skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact is that Google tries to make their devices as open as possible. That philosophy is beneficial to the community, for the software, for their brand, and for the tech industry. If legal issues or unforeseen problems appear while they are launching a product that prevent stock images on a particular device, then oh well, shit happens.

There will be a dozen other Nexus devices within the next year and hopefully Google will learn from their mistakes, and will partner with suppliers who won't prevent source code from being published.

Does Google benefit monetarily from not releasing source code? Nope, it likely decreases their profit and tarnishes their reputation, so I would like to believe that they are doing everything in their power to keep Android and the Nexus brand as open as possible.

http://androidandme.com/2013/08/devices/new-nexus-7-may-not-...
It seems like there'd be a higher demand for these type of specialised content filters.

I'm a big NHL fan, so I'll check out fancloud.com.
That is awesome news, Emerson, congrats!

You've convinced me to help push your goal higher now :)
Here's another bunch of people who didn't do anything illegal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials
Sure. And the community projects use them, often via complicated scripting to pull them off of existing devices, or just a "gray market" where people share blobs directly or just throw them up on servers without worrying about it.

But what Google needs is a license to redistribute this software in a form where it can be used by an AOSP build, not just as part of a finished device. Apparently the couldn't get it.
Android now controls 79.3% of the market share, with iOS dropping to 13.2%
AOSP itself is open, and has no issues on the Nexus 10, Galaxy Nexus or old Nexus 7. However, the Nexus 4 and new Nexus 7 are not capable of booting from just the AOSP source alone. In practice this is the same as most non-Nexus devices, except the bootloader still ships unlocked.

However, the Nexus 4 and new Nexus 7 are the flagships for AOSP, and the maintainer was upset at the fact that the open bit is useless on newer devices without parts that can't be distributed.
Presumably you could use the GPS for altitude detection?
>Things have always been grim. The crows are just coming home to roost in America. Why do you think so many Indians and Chinese people are doctors or engineers?

I think the crows are coming home to roost for America in more ways then one. It isn't just the choices we make, but our very ideology that is devouring us (so to speak). We believe in the free market and competition. We're capitalists. We used to be capitalists mostly within our own borders. Now technology has transformed our chains of distribution and communication to the point where we're capitalists with no borders. Globalization is here, intensifying, and our religion of capitalism has won converts the globe over.

It isn't that Indians and Chinese are choosing more lucrative career paths (working with your assumption there, -I'm not sure myself), -they've also got the fastest growing middle class on the globe. That's not because they are doctors and engineers. They've got what were our manufacturing jobs too. This is the logical outcome of what we preach as a country.

As long as you aren't too nationalistic, it looks like a good thing as wages continually shift and flow to the cheapest labor pools on the planet, lifting those people up, but that's really overly simplistic. What concerns me is the gap between the richest and the poor and middle class. In America it's growing, but it's a concern anywhere on Earth if it gets too large.
Arcade Fire: A New Album and a can of spray paint
I've actually never had another company respond to support requests faster than DO. Almost every ticket gets a human response in under a minute (often in what seems like seconds), and for the small things (billing related), the problem is usually solved in that minute.
Why do we only do one senior thesis?
So, I spoke to the product team and they told me that this is still in the pipeline and part of the plan. The team is pretty heads down focused on scalability, performance and other key items - so yes, this is still coming, and hopefully sooner rather than later.

Sorry I can't give you a specific date, but I don't want to set unreasonable expectations.
"…and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations…"

In my view, the current government abuses and corruption are most apparent in the surveillance state but extend well into its other functions: industry regulation, social welfare programs, military-industrial spending, national security, judicial system, public education, etc.

We need to recall that our government exists to "secure [the] rights" that people have regardless of the existence of government. We should not trust government, as a general rule.

People all across the political spectrum must evaluate their expectations of government through the lens of the NSA revelations, since I believe they indicate the depth and breadth of the corruption of the entire system.
There's a few ways to view it. However I think between all the perspectives there's one central theme. A basic income is not a gift. It's kind of part of the unwritten deal no one has ever discussed. As a society we work together because as a group we're stronger then individually. Its true for animals, and its true for us. Humans have a knack though for really making use of our intelligence, and physical capabilities. We've engineered (hacked) the physical world to make our lives better. Doing that alone though is impossible, so we've engineered "society" to facilitate the process. When the industrial revolution happened, a debate kind of started. What is more important, a persons right to work for stuff, or a persons right to more stuff? By allowing the mechanization of labor, we've implicitly chosen the later. Of course, it was easy to justify. There's always more work, so industrialization is ultimately a good thing. The worker would only be temporarily shifted anyways.

