skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there a YC for startups changing politics? I know there are startups for creating products for incumbent politicians to have better reach. However many of those are just chasing the money thrown around by the candidates with the biggest pockets during elections. I'm more curious about those trying to change the level of discourse entirely like reddit has been doing with AMAs.

We need funding so our best and brightest can afford to dedicate themselves to these endeavors.
I've been hoping for a long time that Mann's EyeTap stuff could be more widely available, so here's hoping they deliver something amazing (and maybe affordable too, in my dreams)
Nope, it's not worth it. And this data does not prove it is.

I need to know everything about the conditions prior to installing a Nest. In particular, I need to know about the thermostat and, if programmable, how it was programmed. I also need to know about living patterns. Did anything change? Was the programmed temperature higher in the summer and lower in the winter with Nest or was it set to about the same conditions?

In terms of energy efficiency. How is the house insulated? Can you add insulation to the walls or attic? Are the windows double-insulated? Do you use a whole house fan in the summer to cool the house at night? Do you have a multiple zone system so you don't have to heat or cool the entire house when you spend all day in, let's say, an office or the kitchen? Is it a two story home? Do you push hot air down in the winter in order to equalize the temperature? Do you have attic ventilators?

I see Nest as more of a neat gizmo with lots of marketing behind it than a real solution to a real problem. To be sure, the real solution requires a lot more work than bolting a piece of slick looking electronics to a wall. The payoff from a real solution would almost certainly be far greater and it doesn't have to cost a lot of money. For example, I use a $200 fan to cool my home at night (taking advantage of my local conditions). We have probably used the air conditioner a grand total of four weeks in the last three years. The savings in three years are already in the thousands and the investment was $200.
In fairness that runs in both directions - we would certainly be better off with some proof of FISA courts' effectiveness, even if were historical (eg declassification of past decisions from >10 years ago, or the establishment of objective criteria for declassification).
You will still have the same set of fonts, resolution, os, ip, etc.
I suspect there may be a little federal grant money floating around for the Nest thermostats.

Some providers are offering free nights, they have so much fluctuation in demand.

Having a fairly hot, but not record-setting day today (61,340 MW).

http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/loadForecastVsActualCu...

http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...

Note: Our peak capacity is ~68,000 MW. There are some peaking-plants that may be brought online if we exceed that, or we'll begin having rolling-blackouts like last summer.
Here's a start:

Through the Electoral College, your vote changes without your consent. Entire states "turn blue" when 49% of it are in fact red. Democracy? Hardly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_State...

As a matter of official policy, elected politicians can define constituency boundaries and as such they can manipulate district boundaries at their discretion -- more often than not to their and their party's benefit. Democracy? Hardly.

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

Both result in hyper-majorities and as such the far left and the far right unilaterally wield power. Compromise is universally interpreted as capitulation, so there is no middle-ground where they meet. Unless, of course, it has to do with spying on Americans.
In a way, yes. What is mature and professional behavior are decisions made by society. It's an opinion, but a consensus opinion of the society you participate in.

All manner of behavior - that you shouldn't steal, that you shouldn't lie, that you shouldn't wear your trucker hat to a business meeting - are all just the opinions of society. Some are made into legal contracts while the rest remain social contracts, but that doesn't mean they're any less important or valid.
I thought a lot of people discourage the use of static linking or any form of local dependency bundling, because when there's a security update every app needs to be updated individually. But it seems that with the emergence of Bundler and NPM, people are trending more and more towards local bundling. What happened?
Someone is terribly mad at sane suggestions and commentary today. Yet another seemingly reasonable comment down-voted.
I think that they are; if you're sufficiently convinced of 1), then 2) follows as a matter of logic.
You should be aware by now that comments are organized in a tree-like structure. But thanks.
> I just don't think it's deliberately engineered to effectively prevent the formation of other parties

Whether it is "deliberately engineered" to do that or not, it has a fairly well-demonstrated effect of doing that compared to systems which provide more proportional results. Intent is pretty much irrelevant.
Thank you for this link. So, currently, it does nothing to protect, it only collects information and sends to them for future analyzing.
Yes, a million times! Journey through Genius is an excellent book (I, too, had this book for a History of Math class). It's really appropriate for people of all different levels of mathematical maturity. It's aimed to be read by a pretty much lay audience. But it covers some interesting t material that you're likely not to have seen in an undergraduate curriculum (Heron's formula, cubic/quartic equations, Euler's windmill proof).
>Now you have a record of how much you needed to cool or heat. Local newspapers -- remember those? -- will usually keep track for you on their weather page

Yahoo! has a great free weather API with historical data, as does NOAA.
Obama has to say this stuff. Does he even believe it himself? Most people don't care as much as the HN crowd. Taking this stance is probably the best way to avoid a PR scandal with the masses. Which doesn't make it right, of course.
Obama 2012: Abandon all hope that things will change.
As you know, a system is only as secure as its weakest component. (Yes, everything is fundamentally broken and insecure, but that's no excuse for writing more crap software.) As a browser, it's impossible to secure all parts of the system (and that's not your job), but it's not okay to be the weakest component and not care about this. By virtue of providing a clear listing of all passwords and neither warning about this nor giving the user a choice, Chrome clearly is the weakest part in this.

