skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The best possible thing that could happen NSA to be pared back to its only legitimate function, military intelligence.

When describing the functions of government, legitimacy is irrelevant. Besides being immeasurable, it's typically defined by those with authority.

> would be for the NSA to be pared back to its only legitimate function, military intelligence.

Have you considered spying on Americans is military intelligence? Have you considered the military may see the public as a threat to national security that may have to be neutralized at a given moments notice? Surely defending our country from anarchy is a legitimate function of the military?
Yeah I think the people who made it use it in production. A startup.
Great stuff! I honestly find it shameful that they don't have an api. A couple of months ago I built one in Node.js (https://github.com/kenshiro-o/RapGenius-JS).
If anyone is interested in improving/using the project let me know!
in my experience macbooks definitely seem to be the defacto development machine/os
They won't read them, but they might weigh them. The point of writing to MPs about policies can't really be to engage with them in an individual debate, but to form one tiny part of a mass of opinions which might persuade the MP.
JPEG has no transparency support, for one
While I think The Intelligent Investor is a worthwhile book, I think it got it wrong for the very reasons I mentioned above.

Anyway, I'm not making any argument here for how the market works, other than pointing out that saying that half of fund managers do worse than the median does not imply that they are unskilled or not providing value. Nor am I saying that they do provide value, but rather the original theory is both flawed and insufficient to make a conclusion.

In games of skill, past results certainly give expectations of future results. Going back to the hockey analogy, I would expect the top 10% of performers over five years (determined by some metric) would as a whole outperform a random sample of 10% of the league in a sixth year. Madoff is a bad example here - he was breaking the law, but nobody knew. If you catch a top sports player doping, it doesn't suddenly mean that the game is a game of chance, or that all of the top performers are cheaters (although repeatedly catching cheaters may indicate systematic problems) - rather it means that someone cheated to fake performance. They were playing a different game, but nobody knew.

Going back to the original point, if you want to determine whether something is a game of chance or skill, you have to fix the prior.

Let's say we had coin flipping tournaments, and people were claiming that it's a game of skill. Looking at past statistics, some people seemed to perform far better than the expected 50-50 split. You however claim that coin flipping is just a game of chance. How do you prove it? You look at results for some period of time, say five years. Take the "winners" from that group - say the top 20% of performers. Under the hypothesis that it's a game of skill, these should be a selection of the most skilled people.

Now track their results for a sixth year. If it was a game of skill, the expectation would be that as a whole, these individuals would continue to perform at a high level. However, as a game of chance, you would expect performance to be completely random among these high performers - and by doing this, you can determine whether coin flipping is a game of chance or skill.
Sorry ;-) I only want to thank you then!
good point. his cell number seeems like a personal number as well. i wonder if he's getting messages on it already.
Not sure if the author knows or not, but there exists a BASH environment variable called CDPATH which does the same thing, and is a lot easier to use.
Optimistically fuzzy matching?
That sounds like my Starbucks. I was sitting at a table and overheard a customer complaining that they got their coffee after someone that ordered after them. After the customer left, I heard the Starbucks manager explain to the new hire that the "queue" is very important. It thought "wow, this sounds like my old Data Structures class!"
As someone applying to university this year, I can't thank you enough for the ucas scraper!
This reminds me of NCD (Norton Change Directory) which then went on to inspire many tools, like the excellent KCD and WCD. These tools index rather than create symlinks, though.
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2005031814311425
Yup, everything I access on Google was down... App Engine, Page Speed CDN, Gmail, YouTube, Analytics. Surprising to be honest, wonder what happened.
1. A low-level former NSA employee isn't credible as an authoritative source for all things NSA, especially if you offer nothing to independently support your assertions.

2. To be credible, disclose your affiliation(s) in advance or at the moment you join a discussion.
I actually saw your library, it's super cool - it's currently pretty much the top result for "Rap Genius API", apart from the tweet I refer to (https://twitter.com/RapGenius/statuses/245057326321655808).