There's a caveat to that though. When mechanization became intelligent mechanization (what I call having a Computer whether mechanical or digital control the process) the shifts started happening more frequently, and the replacement jobs became harder to obtain.

I think ultimately this is the key point, as a society we LET mechanization happen, and ultimately it has taken us to a point where not everyone is CAPABLE of having a highly skilled job. There's ways to alleviate it, part of the problem is an outdated education system. Another part of the problem is probably cultural, there might be a lack of high skilled jobs too.

None the less, there WILL be a growing population of people who we've taken away their capability to work for a living. So when we offer a basic income, its not us graciously giving them a gift of our hard work. Its giving them the lives they are owed because of the decisions we have collectively made a hundred years ago.
Yes.

It's not just Ctrl-[ that does this, Escape does it too. We just typically don't toggle between insert mode / ESC in vim fast enough and enough times to notice it. With the pedal it's quite easy to press and release it a bunch of times before you type anything.
For the past century or so, America has needed an "enemy" in order to provide an opponent to focus on. For years, it was the Soviets and Communism, but with the quick collapse of the Iron Curtain, we suddenly lacked one. Luckily (!) terrorism stepped up as a replacement, and well, here we are. Victorious, at the cost of our treasure and our morals.
Noam Chomsky has written about this for decades. The purpose of the entire "political framework" is for "Manufacturing Consent".
Ask HN: would you pay for a "Tell me when" service?
I'm thinking about productizing something like Huginn (https://github.com/cantino/huginn) plus Siri, with a human-driven coding / interaction layer and a simple UI.

A simple form that says "Tell me when ____________" and the user can type anything they want. Examples could range from "tell me when it's going to rain tommorrow" to "tell me when the price per watt of solar panels drops below X". What standing alerts would you want? How much would you pay per alert, and would you accept variable pricing by complexity? When you make these, a real person will evaluate them and use proprietary software on the backend to set them up. Concierge alerts about the world.

What do you folks think?
What other reason would a company (Qualcomm) refuse to allow their software to be published?
> Well, I suppose if you define "open" as being able to build the software, but don't promise you can actually use the result, that makes it acceptable.

You can still use the result, but not with all devices (same thing as any linux distro, despite being open source, you need driver supports for your particular hardware). There are still many devices who can boot aosp (from the nexus line, from sony, etc.).
In the abstract I can see a huge benefit to having a sizable portion of the workforce be temporary employees. Assuming we have a reasonable guaranteed minimum income, then there is not the looming threat of unemployment that makes temporary employment so bad. However, temporary employment does provide a more mobile workforce that can much more quickly re-allocate itself to new demands, and give individuals more freedom to switch jobs.
That's overstating the case. Google can't distribute a tree that can build for the new N7 because of one (or maybe a handful of) component licenses. The rest of the system remains open source though, and can be built (for the N7 and others) by community projects. There is value there.

Certainly the new N7 isn't a "free" device in any meaningful sense. But Android as a whole remains vastly more open than iOS or Windows.
We're part of the universe, so that question is still contained in "where have we come from," at least from some values of "we".

But even after that, there's still the appearance of life in the universe and the appearance of life on Earth.
In-Depth Journalism Takes A Victory Lap
Can this strategy be duplicated? It seems like your main traffic source has been press coverage, but that isn't something that you can plan to have or rely on. Would you have gotten this far otherwise?
But what is the point of WaPo Labs without the WaPo? Are they going to rebrand to some sort of general-purpose tech startup or incubator?

Or are they going to keep doing innovation for WaPo, only now on a contractual basis? (Creating recurring revenue for the public company.)
> Your points are well-taken, but in a democracy it's a hard argument to make to say: "people don't really think what they think they think because of the media."

It's not that hard an argument -- there have been probably hundreds of studies on the influence of media on people's opinions and resulting actions. Why do you think advertising is a nearly half-trillion dollar industry worldwide? It's a significant chunk of GDP in the US and UK, for example, and not without reason: advertising through various media consistently makes a measurable impact on the buying patterns of consumers, and it's not exactly a huge leap to apply this to politics[0].

That point aside, I appreciate the insight, and I think you're on the right track as far as thinking about how to make the issues more concrete to people in a personal way.

The other, perhaps over-broad human nature question is how to get people care about this shit even if it truly only affects "others" - people of other countries, other social classes, other races and other religions. There are middle-aged, upper class voting people, white ones even, who care deeply that their government detains and tortures mulsim men in secret and not-so-secret prisons without trial, who care if activists are targeted for intimidation or treated similarly to terrorists, who can look at history and see that pervasive surveillance without meaningful oversight is always, always abused at some point and who aren't so scared of terrorism that they vote all their own rights away in order to feel safe. That is a much harder battle.

