skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with redistribution (aside from its inherent immorality as theft backed by force) is that you simply shift power from the people who had wealth to the people who are doing the redistributing. At no point do the vast majority of people ever become more powerful. In the new system, power is obtained by currying the favor of party officials. Even contrasted against the most egregious Marxist caricature of capitalism, how is this any better?
Actually, if you keep the fluids changed and topped up, your car will likely not break. What kills most cars is simple neglect.
"When the government fears the people, there is liberty".

And the way in which the government can fear the people is through a revolt of the secret-keepers. Probably why all the sysadmins are getting fired, as a possible admission that the NSA doesn't know who of their own they can trust.
The difficulty of interface isn't even the biggest challenge here.

The biggest challenge is to get grandma / soccer mom and the girl next door to care the tiniest bit about encryption and privacy.

It's the cold hard truth, the overwhelming majority simply don't care. They don't understand why they should care and they don't care enough to learn why they should care.

With things like this, the average person continues ignoring it, until he feels directly threatened in the near future. Anything more than that and they start to think "meh...who cares...maybe another time"

Imagine in 1990 someone told you "in 20 years time people are going to be spying on themselves on a daily basis and providing detailed information about their lives to their government, they will login to a computer system and will enter what's on their mind, what they've been thinking about, who their family is, where they work, with whom they've had relationships with, what they like, where they have been, what events they have attended, their gender, sexuality, birthday, religious and political views and albums and albums of photos of themselves and those who refuse to spy on themselves will be rather alone, disconnected and viewed as rather weird for not participating in these wonderful activities".

Who would've believed that? To an spying/intelligence agency that sounds so good that wouldn't even be capable of imagining ever seeing it as a reality.

Yet here we are, 23 years later, and it sounds all too easy "Facebook", "Twitter", "LinkedIn", "Social Media". The population has been brain-washed to accept, adopt and love these tools with their cute names and logos and seemingly innocent appearance.

Before NSA and PRISM revelations you could call me a delusional, overly-negative, cynic, techophobe or conspiracy theorist. But not today. Today we know for a fact what is happening, and we know that's just the tip of the iceberg that we know about, and just like pre-PRISM times, there's probably a lot of nasty crap that we are not aware of until the next Snowden reveals it.

It all makes sense now.
Do you have a demo account or an invite code we can use to register?
Make a decent pivot table for BootStrap + KnockOut.js :).
"Without reference to Wikipedia, can you tell me what the
difference is between The Internet, The World Wide Web, a
web-browser and a search engine?"

uh... well the last two are pretty easy, but... the first two.

I actually don't know, I've used those two terms interchangably to be honest. I guess if I was pressed I'd say that the world wide web is what the colloquial internet actually is, and the internet is the package of protocols the world wide web runs on? I can't imagine many people are going to get this one right.
Rust has it right, python is a programming language. One of its more common uses is for "scripting," because you can just write it and run it at a prompt, the compilation will happen automatically if you don't do it manually. That part of python is designed to feel like scripting, but it isn't.

Because it is a general purpose programming language, you can use it to make applications as well. Right now at work I'm using Salt Stack, which is a full application written in python. Django is another popular application written in python.

It's easy to think of python as a scripting language because a lot of people who graduate to python from perl only ever used perl for scripting, but that's a general purpose language as well.

Really the difference between "programming languages" and "scripting languages" has nothing to do with the language and everything to do with restrictions placed on the environment you use it in. Where a normal install of python would let you code scripts or full applications, a purposefully limited version of it (for example a limited version of python is bundled as a mod tool in the game Civilization 4) makes that specific implementation "scripting" or "macroing" or however else you want to classify it. The language itself is still python, though.
I love this for two reasons.

First, this is a great example of creating a solution for a small yet annoying problem people have just come to live with. Second, I really like that they're creating well-designed tools for a very specific niche of customers. This isn't a general purpose device for mass consumption, but for architects, interior designers and the like -- professionals whose industry, like most other industries, does not get enough attention in the way of high-quality, well-designed, 'sexy' solutions. There are a ton of opportunities to provide similar solutions to other markets. Withings, for example, produces a really well-designed and easy-to-use blood pressure cuff [1].

As for the Senic, I wouldn't get one myself, but my parents, who are frequently fixing and renovating things around their home and dabble in real estate, definitely would.

