the government, thus the government thinks they are above the law.

It is almost the same as the government would have teams that steal credit cards and make drugs.

We are walking towards a Internet 3.0 which be heavily encrytped anonymized and reinvented by hackers. Imagine encrypted mesh sockets. ifconfig anoninet up
Peer2Peer dns and trust authorities.

Not to mention the banks the government are protecting and the central banks, which purposely steals peoples money through inflation. The Fed is privately owned by the banks they are as Federal as Federal express not at all. The creature from Jekyll island.
Thoughts on why that 'uncacheable' bit matters...
Any chance 4 Ethiopian developer?
Hello all, I am a programmer in a government agency in Ethiopia and I have been writing web based applications for some time now. But recently I have been obsessed with the idea of writing small web based applications for small/medium business as my own business. So I developed an application as MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and gonne out and spoken to a couple of potential customers. The application is a basic income and expense tracking system with invoice in its center. And with my meeting with potential customers I have already found people who are willing to use the system for free with a promise to find me 2 future paying customers each. According to the promise, the future customers would pay me 2500Birr (i.e 125USD).
These were super awesome deals to me, if I get 2 paying customers for my applications I will end up owning 250USD, and that is my salary. I was feeling happy already until I started reading HN, reddit programmer and other success stories in internet. I was constantly reading about these amazing pricing schemes, and how I could easily not just get that amount once but make it my monthly income.
But to my frustration we don’t have any kind of online currency in the whole country here in Ethiopia so I have to resort to my original idea as these all making online stories seem a fairy tale to me. So I am here to ask the HN community if there is any way to make the online money, selling my applications to customers outside my country, without online currency?
Wow...

"TL;DR? Why not just go watch another five second video of a kitten with it’s head in a toilet roll, or a 140 character description of a meal your friend just stuffed in their mouth. “num num”. This blog post is not for you."

Snarky enough? If you start out like that I've already made the decision that you're over opinionated and probably prone to dramatic exaggeration.
To me the most blatant depiction of how rapidly this change has occurred, is to watch action movies from the 80s even the 90s. In many, the police wear suites and only carry a revolver to apprehend the perps. Granted it is fiction, but it is a reflection of the current state of law enforcement.
Apple’s Tim Cook, Other Tech Executives Meet with Obama to Talk Surveillance
We are not trying to compete with or dilute the "Apple Experience". We love Apple and believe our tech is necessary to help the ecosystem.
would've posted the link to the actual article from their website, but it's only available to subscribers.
Because their training also includes the scientifically bankrupt "osteopathic manipulative medicine

I'm sorry and I don't say this lightly but you should really just shut up.

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

In an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine in November 1999, researchers concluded that osteopathic manipulative medicine and traditional drug therapy resulted in equivalent resolution of lower back pain in a nearly identical time frame. The difference was that participants receiving osteopathic manipulative medicine required less pharmaceutical intervention. The advantage of osteopathic manipulative medicine was a diminution of adverse drug reactions while the disadvantage was the greater amount of physician time required for each patient.[22]

A 2005 meta-analysis and systematic review of six randomized controlled trials of osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT) that involved blinded assessments of lower back pain in ambulatory settings concluded that OMT significantly reduces low back pain, and that the level of pain reduction is greater than expected from placebo effects alone and persists for at least three months.[23]

The National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine states[24] that overall, studies have shown that spinal manipulation can provide mild to moderate relief from low-back pain and appears to be as effective as conventional medical treatments.

You are the worst kind of debater. You say something wrong, are called out on it, then you change the entire topic. Only you're wrong about that new topic too, so you cling to it to death. So now you're in the position of arguing against the American Medical Association, the National Institute of Health, the New England Journal of Medicine and frankly thousands of studies.

You are a colossal fool.
Classified texts may be seen as more accurate and reliable because they are assumed to be free of any attempt to manipulate the public.

I didn't read the paywalled paper, they may already cover this hypothesis.
They've built a data centre in Salt lake city, Utah. A city with a large population of mormons...
Bookshelf.js - a Javascript ORM for Node.js for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite3
Please see my response to @datalus below which addresses my thoughts on when I open source code.

Agreed, we all benefit from open source, I think it's almost impossible to avoid an open source tool at some point in your career now as a developer. I love Git and have a lot of respect for Github as a company. My intentions in my post was to address how people misuse such great platforms potentially.

Also, please see my response to @mafro below which addresses your final point.
Oh, you missed the statements be the ex-head of the NSA just a couple days ago I take it. He said that government transparency groups are 'the next terrorists.'

Besides, it's not a human you have to fear. It's their automated systems. They'll set up a system to analyze and profile communications, and it will just spit out names. They'll declare those people terrorists and round them up and not charge them with anything. And as long as no individual NSA agent actually reads your communications, everyone will apparently be happy. Well, except for the people getting waterboarded by CIA agents who just KNOW you MUST have done something terrible, because the information they got about you is called "intelligence" and therefore can not be incorrect.
Primitive Triples solve real-life problems with RDF in the large
Your post made me think that the EFF logo is pretty cool, and I would totally wear a T-shirt with that on it. I went to their merch page, and...they don't have one. The only shirt they have is the "Kingpin", with a metal-band-ified version of the handle of a hacker I've never heard of. What?
No I can't fix any brand of car, as I believe I stated in the post. That was sort of my point. I have great admiration for people who know about car mechanics.

I don't earn a large salary, I'm a teacher.

I do try and fix the situation, rather than just talking about it. I do this in my classroom every day. It is my hope that the next generation of UK students are more tech savvy, and the problem does not escalate.