[0] http://adage.com/article/moy-2008/obama-wins-ad-age-s-market...
Kickstarter says it consulted scientists before banning bioengineered organisms
I can't use Linux on my laptop without some closed source blobs - does that make Linux not open?

No, because you can get other laptops without this problem. Likewise, you can get other Android devices such as the Nexus 10 or Galaxy Nexus which are capable of using the result.

This sucks as it means you now need to choose between a device that's sufficiently open or a device that's up to date, and it's certainly worth criticising Google for, but it's not enough to claim that Android is as closed as iOS or Windows (yet - if they do the same to the next Nexus 10 and continue releasing Nexus devices that can't boot AOSP, then it's concerning, or if they drop support for the devices that are currently able to use the open source code)
Has Physics hit the End?
> Does Google benefit monetarily from not releasing source code?

Indirectly, yes — choice of Qualcomm as a supplier (under condition of not releasing source code) must have been beneficial for Google.
What's wrong with NFC?
I thought the goal was to walk away from external tokens like SecureID - far more secure but bulky. At least I can wear an NFC authenticator as a ring.
The point for someone doing this would presumably be to hope the visitors in question would not notice that they're adding content to the ghost/doppelganger comments.
Asian Parties: Confessions Of An Unwilling Competitor
I find it interesting that the "tech-related topics" that Malda is "most obsessed with right now" are Bitcoin, Manning, and Snowden/NSA - the ones that the proclaimers of a decline of quality of HN complain about the most.
I am actually an immigrant, so I feel I'm quite informed as to the existing differences, thank you. Currently, the biggest debate I have with myself is whether I should go back, or not. It's best for the present moment that I stay here. It's best for the future that I leave. Decisions, decisions...
For anyone who is interested in implementing two-factor authentication, Authy (company behind blog post) is quite easy to use. I recommend it.
Luckiest Wheel : A nice quiz game to became millionaire
Correct. I created a tcpdump trace on my OpenWrt router and then opened it in Wireshark. The HTTP request was easy to spot from there.
Android Device Manager is now live
Maybe. I think there are more than a few people who would be ideologically opposed to paying a for-profit organization in exchange for being able to post on its forum. Maybe if it was a donation to EFF instead?

Anyway, I think aggressive moderation is a big part of Metafilter's secret sauce.
I've never quite understood the impulse to ask that critics be free from blame, as if one must have a solution in order to recognize a problem.

That said, I as a programmer do not work for a tech startup and have quit jobs I felt were complicit in greedy mania.

Another way of looking at it--why is it my problem that the technology sector is dominated by greed?
Texas federal judge declares Bitcoin a currency
>Really, "parallel construction" sounds like what any forensic analyst would do in the case of definitive-yet-inadmissible evidence

that said analyst came by as result of committing a crime (deliberately violating 4th of citizens without probable cause)
How Mobile Money Can Change Even More Lives
Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness
Can you use gyroscopes to provide resistive force. Keep a heavy one running at low speed in the sword in a gimble. when you are about to hit something predictively rotate it to the correct orientation and accelerate it to high speed. Not totally sure this would work but if there is anything that can provide counteracting force without physical contact, a gyroscope is it.

You don't even have to make a heavy sword, the gyroscope itself could simulate the force required to overcome the momentum of a heavy broadsword.
Zuckerberg's Newspaper Analogy
There is a saying in hindi
- "Taala sharifon ke liye hota hai.". Loosely translated as "locks are for decent people". We put the locks for decent people not thieves. For a thief its nothing but an inconvinience. And we still put the locks, don't we?
I wonder what their figures are in terms of customers / expenses, that would be very interesting to see.
Not sure if it's what you're suggesting specifically, but if you analyzed common links within a span of time and analyzed them for keywords, you could associate other tweets from certain individuals. Tim Bray or Zed Shaw, as random examples, could tweet about an issue without providing a link to it (to infer context), but you could infer context by looking for relevant links from similar people.

If the system analyzed the links you clicked on (via the t.co URL shortener Twitter operates), the links you posted, and the topics you tweeted about, they could build a profile of interest for you and highlight those tweets.