As I've said in other comments, I'd love RG to have a public API, but I can see why they don't.

It'd be cool to compare notes on parsing Rap Genius. Drop me an email if you have a moment, me@timrogers.co.uk.
Flakes on a Plane
Reminds me of z, which I use all the time. Anyone else use z? If you have not heard of it, get it now https://github.com/rupa/z.

z is a wonderful complement to cd. After cd into a folders with z set up, a file stores all folders navigated to sorted by frecency, then simply jump to a folder with z [foldernameregex].
If Groupon sales management gets wind of this Andy will be terminated immediately. I dealt with issues similar to this at LivingSocial (one rep offered a positive Yelp review in exchange for a deal) and both legal and sales know this is a very big no-no. Andy will have to re-learn business ethics at another company.
While I agree that is a tad fishy, your stance also appears fairly cynical. Maybe he just changed his mind. I don't think we give our politicians enough slack for them to get better, which in turn means that they learn to bloody-mindedly hold onto their stupid opinions, against the facts and reality.
Thanks for this. I've been using z and like it quite a bit, but I'm always open to ways to improve my workflow.
It was a bad DoS config push that caused a general GFE crash.

The outage lasted less then 5 minutes, so not that interesting.

On a more interesting note, the Helpouts leaker has been identified and fired: http://www.linkedin.com/in/georgearison

And in related news you might want to ask Jean Baptiste Quéru how feels about having been fired after having spent years working on AOSP.

That's Google for ya.
Hah - glad you like it. Did you find it before, or is this the first time you've spotted it? I built a cool frontend too that you might be able to cannibalise if you'd like to share your status online - see https://github.com/timrogers/ucas-frontend.

If you wanna chat at all about any of this stuff, drop me a line at me@timrogers.co.uk.
Could you be a little more specific about exactly how Americans were misled about the threat of war with the Soviet Union?
Aaaaand... the Russian Reversal practically writes itself.
> "I have a huge network of friends (ages 25-40) that all are extremely active on Yelp"

Apparently, 10 people is a HUGE network.
Thank you for taking the initiative.
Here is a fully functional (albeit minimal) Windows version: http://appleseedhq.net/stuff/marks-v1.zip. Tested on Windows 7 (does not require PowerShell).

GitHub: https://github.com/dictoon/marks

Edit: to install, unzip anywhere and add to your path. Then:

C:\Windows> mark win

C:\Windows> marks
win => C:\Windows

C:\Windows> cd ..

C:\> jump win

C:\Windows>

Marks will be stored in a marks\ subdirectory (relatively to the mark.bat file).
He's not calling for what you're talking about : He's asking people to open source things.
Why Do People LIKE Brands On Facebook?
First, thank you for continuing to participate in this discussion. I think you are bringing some different perspective and make some good points.

> I agree, whistleblower protections would be a massively positive change in how governance works in the US, and would make people accountable for decisions which have significant impact on national policy, security, and economy. That being said, I don't see either Manning or Snowden as whistleblowers.

What do you think disqualifies them as whistleblowers? Manning seems disqualified on some level because his leaks were large, not specific, without a specific goal, and possibly not even motivated by the content of what he leaked. Snowden's leaks seem more specific and motivated by a desire to blow the whistle on specific practices he sees as illegal or immoral. Daniel Ellsberg's leaks were rather large and non-specific in many ways but he is widely regarded as a whistleblower. What is the qualification or disqualification?
> If you extend the thought, it's as if the machine disappears

Indeed it does. How long was it after we discovered DNA that we discovered its 'machine', DNA polymerase? And in the end, what's more interesting?
We've had quite a few people defend them on previous threads about groupon with really positive experiences.

They have tended to be places like paintballing or sky diving, things where the cost doesn't go up that much more with the more people who come. And who can upsell (paintballs, photographs). There's a technical business term for those businesses that I can't remember.

But apparently they do do well out of groupon.
Second Reality Code Review
Any advice on how to build the API if a banking service uses 2-factor auth?