.
I think that anything in particular can be done about companies caring about profit and little else. What can be done is changing the world for the better via (smart) state policies, some of them incentivising companies to do good (or at least less harm), others changing the world explicitly (like various social programs, the labor laws etc.). That's obviously hard and messy since it involves politics, but hey - people on this forum are supposedly all about hard problems and changing the world :) (usually, they're also about making millions of dollars in the process, but that, since it doesn't make you look as attractive, is usually left unspoken).
There'll never be a way of filtering it correctly (is ASCII art of sex acts posted to reddit porn?) so the only real option is ensure people are aware of the risks (whatever they might be). Opting out is already possible today - don't visit porn websites if you don't want to see it.
> That being said, I wouldn't go as far as to say the average American doesn't care, just that their reaction in light of these leaks is underwhelming.

Classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog situation. What is now somehow acceptable, would have been outrageous a dozen years ago. In a few months' time people will have accepted that the NSA is spying on US citizens without a warrant.

This is why it is inevitable that the US will become a totalitarian surveillance state - if the political establishment chooses to go down that road.
Sorry you feel that way. I'll edit it out when I get back to my computer. I wasn't trying to be a prick, but I get your point.
okay okay, i am not doubting Snowden is a good guy. I am just trying to tell there is nothing so tragic in his current situation (while of course, he risked much more). One day life will pay him back for this. And for now, he will be just fine. And there are plenty of good girls to date in Russia (and many of them are already attacking him).
its a passive system where the camera sensor collects image data before the picture is taken and analyzes the image, then activates the focus motor to adjust the focus. No emitter required.
When I ponder why the War on Drugs continues, even on fronts that have been pretty well settled (marijuana), I don't think it takes much more thought beyond understanding money and bureaucracy.

Political and law enforcement agencies have been fueled by federal money and grants, which they've poured into militarizing the police. You stop the War on Drugs, then you stop that money flow. These former warriors may not experience a net-loss in pay or jobs, but they get kicked back to office duty, their departments are slashed...at some point, some middle manager or higher-level exec loses their exciting, plum job. It just takes a bunch of these to continue pushing the idea of the War on Drugs, and it has nothing to do with the actual harm of drugs.

This is related to the militarization of police because that's what agencies happened to pour their money into (well, can you blame them? The top level of fed government called it a "War on Drugs"). Imagine if they poured that money into fighting the drug problem, but through social services. We'd be complaining about the nanny-state of social services, but somehow, I'd think that be a much more pleasant situation than turning cops into heavily armed community warriors.
Most of these features are available even if you don't use Gmail though - the article's point wasn't about e-mail in general, just the invasiveness of Gmail.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofocus

Passive: Measurement of light

Active: Infrared or ultrasound
What happens when Google offers your product for free?
Keep in mind that the majority of the Tumblr staff have been here a year or less.
Long term longitudinal studies like the one referenced are inconclusive when taken in isolation. They really only work in relation to other studies, tracking already known traits. This study most likely indicates a correlation one or more other unknown traits in the individual and can in no way be taken to indicate what it claims in that article.
Elysium Space sends your ashes into orbit for $2,000
Kim Dotcom Will Move Mega Privacy Services to Iceland to Avoid Spying
"the problem is usually the interface between the chair and the keyboard."

Loved reading this. Well said [1]. I am sure this post resonates a lot with many of us. I remember a joke where someone calls the tech support of a computer company and it goes like this:

Person: "My computer does not turn on".

Tech. guy: "Whats the problem. Did you press the ON switch? "

Person: "Yes of course. I pressed it twice already"

[1] EDIT : As other pointed out, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_error
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6147423
Xbox One: Sharing Digital Games and Gold
> (Ironically, that article about getting rid of porn has a full column of ads on the right side filled with half-naked women)

That's the Daily Mail for you. Ironic.
Shuttleworth already has the money to pay for the phones from this pocket. Even the best possible phones.

What he needs is to prove there's a market. They are still short of this goal by a large margin. The price drop helps toward this goal.
Yes. I am over opinionated and prone to dramatic exaggeration. Point taken though, and I'll remove the TL;DR.
The New Yorker's Mayer is paraphrasing an anonymous source, which she then counter-points in the very next sentence of the article with a quote from NSA historian Matthew Aid, who says: “The resistance to ThinThread was just standard bureaucratic politics. ThinThread was small, cost-effective, easy to understand, and protected the identity of Americans.” [1]

That's what Binney and Drake have said all along.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_...
These issues aren't black and white. Calling the US a police state is perhaps unhelpful.

Emerging police state may be more accurate. The people who use such language note trends. The USA still has liberty, but things are moving in the wrong direction.

An article is on the front page on the increasing militarization of police forces. This level of police action surpasses the level of state violence in many police states.

I've lived in one police state: Cuba. In many ways, the Cubans were freer of speech than Americans are, and they faced less police intrusion in their lives.

And, in other ways, the Cubans were less free and faced more restrictions on speech. Chiefly, when someone decided to step out of line and move from passive complainer to actual threat to the state.

My point is this. The USA is still a free country. Citizens enjoy great liberty. However, there are many elements of US society that surpass the excesses of 'police states'. Those trends are increasing, not decreasing.

Pointing out that the institutions of American democracy still exist and exercise certain functions does not refute any concerns about increasing state violence.

When is the appropriate moment to voice concerns that the USA is moving towards becoming a police state? Once it happens, it will be too late.
Yep we love Pieceable and know some of the guys. They've done well!
I am pissed off. I am a life long linux user and Ubuntu has done great work.

I am really starting to see Ubuntu used for the desktop in various companies.

But nobody gives a shit enough to invest in their technologies. I think edge is a great idea. I will buy (once the phone is available). That is my contribution.
Advanced User Management for Ruby, Rails and Sinatra