skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting comments. I got that this guy was burned out. I know that feeling, how many times can someone say "The Internet it down" and you have told them the steps to identify what is the problem and often fix it?

I really applauded Microsofts work on "Trouble Shooters" which would walk you through those steps. Each one saying "Is it better now?" and if you got to the end it would send a report to Microsoft.

More importantly the message though is that a large number of people use "computers" when what they wanted were "appliances." Specifically it always does what its job. No programability required. This is what makes the Chromebook and things like it so powerful for those people. Turn it on it works, if not you get a new one.

The dissonance of people who use a software tool, and that forces them to use a computer to run it, versus the people who use a computer that has a number of different software tools is getting stronger.
Given that I am not an US-citizen I would argue that I am better of an provider outside.. namely myself. Have fun puzzling together a complete picture from dozens of providers.
All of these programs started under Bush. Obama has tried to give legal cover to some of the programs that Bush was conducting illegally. He has ended other illegal programs such as "enhanced interrogations", aka torture.

I guess which one is worse depends on which one you think is scarier, a reckless cowboy or a careful efficient crime boss.
Get ready to be underwhelmed.
Wow, thats perfect....
I'm in Venezuela and unfortunately I've never heard anyone talking about Bitcoin here.I haven't really looked hard,to be honest.

Dollar purchases are totally prohibited here , we only get $400/year for online purchases and ~$2500 for travellers.

The black market here is just out of control, like you said, just today a friend sold $1000 at Bs.32.

The Government only gives dollars at the official rate (Bs.6.3) to their close friends (corruption). Venezuela does not produce anything other than oil. So , everything we consume here is imported (food,clothing,etc). If you are in commerce and need to import something, you go to the black market.

And that explains why the projected inflation for this year is ~45 - 50%.

Argentina already suffered hyper-inflation not too long ago. I cannot understand why they did not learn from their mistakes.
> Retired infantrymen have already been in combat

Maybe that depends on the time period. The 80's and early 90's cliche/trope was former military who never got to see action being gun crazy.

I imagine your view of "action" in the military sense depends very highly on whether you've seen any, and of what time. Fighting an entrenched insurgency where you have to wonder every moment whether you are going to be ambushed, whether every building you enter harbors an enemy combatant, that's probably enough to wean most off any illusions as to the glory.

Edit: to be clear, I'm using "you" in the general sense here. I'm not trying to imply any sort of military background of anyone.
Just when I was beginning to figure it out... What a mess.
Just open source the code. They can not buy all the clones.
lol ... sounds like this guy is Nick Burns the company's computer guy - http://vimeo.com/24762526
It's a 702 vs 215 distinction, right?
I don't get it - can't we just implement the same effect in JS if we need blink that badly?
That's not what we're really taking about.

"Uparming" individual officers from revolvers and shotguns to semi-automatic handguns and semi-auto "assault rifles", not inaccurately called "patrol rifles", not to mention concealable body armor, only makes sense. I in fact do or can do every one of those (my threat level is not high enough to routinely wear (uncomfortable) body armor).

It's the "no matter who you have to kill, go home safely", and the routine use of frank paramilitary stuff like SWAT teams and no-knock warrant for threats that don't require them that's an issue. Or look at puppycide, it's telling that so many police encounters with civilian's dogs end with the latter being executed. The Postal Service doesn't try to get away with that.
Interesting to have this come out when yesterday the Sunnyvale police drove their tank over to a house where someone had called in reporting a murder, they asked the person to come out and then immediately shot him dead.

Good grief Chuck, how many ways are you going to mischaracterize what happened in one sentence? The guy called the police saying that he had committed a murder, and indeed police found the body of a woman in the house. Per a neighbor's testimony, the police turned up with sirens wailing, and about an hour later later shots were heard (of them killing the guy).

According to the police (whose account of events is open to question) the guy refused to come out at first and then charged them.

Now, I am not excusing the fact that they shot him, and I am not willing to take their account of things at face value absent evidence. But leaving out the facts that the guy reported himself to be a murderer, and that this report seems to have been true, and that there was a considerable interval between the arrival of the police and the shooting of the suspect, is spectacularly misleading.

I realize this might be the result of error rather than intention, but you should apologize to people for having only provided them with half the facts.

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/08/08/sunnyvale-stando...

[...] What sounded like gunfire had been heard earlier at the home, and a person called police around 8 a.m. and said he had killed someone inside his home in the 600 block of San Pedro Ave., Capt. Dave Pitts said.

At 8:53 a.m., a SWAT vehicle was driven onto the front yard of the home. Roughly 10 SWAT officers wearing bulletproof vests then approached the front of the home. A few moments later, a voice could be heard on a loudspeaker saying “Come out with your hands up.”