Perhaps SMSing the secret number they send you back to your system (assuming you can't give your system direct access to phone number your the secret number will arrive at)?
The title sounded much more interesting then the article itself. I was expecting something about black-hat hackers.
This seems likely to be one of his friends. http://www.yelp.com/biz/sauce-san-francisco#hrid:-tu5rIsfjQJ...

Note that the health score is 83, and could be much worse, and that there were 5 other inspections before that, which were all over 90. http://www.yelp.com/inspections/sauce-san-francisco
Jobs movie review: Not a Font of Inspiration
I use a Mac with Fusion for my linux VMs.
linux , need : performance
I am interested in reading the 90 minute interview transcript, the finished article and the prepared statement from the White House to compare the three and then make a judgement on the WH's action.
Aggregators For Technology and Finance
http://talll.com for tech, and http://filll.com for finance. Has all top-quality, frequently updated feeds.
Yeah I'm sick of that obvious strawman being trotted out by the function-bloater side everytime we try to talk about how code size is important. I'm sure there's other examples where small code size isn't necessarily better -- but nobody bothers to look for them!

In practice I find I'm a terrible judge at where the function boundaries should be. Several times I've tried to reorganize a project where functions had gotten gradually too big, ended up making them too small and numerous and having a pain debugging, then finally settling on some intermediate position. All the overly-certain talk of "as many functions as you need" misses these nuances.

(I wrote recently about global vs local readability: http://akkartik.name/blog/readable-bad)
Gorgeous Glimpses of Calamity
Then i would go for a thinkpad without doubt, but wait for one with the new haswell cpu
So make an account without personal information. What's the big deal?
How easy is it to hack JavaScript in a browser?
Hmmm, this doesn't seem to work in `zsh`. Typing `jump <tab>` suggests everything in the current directory (folders and files).

Does anyone here know offhand how autocompletion in `zsh` works?
Possibly. I'm just inferring the GP's distinction of the terms from context.
Although I cannot agree more with you and csheid, you really should give sublimetext a try. I've been quite impressed.
First, wow, this looks quite impressive.

Have you considered a Mono port as well? I know hosting Mono isn't as easy as C++/CLI (where IJW just makes all the magic happen) but it might be fun.

Personally I never quite "got" node.js, except for the fact that there's a slick library for _everything_, so writing a small DNS interceptor is trivial. Forgive me if I didn't read properly, but I still have to run in node for this, right? Do you think it'd be possible to set something up that'd let .NET devs easily pull in a node module? Or is it better to just port the code in question (like the DNS server part) to .NET?
Bashmarks - directory bookmarks for the shell
What's wrong with running FreeBSD on laptops? Works for me...
Seems like it would be more difficult to fake all of the different locations and people, than simply mail a box with a camera in it.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6229324
To do is to be.
Funnily enough, my first thought was that it must have been in the UK, but also because of the Danske Bank -- one of the largest banks here in Northern Ireland. Post Danmark gave it away though.
I would add to this excellent intro: pandas, for doing data analysis, and the fabulous ipython notebook for easily interacting with your computations.
My Mom prefers to do her development in C, because she needs to make sure her search algorithms are very high performance. So it seems she already has a pretty good language for her use cases?
I'm not a developer, I'm a scientist (astronomer as a matter of fact).

I live on a single 13" screen, the MacBook Air I'm typing on right now. I used to have lots of screen space, driving dual monitors on my linux box at work. I replaced them with a fern.

For some people, less is more =)
DeepField says it was a 10-15% overall drop.

http://www.deepfield.net/2013/08/googalapse/
Without having me dig through the code, could you tell me in a few lines how it works? (not usage, but how internally you managed to handle shell environment vars, "clean after" finishing/switching, etc)
You have plenty of areas where you're not free to be irreligious. Or where criticising the regime will land you in jail. That said, the"hating our freedoms" line is definitely bull. People actually say that?
That's all perfectly reasonable and very well stated. Your perspective was what I was trying to address with the "If you like working with google systems and resources so much that you are willing to pay your employer to use them then ok, that's a bit weird, but it's your time" line.

