skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For loose definitions of 'works'
"error establishing a database connection" is all I get
NSA admits rare willful surveillance violations
It has worked just fine for Python, now. Maybe your impressions of how well it went were set in 2010 and not revisited?
Damn. The powers that be better do something about this fast. SF is about one of the last places in the US to develop new things.

Heck just a temporary prolonged outage of Google alone would have huge negative consequences for the US (not to mention the world). Amazon AWS US west is in Northeren California. I wonder how big the negative effect will be on just how many companies?
Damn you, autocorrect!

(I was on my phone at the time, HN's edit lock has enshrined it now, enjoy).
The Truth About Marissa Mayer: An Unauthorized Biography
JavaScript's design is clearly much more coherent than PHP's. Whereas PHP's developers have added features haphazardly over several years, the JavaScript language hasn't changed much since its initial design in 1995. Warts aside, having a (barely) complete initial design that was done by one person over a short time and has since been mostly left alone is an advantage. And JavaScript is flexible enough that library and framework developers have been able to explore several different approaches while the language remains frozen. Therefore, it's quite misguided to lump JavaScript in with PHP in terms of language design.

It's certainly not accurate to categorize JS as a functional language, but it is flexible enough that one can program in a more or less functional style; and unlike PHP, it always has been.

Also, I've read several of your anti-JS diatribes, and I feel compelled to ask this: What drives you to denigrate JavaScript, and programmers who willingly choose to use it, wherever you can? Do you feel the need to show your superiority by bashing the languages that many programmers use to produce useful applications despite their lack of expertise? Can we not accept that all mainstream languages have warts, and that in many cases, practicality may dictate that we use a language that doesn't please us aesthetically but is nevertheless useful?
> Making nice with the Executive Branch maybe gets you favorite treatment from the DoJ or IRS -- maybe.

You mean, like these?

- A tap on a wrist from the FTC for multiple complaints around abuse of market power: http://ftc.gov/opa/2013/01/google.shtm

- A fine of $22.5M for wilfully subverting Apple Safari user's privacy settings: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2012/08/google.shtm

- A fine of $7 million for collecting private user data from unsecured Wi-fi networks: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20130312-709686.html
The claim is sexist and it would be stronger without the wealthy-looking bit, but when building a dating site it's definitely the women that will matter. I think the OP's point (by analogy) is knowing which side of the market is constraining you and focusing on that.

For dating sites, men go where the women are and it's women who have more optionality, including not joining a dating site altogether. So if you're building one you have to think about what your women customers want first and foremost.
What's concerning about companies that don't delete user info is that they don't consider it a liability, or don't believe they can be hacked. If people tell you to delete their PII and you don't, then lose it, isn't that a lawsuit waiting to happen?
Here is the video to accompany the presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNO_CYUjMK8 [30:55]
As far as economics math not representing reality: I think it's obvious enough that humans don't behave the way these equations assume. However, they are a great framework from which to think about how humans actually behave.

There's a problem: the only reason you would build a model is to predict things from it. If the model can't do that for you what you are doing has stopped being science and had turned into something else. Again: if the "framework from which to think about how humans ... behave" can't predict how humans behave in actuality looking at such frameworks is an exercise in futility.
Why is the author comparing apples to oranges?
Facebook kills physical Gifts in favor of digital redemption codes
Engineer left NASA to make awesome wearable tech Halloween costumes
We have reached a point where, no matter how few violations occur and no matter how innocuous they may be, the average person will always believe the NSA is doing things that are much more extreme than what is reported. The secret nature of the NSA (and all intelligence gathering) simply means rational people will always be able to justify fears of conspiracy, tyranny, and Big Brother (now that the Snowden revelations have come to light).

What would it take for people to stop fearing an encroaching surveillance state? The complete dismantling of NSA and the government-intelligence complex? Even then, intelligent people would have reason to doubt that secret facilities did not exist somewhere.

I cannot see how any of this can be resolved.

EDIT: I'd like to add another "meta" remark about NSA discussion on the internet.

Anyone who frequents HN, or reddit's r/technology, or similar boards, will be familiar with the universal bashing of NSA and rampant speculation of what they may be doing. Invariably, snarky and profoundly cynical comments are at the top: these do not help. Instead, they react to the new sensationalist headline about how "NSA has done something else!!" by bashing the NSA, American government, Obama, or all three. In effect, every thread about the NSA is our version of the daily "Two Minutes of Hate", the ritual from Orwell's 1984 where workers get up and scream, releasing their ire and accomplishing nothing but self-pacifying catharsis.

We do not need that. Instead of beating the dead horse to make ourselves feel better and go back to "normal" life, we need to do something productive. Let's say something new and thoughtful, rather than cynical witticisms.
Anyone else find this line offensive & presumptious of the author?