-----

From the source, it seems Chrome adds password using `SecKeychainAddInternetPassword` (see http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Securit... ).

Passwords added that way require confirmation for access, do not require entering the keychain password, and the application adding the password is auto-whitelisted (which overrides confirmation for access) -- which matches what I see on Chrome passwords.

This means that the default way of creating internet passwords in the Keychain provides only weak security (sigh, Apple), because the creating application can always access the password. (Same applies to Safari, only it doesn't provide a nice list of passwords as far as I can tell.)

-----

I agree that trying to add access control inside Chrome is nonsense – Chrome can access the passwords and you'll (probably) always be able to trick it into revealing things. But that's not the only thing you can do – it's relatively easy to fix the bad default behavior and disallow access for Chrome unless the user (via Keychain prompt) explicitly allows it.

When storing a new password, offer to always require the keychain password for access.

If the user chooses this option, use the lower-level API to create the entry (or use the default function and modify / add modified / delete old – there's code for that in the chrome repo) and use an ACL that has (1) an empty (but not NULL!) trusted application list, (2) the $blah_REQUIRE_PASSPHRASE bit in the prompt selector set. As a result, Chrome will not be able to access the password without the user explicitly allowing it.

If the user always chooses the secure option when saving passwords, no one can access them without entering the keychain password or significantly mucking with the system. If that breaks, it's not your fault.

That's a fundamentally different situation – it's hard to fail to protect passwords that you cannot access(^1)!

(^1) at least not without other parts failing first
Best of luck to you mate :)
Twitter joins Washington’s influence economy, forms PAC
Some people use electric heat in the south. Mine is gas, but I wouldn't mind electric since I use it only a few weeks per year.
The response to that concern at the time was that most of the people who would know how to get around it wouldn't need to sockpuppet[1]. I suspect, if it were ever implemented, there'd be some attempt to obfuscate or hide what was actually tracked like they do for their other fraud algorithms. But issues like that and the privacy issues were pretty indicative of its lack of value and it doesn't surprise me it was never implemented and didn't even warrant a response from an SE employee.

[1]: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/113394/implement-som...
Go here => https://stopfingerprinting.inria.fr/ Chrome + Firefox add-on.
Show HN: An open-source media hosting site that's anonymous and fast
I'm not sure looking at the pure money saving in terms of lower energy is the way to go, since a lot of the benefits are more intangible than that. The ability to detect when you're away, automatic scheduling and easy control from a smartphone are pretty big benefits for me but they'd be hard to quantify in terms of being "worth it".

As others have pointed out, you can achieve a lot of that with other (cheaper) products. But to be honest, I think Nest's main strength is making the features easy and fun to use rather than having totally revolutionary new features. But that's the Android and Iphone claim to fame in the smartphone world, and they did OK ;)
some other interesting videos about Meta that get more into the details:

http://www.meta-view.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv7nSng0yD8
Well he does plan on publishing that protected information as soon as it becomes newsworthy by virtue of demonstrating that some politician or bureaucrat is lying to the American people. The politicians are just holding things up by not lying sooner.
I'd recommend them collecting some testimonials from exsisting customers, and pairing them with their location so they can display local testimonials to local businesses that may have come across their site. Knowing that Carl 2 blocks away is using it could very well make the difference between a signup and no signup.

Keep going guys!
The author is a doctor with decades of experience and is explicitly detailing the perils of standardization from the top-down. I think it's very relevant.
> what you're doing isn't working, do anything else.

That's a fairly silly proposition that could justify any arbitrary change of action no matter how unlikely it was to produce better results (indeed, even if it was certain to provide worse results) than your current course of action.

> I vote 3rd party

Is it working? If not, shouldn't you, by your own standards, be doing anything else?
This is very cool. Good idea and good design. I wish my forms are as pretty. Good work and keep it up.
Hi, I made this site with jdiez17 over the past few months. We'd love to hear your thoughts on our work.
Don't see how the blink tag would be much use though..
that reminds me to the css :visited browser history hack. I wonder if that still works, or if it could be replaced by your IMG approach. I fear yes.

The next ugly site could steal your browser history that way and show which porn sites you've visited, in example.
"seemingly reasonable" is the key, I down voted it because it wasted my time.