A team of about six SWAT officers entered the home about 10 a.m. and within seconds, several loud gunshots were heard. [...]
Just like how hitting a nail with a screwdriver gets the job done!
Show HN: CMDB Implementation with ActiveAdmin
This is a prototype of a CMDB that I created for work. We are currently building servers across several countries and in order to track the team's progress I created this application.

url: dcmdashboard.herokuapp.com
login: visitor@example.com
password: password
Keep the snark.

It's rather discombobulating at first, but then the point of the article indeed comes thru: if you're not going to read beyond a TL;DR then you're part of the problem.
Source Code Line Counter program for Windows
How to deal with setbacks by learning from running
I agree completely. I can cook my own food, but I don't do it all the time.

Also, just because you own a car, doesn't mean you have space to change your oil or the storage area for the (few) tools required and the 5 quarts of used oil that will result.
Patriotwsgi - A WSGI Middleware that sends eveything to an NSA datacenter
The county proxy is there to ensure that the staff and students can’t access porn on the school network. It also filters for violence, extremism, swearing, social networks, alcohol, smoking, hacking, gaming and streaming video. Ironically, if you were to perform a Google search for “proxy settings OSX”, the top results would all be blocked because you used the word ‘proxy’ and that is a filtered word.

That was the most interesting part for me. It's crazy that people are ok with it.
I can follow instructions too but I wouldn't change the brakes on a car without supervision from someone who knows what they're doing. That's a safety-critical repair.
When I read kids I was expecting actual kids, a "twentysomething" may already have kids of their own.
What about the cost of the time you would put into the class? Surely that brings the total effective cost of the course to far more than $115, to acquire a skill you're unlikely to gain much from (unless you want to learn it for its own sake or become an AC tech).
> I think you've just illustrated his point...Those fucked up states?

But if you read my comment it depends what metric you use to compare. I choose to compare US against what other expect from US and what it should expect from itself. Also US against its historical state (now many would argue this is not looking too good either).

Now another way to look at it is like this -- qualitatively vs quantitatively. It seems to me (and I maybe wrong) that qualitatively we didn't have these provisions to imprison people without trial, to torture them, to assassinate, we weren't supposed to spy on American citizens. This was understood by the government, legislation and citizens in general. What changed is that the legal framework (using weasel words and loopholes) has been shaped to allow these things. Qualitatively one could argue these are the same legal provisions that would allow a police state to exist just by turning up the level of torture, extra judicial killing, indefinite detention, total monitoring and recording. Those are there now.

Now quantitatively. You got to lunch with your friends on Saturday to a cafe in Chicago. Should you be afraid of a drone strike and you'd rather hide in a basement? No. It is not happening. Can you still yell about how stupid the president is? Yes. But my point is, from that reality to this is just a matter of turning up the levels not really building or overcoming a major hurdle of putting together a new legal framework.
It's a mistake to think that the Presidents are really in the driving seat when it comes to issues like this. None of them since Eisenhower come out of the military establishment or have any deep background in security policy, so they're reliant on, and credulous of, advisers who are completely bound to the military-intelligence-security-industrial complex.

Obama has dozens of generals and spy chiefs and policy "experts" telling him that if he veers off course the sky will come crashing down on his head. So will the next President.

No one with the immense responsibility of a modern President is going to be able to bring themselves to overrule the expert "advice" of the entrenched mil-sec-intel establishment unless they're already very thoroughly acquainted with its failings.

It is folly to expect a single man to be able to fix this mess. The only way out is to fix the legislative and policy failures that allow the whole structure to exist.
The authors' attitude, while polarizing, is not really as important as the underlying issues that the article is trying to address. I agree and disagree with a few of his points, but just understanding the current environment in education, there are too many obstacles to overcome systematically.

How do you strike a balance between budget, administration, curriculum, and execution. Inevitably, one of these stakeholders prevents change and growth.

In the end, it may fall upon us tech professionals to continually improve UX. As far as the masses are concerned, that is the point of our professional existence. When a car breaks, they want a mechanic. When a computer doesn't connect to the inter-nets, they want a tech professional.

Just to throw it out there. Think of how much tech has advanced in the last ten years (Google is only 10yrs old)... do you really think, knowing what you know about agility in education, that public schools could have kept pace??? There are tech giants that have fallen by the wayside over the same period of time.
I agree with you that it's probably PR, and that Obama isn't about to dismantle the whole NSA machinery that's been operating for years now under his administration. My guess is that you were downvoted for asking "Are you people stupid?", which is not a particularly civil way of addressing your fellow HN readers.
But nowadays everyone is connected which makes a huge difference.
I don't think we need SBR/SBS/suppressors (and probably AOWs and most DDs) under NFA at all, but I'm kind of ok with at least making the requirements for select-fire consistent for individual vs. organization, especially after that LAPD Dorner guy.
I'm honestly surprised that no country has seen the massive opportunity to pull ahead here economically. Given the that the legal clusterfuck for tech companies continues to snowball, it is only a matter of time before more and more tech companies start asking themselves if the US is the right jurisdiction to set up shop. I would imagine that Lavabit and Silent Circle are having this conversation now.

