skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> For every comment I read that was outlandish, fallacious and clearly media spoon-fed, ...

If you look at the timeline, the CIA had such a spectacular failure that an ambassador was raped to death and Hilary Clinton kicked to the curb. Almost simultaneously the IRS was caught embezzling money from anti-statist campaigns.

Every time those stories threatened to gain traction, every leftist organ would run another 48 point headline about Snowden or the NSA. The coincidences piled up until it is impossible that the NSA story's popularity was not largely a political creation, and just barely might be a false flag operation to punish the intel community.

Likewise, I was downvoted to oblivion every time I pointed out that the NSA story was not a revelation, that it wasn't even news. My first awareness of the NSA was their Echelon spying efforts, where it was openly discussed that they wanted to vacuum up all the worlds' communications. The weakness of the DES cipher was widely recognized to be a NSA plot to make it easy to intercept domestic comms. The Clipper chip and key escrow programs were a naked domestic snooping plan. This was widely covered by the trade press, a fair bit by the mainstream media, exhaustively by Slashdot and Ars Technica, and obsessively by the Computer Underground Digest, the Hacker News Network, the Cipherpunks, Telecom Digest, and many others.

Hacker News has also started importing the Reddit Censorship ethos. Downvoting rings censor many politically correct or just unpopular comments, comments that in many cases are correct but counterintuitive. The endless September seems to have finally arrived at HN.
This brings an interesting point.

Before this what would happen? So you type
"terrorist, bomb, drone, blah blah" in an email and send it to yourself perhaps. Does the NSA flag you and send your IP to the FBI and then you get a knock on the door. Wouldn't that reveal that they are spying and reading everything? It would probably so they might not do it. Quietly watch you from the shadows so to speak until you happen to walk into your gardening store to buy some fertilizer on day for your lawn.

Now, while it is good that we know the spying is happening, a more terrifying thing is about to go on and that is -- they can just openly come and arrest you for conspiracy to commit terrorism solely based on your online jokes for example. They know that everyone knows that they are spying so there is no need to hide their "tactics and procedures" anymore. They can come to your door and with plain unflinching face say "You sent this sentence to your friend on this day and hour as detected by NSA surveillance program, you are now under arrest ... blah blah ..."

So to recap. Without an overwhelming outrage from the masses this revelation will actually embolden them and will let them widen the scope and power of these programs.
Quite. I don't think that making it hard automatically makes it better, any more than I think that using vi will make you a better programmer than using [insert your favorite GUI editor here].
You might not have free will as a meat brain.
Not only is it invite only but your own membership can be revoked if the people you invited cause problems (they keep track of the user tree https://lobste.rs/u, so your actions could also reflect badly on the person you got an invite from). The true reason could be something else (or many factors), but I suspect this is one decision that has kept the pool of users extremely small (1.1k isn't much for a social graph).
some would call this fascism

some would, some woodn't
Removing background noise in Audacity by differencing stereo channels
> We have no choice but to share our personal information with these corporations, because that’s how our world works today.

While (as usual) the article makes some strong points, it ends on this, which is not convincing. We can certainly control the amount of information we share with these corporations. Cold turkey is indeed very hard, but using their data-collecting services less, diversifying by not using multiple services of a single company, or switching at least partially to a competing product that collects less data - are all certainly possible.

Saying we are powerless and must use these services, and therefore we have to lobby government to legislate a fix, is like saying that trans fats are super-dangerous but so tasty that we have no choice but to eat them, so we need government to ban them. We should both take responsibility and eat less trans fats, and also try to limit their use through government regulation.
Inverted totalitarianism
Given we are comfortable with firing bullets into each other. (i.e. killing what is already accepted as human life)

I find it difficult to see how this could ever be unethical (given the status quo).
One thing I've found is that there is a lot of independence on GitHub. My immediate assumption if I see a project public project on GitHub is that the owner is saying "I'm ready and willing to accept help." The challenge of not knowing where to start is something different.

A lot of projects can be complicated (D3.js comes to mind). If you don't have a really good grasp on a few very key disciplines in math then honestly, before you contribute to D3, you should brush up on that. The system is self regulating in a sense where you have to know enough about the subject to contribute.

Maybe, there should be a section that people add to their README.md that explain what you need to know before you start digging into a project along with a project goal. I know that for my project[1], I want to create an authoritative .gitignore database, but I'm not really clear on that being my goal nor am I clear on where to add your new files. All of the contributors to my repo have figured it out though without me really telling them anything.

[1] - https://github.com/joeblau/gitignore.io
This may interest you: http://angular-ui.github.io/bootstrap/
How do you feel about Consultivate?
> Why shouldn't Xerox use a standard compression algorithm in their scanner/copiers?

The problem isn't using a standard compression algorithm. It's failing to consider the properties of the algorithm used in relation to the problem domain.