"Mayer calls herself a geek, but she doesn’t look the part. With her blonde hair, blue eyes, and glamorous style, she has Hollywood-actress good looks."
Mirror: http://thestringer.com.au.nyud.net/google-and-the-nsa-whos-h...
+1 thanks, that was interesting. Good point on the destabilizing influence of putting excess power back into the hands of a very small number of people.
You are giving too much credit to your internet usage preference and its relation to a company being relevant and successful.
From experience at IBM, it was just as terrible there.
Well, first I think it's irrelevant with what we were saying. Secondly, I doubt there will ever be such a document toward PHP, since it wasn't conceived with a linguistic background (Rasmus Lerdorf wanted a pragmatic dynamic layer on top of C code without resorting to perl). There's no special abstraction principle in PHP, as opposed to prototyping, which (after a quick wikicheck) is not a core abstraction in mainstream languages and could benefit from a book explaining how to think in it. PHP is more and more aiming toward mainstream class based OOP, and everything has been said about it but I can be wrong.
It doesn't seem to work in IE11.
Now we need a FOIA Request API wrapper for data recovery.
> Remember that Casimir effect measurements are carried out by applying an external force to move two plates together

So an external field not under control cannot be present (i.e. the experimenter is not putting more energy into the system) to obtain measurements?
What on Earth is the point of that p2read site?

Here's the article this pointless link massively paraphrases:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-08/23/mark-rober-co...
> When it becomes illegal to stage mass protests about anything?

As long as you're in a "free speech zone".

> When the media is directly owned by the state, as it is in many places?

Since the US is basically a corporatocracy, we're already there.

> When journalists and activists are jailed, as they are in many places?

Already happening. Assange abroad, Barrett Brown here in the US.

> When the media feels in any way uncomfortable roundly criticizing the government?

That's been happening here for years. Why does the US not have it's Jeremy Paxman?

> (3) Political mobilization is fine. No repression.

You're joking, right? The Occupy protests in Texas? Infiltration of protest groups and false flag events? Tch.
Python - Become a logging expert in 30 minutes
This is great! Exactly what I am looking for.
1 day car insurance
why not? assuming 100% paralalism, isn't it simply the amount of computations you can do in a certain period of time?
What Makes an Work of Art Seem Dated?
"the basic formula of pairing known stars with compelling stories has not and will not change"

Didn't it change with the advent of the modern TV Shows?

How big were Schwimmer, Laurie or Cranston as stars before their show made a hit? Laurie was locally known but not that much.

With modern show, you have select good actors for their role, not stars from an universal pool, and that's what changed.

And I fail to name terribly many films in the last ten years that can be compared to the best TV shows which are a plenty.
Do you pay anything for the gmail integration?
i would add the problem of movement forces on the storage space. he has open, flat shelves. open in the direction of the vehicle, so the first attempt of breaking harder will throw a bunch of stuff around, incl. that slide out keyboard.

RVs and boats need to be designed differentlty, a house rarely moves.
Is still still needed now that Android has SELinux implemented?
What do you mean admits, is Iran responsible???
Sounds like there's an untapped $65 billion market that other VCs won't touch. What opportunity!
> The market isn't "films". It is "entertainment".

Kevin Spacey on this subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0ukYf_xvgc.
My impressions with Sass
And unfortunately Windows support is one of Rust's weak spots. Which will be sorted in the future of course, but it needs some tenacious souls to donate some time if it's going to happen any sooner. Game devs will need this in particular, and they are probably going to be one of Rust's primary groups of users. (in fact, anecdotally it feels like they already are)
Believe me. You don't want to know the kind of nasty stuff that people like Marty Lev, Rachel Whetstone and David Drummond are involved in.

These are bad times to be a Google employee after having been lied to for so long and many inside of the company are afraid of asking.
Look at the light coming off the far side of the sun post-impact.

It's almost unbelievable how an object "tens of meters" in diameter can affect an object nearly 1.4 Billion meters in diameter.

Just startling.

(Note, comets average 20k mph, so we're still talking maybe 2/1000th's of a percent of c, right? It's not like it's a relativistic bomb or anything... yet billions of meters away, a light burst nearly instantaneous upon impact.)
Take a look at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT/Books+Tut...

It covers more then just recommendation systems - but has some real gems.
Surprisingly enough I’ve end up taking most of my photos with a smartphone. I used to carry around a compact camera but even that felt meaningless after I discovered how sharp photos can a modern smartphone produce. Plus software like Lightroom makes it easy to enhance the quality of your pictures a lot. So since the phone is the one device I carry with me all the time I see no point of having yet another gadget with me. As for my DSLR it's eating dust in some shelve on my library, I rarely ever use it these days.