If I were in the congress or parliament of some progressive country, I'd start outlining a ton of bills on privacy, patents, etc. with the goal of creating an economic safe haven for many types of tech companies. Since software is eating the world, it seems like it would be one of the most attractive economic opportunities to develop. Iceland is the obvious choice for this, but I would hope that Germany would jump on this. On top of bills that support the economic environment for tech, I would add a ton of bills surrounding support for foreign nationals who want to move to the country to found and build such companies. Give software and hardware engineers a fast track to citizenship and a decent tax structure on gains from the companies they build, then give VCs decent tax benefits on their gains.

This is as good an opportunity as any for some countries out there with a decent but still subordinate tech economy to take two steps forward.
Since it's more work to coerce the mail provider into providing them the data, by finding something dirty about them or something like that.

If they just send their subpoena without any of that, it will just end up in /dev/null and that's the end of the story.
You can just buy 1 LaunchPad and use it as a programmer to download code to your breadboard or custom PCB. You just need to hook up the TEST, RESET and GND lines. So you can use a cheaper board (and with more pins) like this https://analog10.com/store/BOB-G2553-28.html.
> This guy had a knife and was 15 yards away from the officer when they were killed.

Google "Tueller drill." You'll be surprised by what you find. Now, 45' is a bit further than that 21' that is usually cited as the "this guy can run and stab you before you can stop him" distance, but I can see why a situation very similar to what you describe was assessed as a good shoot.

(Test it yourself and see. You'll be surprised.)
This is one of the most fantastically insightful and legitimately important posts I've seen on Hacker News in a while. It's refreshing.
Show HN: San Francisco vintage shop spins off a SaaS startup
Relevant XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1172/
Every conversation I have with someone who's having browser troubles:

"What browser do you use?"
"I don't use a browser, I use the internet"

I then know exactly what the problem is.
1) The event was witnessed in its entirety by friends of ours who live there. They describe the sequence differently than the official sequence of events.

Then you need to explain how up front. right now I'm no wiser and your position is basically 'trust me, other evidence is wrong.' I agree with you about the more general point of police militarization being bad, but to do something about that you're also going to have to stand up for limitation on the 2nd amendment.
Because students are expected to use computers to complete their work in high school and sometimes sooner. There is no coincidence that driving classes and learners permits are given before the ability to get a licence to drive. They should learn good practices just before they are expected to perform.
Well, the "smart"phones of today hardly inspire curiosity...
Thanks for sharing - I wasn't aware you had different and (potentially) more reliable sources.
The Tueller Drill (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill) tells us to deal with a potential adversary with an edged weapon within 21 feet with utmost seriousness (do a search on the phrase and watch some videos, they're chilling). Given the rough eyewitness estimate of "15 yards" and whatever the officers estimated we can't dismiss the possibility the shooting was entirely justified.
Google for sparklines excel to see some examples.
Ah, this is deploying StriderCD with Docker, and not the other way the around. Was really hoping to see a build server that could spit out Docker images :)
Obama to announce proposals to reform NSA surveillance
The rebuttal to that is that people might be able to learn if software people didn't keep changing how it works. It's obvious on nearly every car since 1960 where the ignition is. Can you say the same for the Wi-Fi settings on computers?
If I only knew when I was a kid, and had access only to AOL kid's, that I could open IE and look at all the porn in the world... My life might be very different now.
He's never done ebooks, it's sorely lacking IMHO for this kind of book. I'd buy one of everything as ebooks.
>Since the NSA's vast data-gathering programs were revealed in June, the president has repeatedly said he would encourage a national conversation on the need for U.S. surveillance while respecting people's right to privacy.

Let me build a straw man of what I think will be the argument:

"If you're against mass surveillance[1], your position isn't reasonable. We must protect our country. Protecting our country requires watching for people who want to do us harm. If you love America, you should let us protect the nation, and that requires the practices our agencies do. We guarantee data will be used only following the correct procedures and safeguards[2]. We cannot tell too much about the programs or the groups and individuals who want to harm us will use this knowledge to put those who serve the nation and all American citizens at risk."