1. http://withings.com/en/bloodpressuremonitor
It doesn't seem like I can reply to smtddr's sibling comment here (probably nested too deep?). So here's my two cents:

I agree that in context of memory, the brain's capacity does appear limitless. However, the brain's capacity to process all of the information that it's exposed to is quite limited. For example, for most people, working memory is limited to 7 items plus/minus 2. One part of a standard cognitive test is to expose the subject to a list of numbers, and after hiding the numbers, ask the subject to repeat them back to you (and again, but backwards). A similar test of memory is to ask a subject to remember a list of items, then ask a series of other questions, then ask the subject to repeat the same list some time later. Some people do pretty well at these tests; some don't (approximating a normal distribution in ). So while it's theoretically possible that all subjects do have all of the numbers stored in their brain, it's quite clear that there's differing capability at least in memory encoding and/or retrieval.

I guess I also wanted to mention the concept of saliency. Different people will pay attention to different things even if all of the people are exposed to exactly the same stimuli. This is important because the brain only encodes to memory what it finds particularly important and/or interesting (i.e. salient). This can be trained to a degree: more experienced or trained people will be able to detect what's important, like a soldier being better able to "sense" the presence of an IED in a warzone. So even if everyone has exactly the same memory capacity, there'd still be variation in how well the brain itself decides to use that capacity.
And thats where it falls apart.

If he were more honest with himself he'd say something like 'I know I can go online or pick up a manual and figure anything about my car that I'd want to.'

Letting it remain a mystery is just perpetuating the ignorance people seem to cling to like a life raft.

Figuring things out is fun and you learn new skills.
I also found the TLDR quite arrogant and frustrating. It's like if I'm sending an e-mail to someone and I write in the subject "Just read the damn email".

Maybe the words TLDR aren't chosen correctly. I view it more as a "Here's a summary of the article". It's not that the text is "too long" but mostly that there are billions of articles to read. I'd be more than happy to read yours if you can just grab my attention and make it interesting in the summary. I.e. Like a trailer.
I got to play games because I learned the magic of memmaker.exe, autoexec.bat, config.sys, and boot disks. And I was motivated to learn how to fix things back when they broke because I shared a PC with my dad, who used it for consulting work--and who did not take kindly to service outages.
> Well, maybe it shouldn't have been "techno dad to the rescue", but rather "dad spending a moment with his kids showing them how to setup a raspberry pi/their xbox/etc.". And if the kids aren't even interested in setting up their own XBox, well then that's their prerogative. Give a man a fish, etc.

...

That is exactly what the paragraph you quoted means. The author regrets just doing it, and wishes he would have taken the time to show his family how to set things up.

I'm really confused by this comment of yours.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an
invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building,
write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a
bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders,
cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new
problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty
meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization
is for insects.

(Lazarus Long, in Time Enough For Love, Robert A. Heinlein, 1973.)
I'm not sure about the others, but Lexity has an actual business model.
I think Google should require every app that uses the NDK to provide ARM, x86 and MIPS binaries.
My definition of force involves things like threats of violence, firearms. FORCE.

People's definition of force here on HN seems to be "A written request by the USG."
first thing that struck me, the author complains about a stigma attached to knowing how computers work:
>>"Rather than being some faceless, keyboard tapping, socially inept, sexually inexperienced, network monkey, she now saw me as a colleague. To people like her, technicians are a necessary annoyance. She’d be quite happy to ignore them all, joke about them behind their backs, snigger at them to their faces,"

AND THEN, goes on to declare that yes, he is normally a sarcastic bastard who makes big deals out of inane verbiage:
>>"Normally I pull out my mobile phone and pretend to tap in a few numbers. Holding the handset to my ear I say ‘Yes, give me the office of the President of the United States… NO I WILL NOT HOLD, this is an emergency… Hello, Mister President, I’m afraid I have some bad news. I’ve just been informed that The Internet is not working.’"

And you wonder where the stereotypes come from....
I'm sure it must be similar to the feeling I get when I'm working on a new code base that I'm not familiar with

Haha - I know that feeling well. First moveup with a new code base is always the scariest. You're always fearing something like, "Oh crap, I had no idea what that module did and I accidentally disabled it."

I think you may have given me an insight that will make me more tolerant of my wife's refusal to attempt fixing technical things on her own. Thank you.
I thought I had been taking math my whole life until I finally took a math class.
Yes, the police can steal anything from you that they want. They do not need to arrest you or charge you with a crime, or even show evidence that a crime even occurred. The burden of proof is on you that you didn't break any laws. The idea is that they're charging your property with a crime, not you, and since your property is not a person it has no rights.

The US Supreme Court has ruled that this kind of asset forfeiture is constitutional.
> Again, I agree that police forces in general
> are over-militarized, but we need to represent
> the facts accurately.

We agree on the militarization, I am concerned about factual accuracy, in part because I've got a personal connection with eye witnesses to this event, and their statements do not agree with the official narrative. That is perhaps the most unsettling part here. This is further complicated that it is the second time in 18 months where this has been the case for me.