What could possibly motivate politicians in the current system to engage in such a forum??? Look at what happened after the cited example of Nixon in the 1960 debate, such as what didn't happen in this press conference.

Echoing my other comment, I'll bet there was a Fox reporter in the group (I think I would have heard if the Obama had totally shut them out). Was he called?
He can blow it out of his ass. Nothing they say has a grain of truth anymore, and nothing of value will be accomplished by his latest chest-thumping.

Data mining and data manipulation are the air superiority of the 21st century -- it's going to the form the bottom line of every major power in the world. They're going to bare their largest fangs and growl with impudence at anybody that gets in their way.

He says there are safeguards, but the most important -- whistleblowing and accountability -- are getting a backseat.

The NSA has vast swaths of information on everything and on everybody, and the related Federal agencies (Department of Treasury (IRS), Department of Justice (DEA)) can smell blood. Unless he puts very large walls and many beartraps around the NSA's data, we will be slaughtered.

They're recording everything passing through their part of the internet, and now they're in charge of guarding their recordings. They're doing a piss-poor job so far.
> Real change starts at the ballot box.

No, real change starts with working to build a mass constituency that believes that real change is necessary, and agrees on the general direction of change.

If you want it to work, change through the ballot box is fairly late in that process.
Californian cities are making it awfully difficult to resist the appeal of places like Austin.

The dysfunction in government and the general unfriendliness to the upwardly mobile is appalling.

California neither benefits from the good Puritan economic sense seen in New England states nor the thrift of good-governance states like Montana.

Yes, Montana ! :

For six years it has been one of the only states in America with a budget surplus: this year it is a record $433 million, proportionally equivalent to a federal surplus of $858 billion. Thus we’ve been able to cut taxes, invest in education and infrastructure and keep essential services intact. We recently got our first bond rating upgrade in 26 years.

And we’re not simply riding the Western energy boom. The recession has driven unemployment to 7.5 percent, and while we’ve had a great run with oil, coal and gas, royalties from these commodities account for only 9 percent of our budget surplus.

How do we accomplish what most states and the federal government cannot? I like to say we run government like a ranch. In ranching — my old job — you either pinch pennies or go belly-up. We do the same in government. Perhaps Washington can try it.

For one thing, we challenge every expense. If it isn’t absolutely necessary, we eliminate it. When the recession came we found $80 million in savings, which helped us avert a budget crisis. Little things added up: we renegotiated state contracts, cut our energy consumption by 20 percent, auctioned off state vehicles and canceled building projects and computer upgrades.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/opinion/cutting-costs-the-...

California is not just a weird cesspool of the quixotic and the inept.

It is quixotic and inept for solely the sake of being so.

(If you didn't notice, someone already down-voted your entry. I expect the same of mine.)
Hyperbole means exaggerating something, usually for emphasis or humor. Even taking your comment as hyperbole, the intended, non-exaggerated meaning still appears to be "this person has insufficient experience to speak on this subject." But the person in question is actually very experienced in this area. Given that, I don't think we can blame James if he didn't understand — it's hard to see what the actual meaning behind the statement could have been.
Businesses cannot stop coming up with new products and solutions. We cannot say that "Oh, NSA can access anything so let's not use anything anymore."

A better way to address the problem is to just persistently keep fighting it and raising this issue. Running away from it will not get us anywhere.
I see a vision of all our futures. Cranky old tech guy and hot-flashing old woman spend retirement in hacking war to set the indoor temperature with their phones/tablets/whatever we're using in a decade or two.
If you're comparing against an ideal savings regime, I imagine it's not worth it. However, in my case, I was always putting off figuring out how to program my thermostats, deciding it was too much trouble to adjust them, etc. Against that, I expect the Nest to pay off fairly quickly.
What a sham. "Oversight and transparency" is not good enough. The government kicks you in the teeth and then lies about it, now they promise next time not to lie about it. Anyone else feel underwhelmed?

Oversight and transparency are a big pile of nothing if all it means in practice is that government officials engaged in unjustifiable surveillance have to work in pairs to "oversee" each other. The government should not be engaged in mass surveillance. How about you identify a specific suspect and get a warrant, Mr. President.

> "America is not interested in spying on ordinary people," Obama said.

"America" is not interested in spying on ordinary people, the trouble is the NSA seems quite keen on it.

> Obama said his administration and the NSA is only interested in preventing another terror attack.

> "We do not have an interest in doing anything other than that," Obama said.

For example, no interest in providing exculpatory evidence to those they falsely accused. That seems fair, right?
Thanks, that was an extremely interesting read.