If you feel differently than I about Google's contribution to society or the ethics of unpaid overtime cultures in general then even my rather tame "that's a bit weird" might seem wrong to you and that's fair enough, these are opinions after all.

I meant for my comment to address the framing of similar arguments to yours as "repaying Google's generosity". Considering that type of statement really does "sound brainwashed" as another commenter pointed out, I was interested in a better articulated reason which you have definitely provided.
z is absolutely wonderful. Even my boss has become a convert, and he's been hacking unix since the 1970s, when he worked at AT&T, and is very set in his ways.

[Disclaimer: rupa's a good friend of mine]
yeah, it can be annoying that the directory stack sequence keeps changing, which means that sometimes you can't easily re-run commands from your history if you've pushd since you last ran the command

e.g., a command like "tar cfz bak.tgz ~3 ~2/subdirectory ~1" would mean something else once you've "pushd +3".

I always find it hard to undo my sequence changes to get the stack in the same order as before, so usually end up typing "dirs -v" a lot (or its alias) and renumbering my ~N references.
I love this so much! The possibilities of the Internet with art are just endless; this is just one more example. Great work. Looking forward to where this goes from here. I'll be watching! :)
I agree, quite impressive.

I'm thinking the reverse will also be impressive - calling node.js packages from within .NET code.
Mac + IBM Model M in a proper black gym bag.
My first thought: "This would be great in ImageOptim".
Then I noticed you are also the author of both awesomes.
Clever!

With fish 2.0, the shell stores a list of "cd" commands issued from a specific directory, so mostly just typing "cd" yields an auto-completion hint out of the box.
Here is one that works with zsh: https://github.com/bufordtaylor/swiftcommandline
> isinf and insnan logically should always return false when called with an int argument.

Yes, but the thing is, they are defined only for floating point types in standard
If he treats his friends like he treats his potential customers, 10 IS huge.
Ask HN: How did you figure out your SaaS?
I can't stop thinking about starting a SaaS, how incredibly giving and good experience it would be.
But I just can't figure anything out. I keep thinking "everyone else does that, I probably won't bring anything new to the table". I guess this is not the way I should think about it, as just coding, launching and getting feedback would be really good for me.
How did you go through the pre-coding stage?
Rails: Strong Parameters by Example
I see non-sanctioned access like this as a huge boon to both the service and its users: it enables easy marketing, community-supported apps, easy research on what features users want, etc.

I also think the fear of abuse is mostly unwarranted. If somebody wanted to steal your content or abuse your platform, they'd figure out a way to do so -- with or without an unofficial api (especially if all that's needed is http scraping).

(disclaimer: I maintain https://github.com/simon-weber/Unofficial-Google-Music-API)
Interesting question - I haven't had to try it yet. My scrapers are all read-only at the moment, and (afaik) none of the UK banks require two-factor in any form for that kind of operation.

Potentially using Twilio (http://www.twilio.com) you might be able to have an application which receives the two-factor request itself and handles it. It'd make the process async though, which wouldn't be ideal.
Coming from a Python background I appreciate the verbosity. There are times when symbols and being concise may be necessary, but I find a non-expert human readable default to be very appealing.

Thanks for your hard work!
Colors of the Internet
OP here. I agree - for me, the only exception is where data is being abused for overtly commercial purposes. This obviously isn't one of those cases, and I'm doubtful as to whether unofficial APIs (i.e. screen scraping) can ever work properly for that kind of scale.
He edited out the boring parts, no one wants to watch a wall for 2 hours. Also he probably had a notice on the package to keep one side facing the top, at one point a machine did flip it over.
Try using https://github.com/rupa/z
This is something I need to do in my country, I have developed resentment towards Sepomex (Servicio Postal Mexicano / Mexican Postal Service), due to the way they treat my packages.