A classic mistake engineering students make is to try and use familiar equations anywhere that the units work out. As a result, engineering professors hammer in the idea that before using any equation, you have to ask yourself: what are the assumptions underlying this equation, and do those assumptions hold for my specific problem? Similarly, if you're writing software for copiers, you should ask the basic question of whether a particular compression algorithm was appropriate for the particular types of images being compressed. It's incredibly basic.

I can totally see why this error happened. It was the equivalent of the engineering student blithely applying any equation where the units work out. Uncompressed pixels go in, compressed data comes out. Compression algorithms are substitutable... except when they're not.
Kaplan Test Prep employee here. I of course don't speak officially for anybody but myself, but I will say that everybody I know at Kaplan all the way up to senior management has great admiration and respect for Khan Academy and all the other disruptive players in education these days. In fact, we have been hosting an educational technology startup accelerator with TechStars all summer.
Solving pain points is a good place to start.

I've been using Ninja IDE and going to start contributing to it.
One problem with posts costing karma is that it would all but guarantee to stifle long discussions amongst any but the highest karma members -- especially if you end up autobanned when you run out.
>It is laws, and not technical means, that prevent rampant, systemic oppression.

Which is exactly why it's so dangerous to have a secret court, with secret rulings, NSLs, and to make everything a secret in the name of national security.

>What we have learned, essentially, is that the NSA — a spy agency whose attention is focused internationally—does exactly what it is supposed to do.

It's interesting that Americans are only getting uncomfortable with mass surveillance now that they know there is a possibility it's being done to them. It's as if all foreigners should be presumed guilty and have no right to privacy or basic respect.
There is no way to win at roulette. There is no way to win at roulette. Repeat after me, there is no way to win at roulette.

Place a bet on black and if you win, then quit playing roulette for the rest of your life. Then you can say you went out a winner.

Also, anyone who knows anything about roulette wouldn't have made it past the chart showing double zero roulette. Why would you play on a double zero roulette table? Find a single zero table.

You might be able to create a bit more interesting results by playing one of the handful of no-zero tables. Google them. Even in this case your expected win rate over the long term is zero.
It does.

And I'm confirming your numbers, FWIW, which makes me suspect there's something wrong with my assumptions. I'll see if I can't dig up other references on waste-to-energy estimates.
Yes it is...

http://gs.statcounter.com/#resolution-ww-monthly-200903-2013...
This doesn't list all possible two-letter domains, just the .com's. There are others, such as uc.edu, ti.org, and 13.tv.
Go home Signal 11, you are drunk.
Show HN: CoffeeCompile - Sublime Text 2/3 Plugin
Can't find anything on Google, but I saw a docco at least ten years ago of a marine biologist who made one of these for taking notes underwater.

It had four waterproof buttons, and by pressing various combos he could type one-handed underwater while holding scientific instruments or a camera.

I thought at the time it would be awesome for wearable computers.
I wasn't implying otherwise; and the figure I provided is what a typical employee should see in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I was just saying that the figures others were reporting were overly pessimistic.
Sharing science is a crime
Seconded. I'm looking for as much learning material on Docker as possible.
Convert DVD for PS Vita on Mac
Sony, this Tokyo based technological giant has, at late 2011, released PS Vita, also known as PlayStation Vita, its 8th generation of game console. This new-gen gaming device just imported a 5-inch capacitive touch screen with a less shinning 960*544 resolution. But this seemingly humble spec did not fail PS Vita to reach a commercial success. Maybe just because it comes from Sony? Probably true! What the experience if you play videos on this seemingly humble display? Now here is a chance to test that on your Mac computer, with the help of Mac DVD Ripper software, which helps you rip your DVD collections to compatible videos to play on PS Vita.
I created an account over Tor and made a few comments. It was hellbanned the next day.

A few days later, I created a new account and simply lurked -- never posting. It was also hellbanned.

I gave up after that.
I understand what you're saying. You're suggesting that I might (perhaps unintentionally) be cherry-picking. I disagree. I think the kinds of commentary I referred to aren't outliers, but rather characterize the site.
GitHub already made this easier, but I feel like they just aren't pushing it in front of everyone early enough. They added support for the CONTRIBUTING/CONTRIBUTING.md file[1], but it is only displayed when opening up an issue or pull request. I think all they would really need to do is advertise projects which have a properly set up file while browsing, similar to how README files are already displayed. If a person wants to contribute, telling them how to contribute only after opening up an issue/PR is a bit late, no?

[1] https://github.com/blog/1184-contributing-guidelines
http://openhatch.org/ tries to solve exactly this problem: they're working to bring in more people into OSS, so they pay special attention to make it easy for new programmers (or even non-programmers) to find a good match and start contributing.