I’d love to get my hands sometime in the future on the 40 megapixel smartphone announced by Nokia.
The comet only appears to explode because of a coronal mass ejection. The article attributes the coronal mass ejection to "an explosion on the other side of the star" and suggests that the timing was coincidental. It's unfortunate that the video does not make this clear.
There's some seriously funky stuff going on in the console if you look at it in chrome.
Ahh, but therein lies the rub. The movie-making business is fine, its the disties that are the problem.

The problem is this, a good movie is subjective. Go to your local movie festival, 90% of the entries will be clichéd lumbering trite. 7% will be good by comparison, but you wouldn't recommend them to your friends, much less bet money on them. This leaves 3% that are quality. Of that 3% 20% might be profitable.

People go to cinemas to see movies that interest them. If they go to a cinema, they understand that the content is hand picked and is going to be high quality. This is how HBO works. They select scripts/concepts that they think are good. They are overwhelmed by wannabe directors who are frankly rubbish. In the same way the a good VC is overwhelmed by instagram clones.

There is a need for a gate keeper, to maintain quality. arguably these gate keepers are more likley to be TV execs (HBO bankrolled the new Liberace movie) or people like netflicks
From the blog post:

> We have tightened Docker’s default access control configuration, to make it more suitable for use on a host machine shared with untrusted applications. Running docker commands now requires either root privileges, or a user account included in the “docker” group.

> This means that after upgrading to 0.6, you will need sudo to run docker commands.

> Don’t worry, you can revert your configuration with the “-H” flag. Just make sure you understand the security implications!
An excellent primer on modern OpenGL I've found to be here (one I've shamelessly cribbed and adapted when teaching):

http://duriansoftware.com/joe/An-intro-to-modern-OpenGL.-Cha...
What was it we had earlier today? Ah, yes: "The actions, said a second U.S. official briefed on them, were the work of overzealous NSA employees or contractors eager to prevent any encore to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks." [1]

And now we have: "one analyst disciplined for using NSA resources to track a former spouse."

Overzealous indeed.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-23/nsa-analysts-intent...
When did the actual observation that gold economies are not more stable happen?

The list provided only shows that they also have crises -- it doesn't show how those crises measure (respective to fiat currency economies) in magnitude, frequency and consequences.
Austin also got nice startup scene.
I've been kind of hoping for this, all that high-end DSLR gear will suddenly become affordable on the used market.

With photography, at least to me, you don't need the latest and greatest thing.
"TBH I don't get why public urination deserves more than a ticket as deterrence. Listing someone as a convicted sex offender is quite frankly absurd for such a benign infraction."

Sex offender registration is absurd regardless of the crime. The entire concept was a knee-jerk reaction to a rare crime, and now we have to deal with a class of outcasts who have trouble finding a place to live:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Tuttle_Causeway_sex_offe...
Why should he mention depth of field? Two out of the three "compact" cameras he mentions having are equipped with APS-C sensors, which, while smaller than 35mm, are still plenty large for most uses. They're used in DSLRs too. The third one is a Micro 4/3 sensor, which is just a little bit smaller compared to the APS-C. And then you have for example the Leica M8 & M9, both with large sensors. They're not DSLRs either.
Steve Ballmer, Meet Ibn Khaldun
Windows 8.1 is ready for its October 17th release
"Why Silicon Valley will never beat Hollywood" inaccurately summarized the piece (see the bottom of the article, where the author says the industry could go either way).

Also, IMO, having inflammatory titles beginning with "Why..." is way too common on HN and is way more of an annoyance than headline-rewriting.
Amazing. This is the first WebGL demo running fluently on my system... a 7 year old Athlon Dual Core.
You never needed to prefork. One process can open a listening socket and share it with an unrelated process via file-descriptor passing.
With lenses like the Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8, we are starting to see how depth of field issues might be improved. There's a very long way to go though.

I agree that it's very likely to happen, although I'm not sure we're there yet. The VF-4 EVF does finally have what I would call a 'barely-acceptable' resolution, but I think 4K resolution EVFs will be required to really equal the detail someone with good eyesight can see through a good optical viewfinder.

The other issue I've had with all EVFs I've tried (which doesn't include the VF-4) is the input lag is, although small, quite noticeable. Until that's fixed, EVFs are very unlikely to replace optical viewfinders for sports and wildlife photographers.

Similarly, it's hard to beat the speed of the phase-detect autofocus in professional bodies at the moment. Again, that's fixable, probably with a combination of better on-sensor phase detection and more advanced algorithms to mix phase-detect and contrast-detect data together, but I think we're still at least two generations away from a system that can accurately track a fast-moving and erratic object.