Some additional back story.

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.

2) A previous officer involved shooting, on my street, was also reported as a 'charged with weapon, officer defended themselves and shot the suspect.' which was also reported very differently by the people who were standing on the curb behind the guy that got shot (and nearly caught in the cross fire). This guy had a knife and was 15 yards away from the officer when they were killed.

The similarity between both events is that there had been a 911 call, and police responded 'ready to fight.'

I've got a number of concerns with respect to the training and rules of engagement our public safety officers are operating under. I'm a big fan of the classic 'old west' rule that first shot is offense, second shot is defense. Meaning that if you fire first you are the guy doing the shooting, if the person fires back at you they are defending.

Clearly I get to follow this one, its in my 'backyard' to use the vernacular. It is certainly going to be a hot topic of discussion at the BBQ we host for the folks running for City Council. (strangely the police report through the city manager which is another topic of discussion for the BBQ)
TL;DR

Node.js is really popular. Also, JavaScript related job postings are sharply rising. Ergo, JavaScript will become the one true language.
Google Maps adds Ads into Mobile Maps soon
$5 a month US-based Schnail Mail.

We _won't_ open your mail, because you pay us. But hey, we _will_ pass it on to the Government, and you'll still pay us.

Think we're a better option? Go ahead. Give us your money!
Silicon Valley calls us unicorns
$81 million sounds kinda low for the value of Tumblr.
I wouldn't sell my baby for that.

Heh, well first you'd need to have a baby. A baby worth $1bn of which you owned 20-25% equity.
This is pretty nifty!

Where is 'git'? I can't seem to find it using the search.
AutoCAD support would be awesome. I have a couple friends who run their own stainless steel fabrication & kitchen install business, and getting salesmen and business owners to give them accurate measurements is a huge pain point for them.

If a wall shifts 1 inch across 20 feet, they can build for that, if they have those measurements. But when they are told to make a sink-with-backsplash square, and there's an ugly gap between it and the wall -- well, reworking that tiny gap is almost as expensive as building the table itself.
That's ridiculous. You think they would self-inflict this huge PR nightmare upon themselves?

They were doing perfectly fine before the leaks, getting cooperation from major tech companies and other countries and their reach was constantly expanding.

It's silly to think they'd give all that up by setting in motion something which could potentially piss of its own citizens and its allies, just for the off chance that people might become numb to it. Then what happens? They continue their operations just the same way they did before?
Laser rangefinders don't switch the light source at 10GHz. They "chop" the laser on-off at (say) 10kHz. The measure the difference between the reference (onboard) and the return using (typically) a PLL that can measure time differences down to picoseconds (these are usually used in high-frequency RF equipment). Using a microcontroller counter would be too slow.

Cheaper LRF's can use triangulation with a known baseline. That's how Neato robotic managed their $10 spinning version for the vacuum: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/12/20/ultra-low-cost-laser-r...

To wit... I like to disassemble laser rangefinders!

http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/01/04/velodyne-hdl-64e-laser...

http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/02/14/omron-sti-optoshield-o...

http://www.hizook.com/blog/2008/12/15/sick-laser-rangefinder...
My cynical sense is that we're halfway through 3Q13, the leaks have been out for a month and a half, so it's time to take these companies' temperature about whether their earnings have been affected. If not, "we still good, guys?" After all, "competitiveness" is a synonym for revenue.
It never helped much for health care; I'm not betting the farm on it helping for surveillance.

The people in charge already have theirs. They don't really care about America's global economic competitiveness because their buddies are as competitive as they need to be, and because they fantasize that if things get out of hand they'll just slam some small country up against the wall to show who's boss.

Oh, you might be able to convince some of the public. But in the end, who cares what the public thinks? What, are they going to vote for the Presidential candidate who takes a position against secrecy or something? Because I've been down that road, friend.
I'd rather not bug the team members with my personal curiosity. I rather hoped to have missed some pointers torwards their work and achievements
At this moment, I rather wish you could as well - but I really don't wish that everybody could. Some of the meme heavy github issues threads I've seen have led me to the conclusion that it would just make me cry.
I may be biased as I spent a lot of time in helpdesk, but I think many of the problems most users and admins face could be easily avoided with education. An anti-virus is only good when paired with safe computer practices. Knowing about an IP address in the most basic sense (I'm not expecting subnetting here or knowing what an APIPA address is) allows many problems to be resolved in a few minutes. It should be expected when you drop off your car at the mechanic to say "the brakes squeak" or "It's making a click-clank-clank sound" instead of "it's broke, fix it." IT shouldn't have to jump through hoops to find out the user deleted system32 because they needed more space.
It would be nice if they actually got the tax laws right on the overly complicated system they protect. Cost my Dad a bit of money on some of their errors.
There is quite a difference between fixing a car and fixing computers.