Their current 'you should check this out' system on twitter.com and in the twitter client seems to be 'hey, here's some stuff everyone else likes', which (the last time I looked at it) was complete tripe about idiotic topics that 'the masses' care about, with nothing about the sort of tech news or political/economic interest that I tend to prefer, but I feel like a personalized feed is something that would be far more useful to me, and probably many other people.
This statement is far from 'elegant', it is tens of thousands of words that ultimately say nothing. The relevant section is 7B, which says that their ultimate success was not keeping a secret!
This is the most annoying thing about most blogs, and like others on HN I don't bother to visit the main page since I'm usually in reading mode (hand on mouse, away from keyboard). To their credit there is also an About StatusPage button (not sure if that was added after the fact).
Even so, the latency on the compass and GPS is far too high for tracking convincingly.
Ask HN: Should a login page use SSL?
First off, I'm not trying to tattle on my web host here. In a forum post, for my web hosting service, I made the following statement.

"I already feel exposed having to login to the forums without an https login page."

This was in a discussion about their lack of support for encrypted password transmission for their mail server.

The reply I got from my host was.

"I don't know of a forum anywhere that uses an https login.

As far as account compromises that we see (and we see a lot of them), they are almost exclusively due to compromised home or workplace computers, or insecure web sites, not intercepted Internet traffic.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen anymore, but it's exceptionally rare these days, primarily because it's infinitely easier to drop malware or viruses on tens or hundreds of thousands of people in one fell swoop than it is to intercept and analyze an individual users traffic looking for logins.

Security concerns are certainly always valid, and if you have reason to believe someone is targeting you, I can understand the desire for heightened security everywhere you enter a login. But the fact is most people would be better served ensuring security closer to home."

I can understand the claim that accounts are more likely to be compromised by user's not being careful with their own computers, but something about this reply is lowering my confidence. The reason is that many users will create forum accounts using the same credentials (as their host control panel login), which makes for an easy target IMO.

Is this (non-ssl login page) really as common practice as the reply claims? And if so, shouldn't that be changed, or am I just being too paranoid?

EDIT: Clarified statement.
I have a bad feeling that one of these days we will lock ourselves out of our own accounts...
With newer, more powerful servers they can cram more VPS in to single server.
Usually users rarely have continuous CPU usage on small CPUs like that, so in theory you can cram more VPS in a server, without causing any performance issue to other VPS.

VPS in general is insanely profitable, if you know what you are doing.

The employee aspect will always be there, DO can still make money by not taking outrageous profit margin like AWS and Rackspace.
First you need to know what kind of customer you are targeting, for example if you're emailing to usa the majority of the population lives in the EST zone. Focus your emails on hitting that time zone (unless you have the capability to segment your list by geographic location and send in staggered sends). Weekends are not good. Mondays are also not good, I frequently use Mondays to delete all spam and junk or unimportant emails. Probably Wednesdays, Thursdays are the best days of the week.
Yes. Technically illegal but basically what happens with custom ROMs for most non-Nexus devices.
This assumes that everyone acts rationally and looks out for the best of society though.

We're certainly not there now.
Chevy Volt Price Drop
Dharmesh had mentioned it really wasn't that big of a difference either way. Personally I have no idea outside of a short exchange with him about it.
They're already undercutting a lot of much bigger providers.

It seems to me that economy of scale does not translate so well to hosting companies. Sure you might be able to get slightly better pricing on servers and connectivity, but complexity has a cost, and it goes up as you get bigger.
> The best part about their $5,000 is that most of it will be profit.

How do you reason to that statement?
Whenever I build apps, along with giving best possible product, my focus is always on K-factor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-factor_(marketing)).

Viral Factor, K = No. of invites X Conversion rate

As long as, K >1, your app is growing. And best way I figured out to do that was to make people tweet and make that tweet provoking enough to let her users click on that tweet. Example, I encourage people to boast about number of repins or followers they got because of Pinwoot and tweet reads something like : 1) I got 954 repins on #Pinterest using @Pinwoot. Add your pin here https://pinwoot.com

2) Try @Pinwoot.com to get free followers on #Pinterest https://pinwoot.com

Tweet Copy 1 performed 267% better than Tweet Copy 2 in getting new users.
http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/when-is-the-best-time-to-sen...

Wednesday 4pm
Everyone in Mainland China May Need Such A Router
Thanks for the classy response! I'm excited that you have a paid maintainer for Pyrax and are willing to consider python 2.6 support. Things are looking good for the future.
It's more that if you didn't flag them the first N times you're rather unlikely to flag them in the future. The screening isn't perfect but screening these people more won't help.
>The Oculus Rift certainly won't be worn all the time.

Of course not, but "always on" is not a very useful feature for VR. It's an incredibly useful feature for AR. Oculus Rift is not a good candidate in any way for an AR platform, since camera pass through to VR is not an acceptable replacement for seeing the world with your actual eyes.