On top of just using the site, you could also chat with them about the problem in general - they're very open and friendly.
Spin this: Human sign wavers being replaced by flash text dummies - latimes.com
You have the upvote, downvote and flag buttons. You can also do nothing if you choose.

Unlike Reddit, HN doesn't have subreddits to handle constrained topics. Whatever is on the front page is whatever users want to read and upvote. You are also free to start your own technology only clone if you wish.

This has been brought up before many times. The ones who have been around longer would usually talk about the good old days. Well so do my parents and everyone else who is older ("Oh the kids these days"). I for one like what HN has become and think it is a positive development. People do care about legal issues and health insurance issues and other things not just twiddling bits and that's good.
Heh, they probably did.

Those 2500s are long gone although I've damn near a full rack of gear now. The electric company loves me.
Huh.
So basically it's like the mafia. You vouch for the wrong guy you get whacked.

I can see how that might stifle discussion.

Although... temporary guest accounts with joint karma might be an interesting idea.
> And let's not get started about the legal acumen of the site as a whole.

This has been disappointing, not because I expect everyone to be lawyer, but because I expect HN commenters to be able to use an internet search engine. It'd be one thing to miss details that you need years of training to understand correctly, but a huge proportion of the comments in these threads strongly suggest that the person posting them has not spent even five minutes researching the subject they're posting on, and yet has somehow arrived at strong opinions on the subject anyway.
You had better luck than I did, then. Both accounts I created (maybe a month ago and a few days apart) were banned.
no, it isn't. everything is a data collecting service. want to not share this information? then don't do the following:

- use a credit card

- use a cell phone

- use toll roads

- buy utilities

- buy plane tickets

- use a rewards card at a grocery|electronics|drug store

- use an ATM

- visit a doctors office

- walk down a street, or into a conveience store, or into a shopping mall, where a CCTV camera can see you

- rent property

- own property

- rent a car

- have a "regular" job

- buy gas (for the car that you can't own or rent, natch)

don't do the above, and proooobbly a lot of your data won't wind up in some database. do just a few of those things, and you probably have no privacy. do all (and more) of them, and probably "big data" will know when you are going to have relationship trouble before you do
Is CoffeeScript used much outside of Rails? If not, wouldn't it be a better idea to focus on mastering javascript so it applies globally?
Politics on HN, Exhibit A for the prosecution.
Personally I'd be more able to help out with a lot of projects from a documentation / training / support POV, github isnt really designed for that kind of thing, but it would be awesome if there was some kind of profile page where people could contribute to FAQs, How Tos, etc
How much of this would be solved by personalizing the ranking of stories?

This is certainly a departure from the current model, and the mere notion of front page could be fatally affected, but, after all and just to name two, Amazon and Spotify are pretty good at anticipating my taste. Simply correlating voting patterns with other users and weighting their upvotes more, for instance, could go a long way towards a site where everyone sees more of what they like.

There are also certainly arguments to be made against such an approach ("filter bubble" etc.). If a strong case has been made before, I'd be curious to read it.
Yes! It's like reading and tracking down sources is a kind of superpower here; sometimes, it feels like threads treat that as a kind of unfair advantage. In fact, if pressed, I could cite examples of commenters on threads asserting that.
The site has been equally embarrassingly bad about taking certain claims at face value, like, "no direct access to the servers", when it is painfully clear to anyone running a colo how NSA PowerPoints could talk about data direct from BigCom servers at the same time as BigCom denies giving direct access to its servers, with both 100% "technically true."

What HN could use is a bit less knee jerking towards belief based discussion, and a bit more analysis: we have these two claims, assuming both parties are self interested, could both be true, and if so, how.

I see "of course Google is/isn't giving server logins" but I don't see as much "here are ways a third party could get data directly from servers, for these various definitions and implementations of 'directly'."

That stuff does get said here more than other places I'm reading, but still clearly not enough as I haven't yet seen that kind of analysis get noticed and picked up by the reporters increasingly sourcing their tech digests from here.
Incredible how many of these are not being utilized
That's why I read the article...
A few projects now have a "good as a first PR" tag for issues... This is great for helping people get started.
This comment neatly characterizes the kinds of discussions we have on this issue; it starts with innuendo about how the NSA could have what any reasonable person would refer to as direct access to servers, then retreats to a broad, abstract position crafted to make the innuendo harder to rebut.

Thank you.
Why Raising Seed Money from VCs is a Risk Worth Taking
What are my options for email if I don't want to use GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo etc?
It may be easiest to look at small projects you are already using (but want to fix something... or just, write better documentation, which may be the best start).
Kickstarter funds ripped off from aspiring author
Probably should have closed registrations when Google announced the impending death of Reader, then.
The presentation is very well put together, but CoffeeScript is a hack built on top of JS in order to use Ruby semantics. You're correct in that it's not really used outside of Rails, and not knowing JS proper (not that I personally recommend using it for much more than jQuery and a couple other libraries, when you absolutely must) poses a problem for when someone runs into the 97% of code that is JS.
Sadly, you can add to that list:

- drive on a road near a police car, a bridge, or many buildings

... since all of the above, often have license-plate scanners attached, compiling a comprehensive history of individual driving patterns.
Understanding C# Types
Sure. Kosher certification works because companies cooperate; but the network and trust has taken years and money to build, and it only works because there is enough critical mass in the system for a company to lose by not participating.
They characterize the site now, that's for sure.