[1] Of course the term won't be "mass surveillance", but some Luntzian/Orwellian expression: "protecting our communications"

[2] We will establish the procedures and safeguards.
It's funny, i just summarized her davos talk last night and looking at these aquisitions, they all fall into her 'vision'. The only one that stands out is tumblr since she said they were looking to do small aquisitions, therefore she is following her vision and the market will decide if it is successful. If she succeeds, the media will be praising her to the moon and if she flops, we will hear ll the scathing blog posts. So far she has raised yahoo's stock price, which has taken some pressure off here especially from some vocal yahoo shareholders.
Kids will just use tablets instead.
Gitar.sh a quick dedupe and compress script
Not only did Jefferson not say that, it wasn't even attributed to him until 1994.

http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/when-government-fea...
I hated math until I got to calculus. I never knew why, but I might as well quite this mathematician... They took an exciting topic that interested me as a youth and killed it with rote repetition.

The question I struggle with is... How do you really get by without math as a mandatory topic? How can you teach science? How can you teach someone to balance a checkbook? The current system is awful, but do we push the subject to electives as a result?
Don't stand near the democracy if you are afraid of stampedes.
I completely agree with you, especially that all testimony has to be examined closely. The knife case the guy was literally standing in the middle of the intersection (that was wear the blood stain was left) So about as 'out there' as you could get.

If I thought it was a simple problem I'd have a simple answer (that would be wrong [1]) I'm more interested in fixing the process, understanding what in the officer's training lead him to shoot at that moment in time, what other options were considered, and what changes should we put in place to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.

[1] "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken
Ever since AltaVista/Lycos/Hotbot et al what you type and say online can come back to haunt you. This isn't anything new....
Silent Circle ends Silent Mail service to preempt surveillance threats
Someone pointed out to me the 'ls' typo constellation =D

http://jvns.ca/projects/unix-command-survey/graph.html?cente...
You liked how the NSA was copying all your emails from Google mail, and all your sources from github. You will love how they'll introduce backdoors in your programs while you write them with Koding!
Rails vs Sails : A Quick And Dirty Benchmark
I wouldn't characterize recessions as "boondoggles". A boondoggle is a failed project that overruns cost and schedule, like the Big Dig or the Vietnam War. A recession is a temporary economic correction.
I don't think comparing it to someone saying "my body hurts" is a good analogy. I think that it would be more appropriate to say that in the case, she knew her body hurt (computer). She knew what part of the body hurt (web browser, PowerPoint). She just didn't know how to identify the problem.

In this case, it would be comparable to your doctor asking you if it were your C3 or C4 vertebrae that was sore and you saying, "I don't know where that is." .. People with a good understanding of human anatomy know the answer; your average layperson probably does not.
Pop open your glovebox; there is a nice picture book in there that explains with nice line-drawing illustrations how to change your oil. It is easier in every way than assembling an arbitrary Ikea chair. If following instructions from a picture book is too much for you, then I am frightened, mostly for your own safety.

Nobody is saying you have to figure out how do it in a sterile proctored testing environment with no books or computers. Hell, I still consult the grep manpages semi-regularly; knowing how to read documentation is a part of being able to do things. The ability to do things is a far lower bar than you are making it out to be. I don't believe you actually lack the ability to change your oil. Some people do, and they are frightening.
So much bullshit come out of his mouth from minute 1, and it's the same thing he's already said.
My group at work have a work for this. PICNIC- Problem In Chair Not In Computer. This is how we politely describe problem children and either come up with more training opportunities or sigh and fix the issue. Some like the extra training and use it well, others could care less and it doesn't stick.
Gut reaction tells me he probably got something small offered but nothing substantial. Designers in tech not named Jonathan Ive rarely get notable compensation.
These type of comments have shown that lately HN has jumped the shark. Calm down with the hyperbole and lets get back to talking about cool and interesting technical topics vs. rhetoric like this.
I feel like the author defeats his own central thesis in his conclusion:

It didn’t used to be like this. Using an OS used to be hard work. When things went wrong you had to dive in and get dirty to fix things. You learned about file systems and registry settings and drivers for your hardware. Not any more.

In other words, people used to be technically literate because they had to be. Now, it's possible to utilize technology without knowing how it works. Think for a moment about what that means.

This sounds very much like a case of a species evolving to meet its own (lack of) need. People aren't tech literate because you don't need to be tech literate to check your email on an iPad, just like I'm not very proficient in spear hunting because being able to hunt a wild animal is no longer necessary to feed myself.

Not everyone needs to be good at everything, and mastering skills has an opportunity cost. Yes, it would be nice if every teenager could spend the hours required to know how to install Linux and work around the Linux desktop environment, but how many hours would that take them? Every hour that they spend learning how to install and use Linux is one hour less that they have to spend on guitar lessons, or learning a foreign language, or automotive repair, or oratory practice, or whatever other pursuits they might choose to invest themselves in.