What I hate the most is that companies like DHL that are established in Mexico, will use their own service in the country the delivery is being paid, but when the package reaches Mexico, they give the package to Sepomex, which basically defeats the purpose of using a different company...
Why would they even know what's in the package? It shouldn't be going through any kind of xray machine.
Mac + Fusion
What's the error rate, though? For those of us who either find it awkward or just plain incorrect, how many Emily and Johns are there feeling happy that they had a touch of "personal" service?

With an accent, and a short name, giving my name is the part of ordering at Starbucks that I dislike the most, though (presumably due to iterating on the delivery on my part) the retries have become fewer of late. It's especially weird since I pay with the mobile app. No reason my name couldn't be on-screen there for me to point to; some of the smoothest ordering experiences have been while wearing a conference badge, and the cashier wrote my name without asking.

On the other hand, I don't hang out at a specific Starbucks location daily, but I have seen folks who apparently do, and who the staff genuinely do know by name. When my local coffee shop (Red Rock) took my drink order without asking my name I definitely felt pretty special.

Of course, none of this ruins the twinge of embarrassment (is it embarrassment? I'm not sure) I feel whenever a barista loudly yells "LATTE FOR JEN" over the din of an espresso machine.
I haven't used pngquant in years (the last time I used it was for supporting PNG transparency in IE6), but I happened to use the excellent linked tool ImageAlpha on an HTML5/Flash game we are in the middle of shipping and managed to cut 1.2MB out of 7+MB in assets from it. That's pretty impressive.

The interesting thing is that the blur filter gave zero benefit, but the "median cut" pngquant to palletize the images gave some pretty impressive gains.
>When describing the functions of government, legitimacy is irrelevant. Besides being immeasurable, it's typically defined by those with authority.

Fair enough. I hope it is obvious that it was me asserting my opinion.

>Have you considered spying on Americans is military intelligence?

Yes I have. It is a thorny issue. I can even name good reasons that Congress, high ranking gov't officials should be spied upon. I'm not sure those good reasons supersede the potentially disastrous consequences though. Without a doubt though, ubiquitous spying is not compatible with the stated principles of our gov't.

>Have you considered the military may see the public as a threat to national security that may have to be neutralized at a given moments notice?

Yes. There are probably high ranking military officers who believe that moment is now.

>Surely defending our country from anarchy is a legitimate function of the military?

It is most certainly not, at least not without specific constraints.
Everything is Free. Be Happy
> And I still consider what Google provides (search, gmail) "free"

And you would join a large number of people who have recently started using that word to mean "can cost any amount in anything of value as long as it's not currency". So sure, it's "free" in that way and still not free in the definition of the term that's actually useful to people. Boring semantic argument, let's drop it.

As to the rest, this is a much better way of phrasing it than in terms of Google's "generosity", which is what I was pointing out as flawed.
Yes, I'd like to add it to ImageOptim. However, I don't want anybody to accidentally ruin their source images, so I'm looking for an elegant UI for lossy optimizations. Feedback welcome:

https://github.com/pornel/ImageOptim/issues/17
I respect that opinion ... but there was a time such that if America failed so would the whole world. It is not the people of America, but her ideas. I still feel America is our best hope unless someone wants to start all over again. It is truly sad to see governments keep their citizens poor. All of this greed to the detriment of our fellow man.
This is a godsend. Thank you to the developer, I'm already using it. It's cut transparent png-24s by 60% with no perceivable difference. Graphic designers rejoice!
This story has had some interesting developments.. check the bottom of the comments. He has now changed his Yelp name and removed his profile pic. It was unprofessional from the start, but now it's getting really ridiculous.
One of the valuable things about Pomodoro is just the forcing factor. You might have a bunch of random tasks with varying lengths, but getting into the habit of "I will work on X until this signal" forces you to actually start and get into the swing of work, rather than procrastinate.
Hm, is there a market there? Tracking of tricks, scheduling hoes, budgeting, tracking money in drug/alcohol funds, and oversight dashboards for pimps? I mean, they need software too, right?
How about a groupon but for cruise ships?