But it didn't before, as best I can tell. The switchover seemed to happen in 2013, but it wasn't Snowden's leaks that caused me to notice the change.
Amazing how 80% is crap.
Chording keyboards are very common with wearables. The Twiddler being a common example:
http://www.handykey.com/
Huh, apparently c4.com resolves to 127.0.0.1. Also they're running the screenshotting stuff on the same server that serves their site.
Which means are elected officials are not in charge. I wonder who is.
I don't know Rails personally. Both at FiftyThree and with Thingdom, we use CoffeeScript with Node, both on the server-side and client-side.
Host your own e-mail server. It's easier than it's made out to be. I've been doing it since I got my first symmetric DSL line in 1998. Today you can just use a very small VPS.
Any rules against punctuation in a 2-character domain?
Face scanning also works, too. So basically you also have to live outside cities (and soon, in a cave)
I was (trying to) excluding data collected by the police, since the original assertion was that this data can be denied to corporations. now, if you want to argue that ALP scanners are operated by contractors and the data is technically stored on a corporations systems, but access is only (nominally) given to LE, this gets a little stickier...
This unlimited LTE and HSPDA+ 4G plan by T-Mobile is $30/month, for those interested. But only if you buy the start up kit from Walmart. The plan is $70/month otherwise.
KA doesn't accept community-produced videos. Which makes sense if you think about it; it would take more time to vet them than they're worth, on average.

Edit: additionally, if he just sent a video with a quick note, KA may continue repeating the same mistake, as they have done over the past year.
I managed to get to the buttons by zooming out. Couldn't see them by default (Chrome on a Retina Macbook Pro). Tried scrolling and clicked every item visible too before figuring it out, ha.
Oh I see. Sorry. Should have read TFA closely :-/
not sure richter is minimalist (postminimalist? - more romantic?), but the blue notebooks is my favourite work of his (i think the vivaldi is different from the rest). people similar to richter (moving further away from minimalism) include sylvain chauveau, library tapes, ensemble nocturne.
Chord keyboards are pretty cool, historically. I suspect that the reason for their demise was the notion of "keyboard shortcuts" (Ctrl key, alt key, etc) taking over most of their functionality.
Awesome project thanks for sharing.

A few months ago I started on a project to make a 'grip' style chording keyboard [0] also based on the teensy, sadly the project has stalled for a bit (graduated and got a full-time).

I have the keys wired [1] but haven't figure out a nice way to mount them yet, and the firmware isn't finished.

[0] http://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=43132
[1] http://i.imgur.com/zQiYmQC.jpg

EDIT: I always found it a bit sad that I was unable to find much documentation on how Engelbart's original chording keyboard worked, does anyone know of a source where I can read how the keys are chorded?
My point was you can reduce the amount you do such things. You can use fewer credit cards and more cash, to take your first example.

It is impossible to avoid them entirely, I agree, but we are not completely powerless.
I don't think so. It's hype.

There is this misconception that this "maker movement" is different from normal evolution that happens in small industry all over the world. When you have certain tools, you can make some stuff for customer order. New tools just help with that.

Additive manufacturing (3D printing) and modular electronics is just incremental improvement in tools available. When subtractive manufacturing (CNC) machines become cheaper, you can manufacture some stuff more easily and with smaller budget. Your local professional shops will always manufacture cooler things because they have better tools and knowledge. Cool things cost money.

Mass manufacturing will always have edge because they can and more high tech machines and they can do things cheaper. Local shops do what they do today new technologies just help them. People with DIY level tools are left with legos.
I was disappointed after having seen the title. I was hoping for a discussion on information asymmetry and a call to arms from the public to balance the scales via a publicly controlled mass surveillance system.
Is consciousness real? Yes. Find out why. [video & review]
Fair enough. I did mean unintentionally.
> that the NSA story was not a revelation, that it wasn't even news

I still disagree on this (but wouldn't downvote you for expressing that opinion).

I now design and review systems with the assumption that the GPA (global passive adversary) is real. It's not a political thing; it's an observation of technical reality.

To explain why that is a shift in thinking, note that basically every web-site password reset mechanism in the world (apart from those that employ 2FA) is broken in this scenario.

Sensible people cannot expect Tor to provide the fig-leaf of safety it seemed like it offered.

GPA was not a default assumption in threat models before.