Once those issues are resolved though, I can very quickly see the DSLR losing significant market share. There's simply too many advantages to mirrorless cameras -- no heavy, soft, expensive retrofocus wide-angle lenses, no calibration issues between the focus module and the image sensor, no heavy mirror to flip out of the way for every shot, full exposure simulation through the viewfinder (and a host of useful overlays), etc. etc.

Some photographers, of course, don't need focus tracking, and can probably put up with a less-than-stellar viewfinder resolution, which is why a lot of landscape photographers (who also often don't need a narrow depth of field) are already moving towards mirrorless, at least as a second camera.

Personally, apart from the investment I have in SLR glass, I am looking forward to the advantages that mirrorless cameras will bring in a few years time.
> The company also claims it can be more productive with the trucks — it’s more expensive to hire drivers and handle the logistics of moving them back and forth from the iron mines.

Followed by:

>But the reason why the technology is picking up in the mines is partly out of necessity. Partly because Rio Tinto can afford it.

Let's face it. Anything to not pay pensions and workman's comp.
The webshop is impressive, but lacks a basic item: a simple GPIO-controlled solid-state relay. It is the simplest (apart from blinking leds) and only necessary building block to get the Pi to actually do something in the real world (such as opening/closing a garage door).
Current mirrorless cameras still can not compete with DSLR for sports and safari photography. Other than that I don't see the need to carry such heavy equipment. Currently using Lumix m4/3 but is tempted by Fujifilm X100s.
look more 'professional' (aka those only using automatic mode)

A DSLR usually means a larger, bigger sensor, better accessories, and better/selectable lenses. Using manual modes is a trivial, side value of SLRs (actually not even sure why it is mentioned given that every "P&S" I've had in the past decade has had full manual control as well), but in no way is a requirement to yield value from them.

As a sidenote, one of the burdens of carrying a decent camera -- for those moments that only happen once -- is that someone often makes a snarky quip about being a professional.
> Social welfare, and free money to the unemployed, are going to become an obligate, long-term realities

Something tells me from watching what is going on in places like greece, spain, and even stateside in places like detroit and camden, that the above is not going to happen. Or should people expect central banks to print more and allocate more debt to people?
The author alludes to the fact there are better models for representing social graphs, but I think the pdf linked from the article is missing (or rather, only briefly mentioning) a very important model: The Albert-Barabasi model.

This model basically says that when a new node joins the network, it will prefer to attach itself to already popular nodes. For example, when a new user signs up to Twitter, there's a larger chance it will follow celebs with many followers, than the average Joe. Another example: when a new small ISP starts operating, there's a larger chance it will connect to a well-established higher-tier ISP serving many small ISPs, than to a random ISP. This phenomenon is observed in many other contexts: actors appearing together in movies, citations between scientific papers, sexual relations among people...

For more information: http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/~shavitt/courses/LargeG/intro-BigDa... (last 2 pages)

Disclaimer: This is material from a course taught by my advisor.
One point the author misses is that phones have cameras now that eclipsing the 'budget' point and shoot models (often the profit centers for camera makers), and the 'pro-sumer' M4/3ds cameras are eating away at the DSLR high end. Not a fun time to be a camera company. (well profit wise, lots of pressure to innovate and try new things like a camera that "Oh hey! Its a phone too!")
Yeah because I have as many cores as I have concurrent HTTP requests, and obviously it's CPU bound...
This was well before that time. It was already well established when it was a competitor to Digg.
Why is YAGNI a good rule?
> The idea that threads or processes are intrinsically slow was sheer unmitigated propaganda, and probably not only failed to contain a grain of truth, but are actively false.

Threads / processes:

* Run some code from A
* Save state, context switch
* Run some code from B
* Save state, context switch

* Deal with locking, synchronisation, etc

vs

* Run some code.

There is absolutely no instances where [num threads] > [num cores] is as efficient as not using more threads than cores.
I have a technically literate friend who chose not to install Adblock in their web browser because they find it entertaining to see ads on the web while they browse. There's probably lots of people who enjoy these things.
I'm not normally a fan of Krugman but I give him props for pulling Khaldun out.

The entire passage beginning with:

> "This implies that the new rulers are at first considered “barbarians” by comparison to the old ones..."

was also expounded upon at length by Toynbee in "A Study of History". The 'creative minority' that is the heart and soul of most economic/political efforts (such as building out of the American industrial base in the 19th-20th centuries) later becomes the 'dominant minority' that is more interested in holding the power given to them by previous generations rather than building out the company/corporation/empire. As the dominant minority lose their grip and their power, a new generation of 'barbarians' or outsiders (as viewed by the decaying powerbase) fills the vacuum left by the old elites.

It's a dynamic we see time and again in smaller and larger spheres of human activity.
tinfoil 20 years from now the headline will be: "TSA brain scanners achieved by NSA, citizens shocked but docile."
You Can't Fix People
I'm looking forward to the invention of a new kind of physics too.