In your example, you need to fix a specific broken mechanical part, which takes time and resources to fix if it was designed to be fixed at all by a home user. In my example, the information is freely available, costs nothing to duplicate or implement, and is simply a small investment of time--which will pay huge dividends if made.

Most computers even come with all the tools needed to fix them, something which cannot be said for cars. It just takes patience.
The fact that $_REQUEST was used is a huge red flag as well.

edit: I should expand a bit: $_REQUEST is a nono, it should be $_GET or $_POST depending on the request. The actual badness of request is that it also contains everything in $_COOKIE as well.
This is true. Not only does he come off as off-putting to his readers, he also seemingly is off-putting to the rest of society.
I used to have to help my aunt with her computer. She eventually learned how to do a few things (create and edit documents; print), but it was like she had an absolute blind spot to anything I would say about how to do things.

Eventually I gave up and had my wife explain things to her. I swear she used the exact same words that I would have to explain some things, but my aunt understood her just fine and told her how much better she was at explaining. :|

Just mentioning this because it appears there are multiple factors at play, at least with some people. My aunt was a lawyer, by the way, so presumably she could think for herself logically on other topics.

Aside: I was also a kid who knew more than the programming teachers. And FWIW, I know a lot more about car maintenance than the author of the article, because (unlike him) I also apply my thinking skills to cars and just about everything else in my life. Seems like he shouldn't be throwing stones.
I think a lot of what bulks up the rendering parts of the code is the handling of invalid web code. Not JavaScript, it's a programming language so throwing an error and stopping is expected behavior. But for HTML and CSS, browsers are expected to Do What I Mean, Not What I Wrote. If they only rendered valid code, they'd be a lot smaller.

But there are a lot of new APIs under the HTML5 umbrella. They're all accessed using JavaScript for some, a lot of the code will be in WebCore. Here's a bunch:
http://www.netmagazine.com/features/developer-s-guide-html5-...

I'm sure Canvas and WebGL add a lot to WebCore.
Cost-Benefit Analysis Of NSA Surveillance Says It's Simply Not Worth It
There's plenty of documentation showing how these shootouts led directly to American police forces up-arming themselves. For example, see this (http://www.fbi.gov/news/speeches/miami-shootout-20th-anniver...) 2006 speech by John Pistole, then Deputy Director of the FBI (now TSA Administrator):

What also undoubtedly saved future lives were the lessons learned that day—lessons that transformed law enforcement tactics and training. Most immediately, special agents were issued semi-automatic handguns to replace the revolvers that many of the agents carried that day.

Or this (http://www.policemag.com/channel/weapons/articles/print/stor...) article from Police, "The Law Enforcement Magazine":

The [1997 North Hollywood] shootout gave law enforcement a compelling reason to better arm patrol officers with semi-automatic rifles.

There's plenty of room to argue whether this up-arming was an appropriate response to these events, but that's a very different question than whether or not they were connected.
Top Must Watch Documentaries For Entreprneurs and Students
In Balko's book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Americ...

he talks about various aspects and how those incidents were relatively rare, and militarization has not been happening all that much because of outgunning, but rather government incentives for the War on Drugs and measures designed to have closer coordination between the military and police forces.
'Amazing' tops annual vote for words that should be banned
Kickstarter bans GMO handouts, giving way to anti-synthetic bio campaigns
Two Sides to the Datacenter Power Issue
Shot Stats - Make your tennis racket "smart"
Interesting coverage in Popular Science as well [1]. They point out (as does the newscientist article) that the key to organ printing is vascularization (creating a blood supply for the organ). Once you have that conquered you should be good to go on Kidney's, Liver's, Spleen's, Heart Tissue, Etc.

[1] http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-07/how-3-d-printi...
"I Can Work on the Internet" - a book for children
You might have a point if I was arguing that the NSA spying isn't bad because the FBI used to be worse. But I'm specifically responding to the "boiling frog" reference in lazyjones's post. The whole premise of the "boiling frog" is that things get worse for the frog over time, but slowly enough that it doesn't notice until it's cooked. The boiling frog analogy, and various slippery-slope lines of reasoning, seem quite inconsistent to me with the general trajectory of civil liberties over the last 100 years.
Is there a secret handshake too?
The New Nexus 7 Review
After reading some of the comments, the thing that surprised me the most is how many Programmers can't work on their
own car? I just took it for granted, if a person learned
how a computer works--they would know how their computer
controled automobile would work? Especially, these days
with the Internet and cheap scanners?
Analysis of Complexity, Performance, and Debugability of Async Patterns in Node