There seemed to be no rhyme or reason behind the Yahoo acquisitions. For example, why Xobni? The two founders have already left Xobni. So if it was an acquihire, then who was Yahoo trying to acquihire? And if it wasn't, then why did they shut down their products?

But now I understand what was happening. It didn't matter what Yahoo was buying, or whether any of it made sense. In fact, the less sense it made, the more buzz got created, as people tried to figure out Marissa Mayer's master plan.
Despite Microsoft Surface RT Debacle, Second Generation Model in the Works
This is how I feel about doing most coding tutorials versus the MIT intro to CS through python, or project euler.

When coding is presented as:
- here is a problem
- how would you solve this problem?
- here are some hints to get you started

it is incredibly fun for me. when it is presented as:

- follow along
- look what you did!

it can be a bit dry.
Thanks!

As a side note, I've been impressed with French academia lately. Between INRIA and IRCAM, I see a lot of quite practical stuff that I like coming from there.
Doing a "chown" or "chmod" would be an UPDATE operation, not CREATE. The permissions and owner values already exist by value of the record existing, so of course trying to call CREATE on them seems silly. Same with turning cameras on/off; that's UPDATE on the state on the camera. CREATE would be to add a new camera to the system.
Houston has great museums, food and people from every culture, and.... I forgot the third one.
Privacy-Shrivacy Bollocks. Many here do not get the point. US having intimate information of a foreign populace is akin to having an extra weapon in their arsenal. In today's world data is the new gunpowder. If you have insight(I mean really really know) into what a foreign country would buy/sell you can have an upper hand in trade negotiations. This is not some prudish step to prevent Uncle Sam to look into your private details. This is all out cold war. Diplomats across the world are talking about one thing today: Nullifying the U.S advantage. I guess China foresaw it.
Re: "Reforms" and "change"...it might be time to become a bit more cynical about what Obama means by these things. He was never going to reduce his power, or the government's power, voluntarily.
What's your passion?
- south-ness of the border?
- great job?
- nice pay?

Pick ONE (not two or three)
Richard Dawkins should revisit the letter to his 10 year old daughter
Glad to help. Yes so do I, I've seen a lot of INRIA projects that stunned me. I didn't know about CCRMA, would you mind sharing some stuff you found over there?
Hard to say. I watched them go from $18ish per coin down to basically nothing and now it's at $100+ per coin all in a few year time frame.

I think it's a given that some type of global digital currency will happen at some point in time but I don't think it will be bit coins or happen really soon.
That doesn't seem to actually block anything? It just says it sends them your data for analyzing?
As many commenters here say, it isn't inherently more secure than a US-based service. It may be more socially secure, if the warrant system in Germany is more specific than our general system of warrants to spy on everyone foreign or domestic.

However, there's a good reason for German citizens to prefer German services: it takes money away from American service. Money is the only voice that will ever fix this.

So I ask every non-US citizen: please, take your money elsewhere. Please.
I see where our disconnect is: I haven't worked with web designers, rather designers for much more technical software products where the coding tasks are much more involved. So I would also expect a web designer to play around with HTML/CSS, but then that is completely irrelevant when we are building a computer vision product, or a toolkit to support the app platform of a mobile phone. The designers might use HTML/CSS as a prototyping tool, but there are other better suited tools out there since...none of them are close to production reality anyways. There even some domains, like NUI, where separate prototyping roles are required because traditional design tools aren't good enough.

So ya, given simple web/phone apps where HTML/CSS or interface builder are relevant, you could expect designers to be more involved with tweaking production assets directly. But I've never worked on those applications before, and the technical barriers for what I have worked on are quite high; expecting the designer to participate in modifying code assets is a bit crazy!
FPTP itself is not deliberately engineered to lead to two parties and I doubt that was the intent of the framers anyways. For a time at the beginning of U.S. government the whole notion of strong political parties was considered bad for governance anyways; people were supposed to represent their constituents or their state.

However nowadays the two major parties certainly do cooperate in ensuring that there remain only two major parties, rather aggressively going even further than FPTP would otherwise lead to in keeping additional political parties weak. It's easier to get elected without a party affiliation at all than to be elected as a party other than D or R.
Hey shykes,

This is something I'm still not quite clear on. According to the issues in mention here: https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/issues/1185 it is possible to do what StavrosK is asking. What am I missing? Why would a volume need an initial state when when the goal can be accomplished with a bind mount?

I also +1'd the documentation issue because I can't seem to wrap my head around what the current state of volumes and mounting is. Appreciate any direction you could point me in.
> Doing a "chown" or "chmod" would be an UPDATE operation, not CREATE.

Right, which is why calling PUT to do them "CREATE" would be confusing. But PUT is still the right verb (well, for things like chmod 777; for chmod +X, PATCH would be better.)

PUT isn't "create" its "assign".