skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does this mean you have chosen not to work with labels (indie or otherwise) or just that the majority of takeup has been from unsigned artists?
It's interesting that in a thread about inferential statistics you are asserting inferences based on anecdotes with very small sample size, rather than statistics. It's possible that there haven't been enough MOOC statistics classes to really make a significant inference, but that seems to suggest "we'll have to wait and see" rather than "they're all shit".
Just a heads up: I just tried to signup for the newsletter and got a nasty Rails error page (500). It turns out Iwas browsing with JS turned off (using NoScript). It worked fine after activating JS.
Intel’s former chief architect: Moore’s law will be dead within a decade
Loving it! Keep doing what you're doing. One thing I just noticed-- I clicked the Like button which then prompted me to sign up. After doing that I was returned to the same page, but had to click the like button. It's a small thing but applying the action that prompted the signup automatically instead of having to redo it would be a bit of a usability enhancement. Also, an edit button on an already submitted review would be good instead of having to delete and retype.
The NSA has its own team of elite hackers

And the sky is /looks blue .

Maybe that's why there's no gag order or NDA for the former employees that detail what they did. Everyone knows and expects it.
"A lot of those "Just type this!" solutions I've seen involve sudo somewhere."

Not sure if you're alluding to this trick: http://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste

This particular exploit could be rather nasty when used in conjunction with the above.
Isn't this essentially what Maslow's hierarchy states?
Show HN: A Chrome Extension for contextual LinkedIn searches
One of the most Pavlovian I've encountered is in InAppPurchases. A confirm button will be repeated in the same corner of a dialog box 9 out of 10 times, but the 10th time it will be replaced with a single-click purchase.

Basically the UI Is set up to purposefully hotswap to confuse the user into accidental purchases.

I've also seen purchase buttons placed extremely near edges in order to capture edge gestures and convert them into purchases.

Used on several of gamelofts latest free to play games.
Extraordinary Court Statement (re. UK Govt. and David Miranda)
If you understand statistics you should understand the difference between anecdotal evidence and statistical data. You have one online course you're comparing to a handful of in-person courses you, personally, have taken.

There are hundreds of online courses and hundreds of thousands of in-person courses. You should know it's not a good idea to make inference about ALL MOOC's based on one example or ALL in-person courses based on a handful of classes.

If your statistics classes didn't teach you this concept, I'd say it was those classes that did a poor job.
Texting a person that is driving in NJ? You might be liable for their car crash
I would count it's development and publication as another example of the NSA being a bit ahead as it very much looks like they developed an algorithm in secret with a backdoor. I would count the fact that the public found it (after a few years) a point for public crypto research.
Better yet instead of sending it to /dev/null save it on disk and reload it whenever the process needs it again.
Oh wait that is how virtual memory works.
And the NSA is limited to not collecting details on Americans.
This Unicode string will crash your mac browser
سمَـَّوُوُحخ ̷̴̐خ ̷̴̐خ ̷̴̐خ امارتيخ ̷̴̐خ
>dead tree books

Go back to reddit, kid.
Thank you for this! It looks pretty awesome.
I would think he could quit saying it was not profitable. The argument is that because he mentioned an order he violated the gag order.

It is stupid. It is blatantly Unconstitutional. I would hope he'd be suing for declaratory judgement that his conduct did not violate the law (now that he has been threatened with arrest he has standing to sue, I think).
Make A Movie Poster
Why Don't Americans Ride Trains?
So, I have lots of ideas. You want to share your idea with me, and I sign an NDA prior to hearing it. Turns out I already had that idea, and with that NDA, haven't you basically just stolen my idea from me?

No thanks. I am not a lawyer, I don't trust my ability to parse an NDA and accurately and confidently predict exactly what is covered and what is not, nor do I want to predict whether you tie me up in some bullshit lawsuit that will go nowhere but waste my time and money.

No. I just don't see what is in it for me relative to the risks.
Apple confirms Apple Store iPhone trade-in program has launched today
Chrome Web Store - Ember Inspector
The extension itself is pretty simple. I wanted to share my learning about building a Chrome extension, using the LinkedIn Javascript API, and using the AWS S3 boto library. I figured this information may be interesting to some people on HN.
You have an issue with the wikipedia definition?

http://www.whistleblower.org/about/what-is-a-whistleblower

http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/focusareas/government_e...

https://www.gov.uk/whistleblowing/overview

https://www.internationalwhistleblowers.com/contact-iwb/800-...

http://definitions.uslegal.com/w/whistleblowers-law/

http://www.whistleblowers.org/index.php?option=com_content&t...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/06/10/190380255/wha...

Pick whatever definition you want. This document doesn't fit it.
Use PS to make folding ruler font effect
Ask HN: Have you worked for any virtual/remote assistant companies?
Have you worked for any companies that handle appointments, cancel services, etc? What was your experience like? Please name them if you had a positive experience.
Yeah, but you can get a startup company's technology going with Ruby, Python, or PHP.

However, if you espouse an absolutist "victim of circumstances" ideology like the article:

The finding further undercuts the theory that poor people, through inherent weakness, are responsible for their own poverty – or that they ought to be able to lift themselves out of it with enough effort.

You are doomed.
Regarding Amazon, I highly doubt that. As an Amazon employee, I know that only staff administrators with government clearance/certification can access AWS-GovCloud systems for maintenance. And the auditing of maintenance is pretty intense too.
and they enjoy HN too, I suppose.
I get the feeling that companies don't like to talk about or advertise the patents that they own, because it's fantastic for them if somebody else independently has the brilliant idea of rounded corners on the casing of a portable screen.
You mean installing Homebrew itself? Because if you're running "sudo brew install foo" you're doing it wrong.
We use Neural Networks to extract text transcripts from our video stream, the process is extremely complicated as the stream is in Arabic which is a fairly complex language.

the system is fed with the actual transcript for some videos so it can learn with time and minimize error.

the overall system is incredibly useful as you can search the video stream of a TV channel for a specific keyword.

I have also used self organizing maps before for creating a recommendation engine.

I think it works a better than typical recommendation engines because you can feed the network features based on multiple criterias (in addition to taxonomies, you can also feed user geographic location, and click patterns etc ..)
Also location, network, lack of friends and family support, mental illness, pressure from peers to conform to a low standard...
I've got a bunch of 3rd and 4th edition cards, how do I find the id of a given card?
There's a lot of critique that could be leveraged against Facebook, but I don't understand how you could call it trivial.
How Big Data Enabled Spotify To Change The Music Industry
By stopping reporting that, they have divulged that they received a letter. So once you receive one, in order to avoid prosecution, you need to keep your notification up as a continuous lie.
I don't see anything surprising here... Pick a government, any government, do you really think they don't recruit their best hackers for such team? Or was the general thought that only China's gov makes viruses to target other countries? I even know someone in my country who got recruited into our gov's hacking team after being arrested.
We have only chosen not to work with non-indie labels. We are all about independent music only. We've approached and been approached by indie labels too, however most of them demand a minimum upfront payment, which isn't the best thing to do for us. So as of now 90% of the music has been procured directly from the artists (not necessarily unsigned but signed with non-exclusive deal).
Gigdog - Internet Radio for Local Music
I don't see him condoning mass surveillance. I see him condoning being aware that mass surveillance is happening.
Never seen one, but I imagine the NLS reads along the lines of "not giving any indication" -- so if you stopped telling the world, you'd be going against it.

The people who do this for a living aren't stupid, and most of them probably don't even think they're being evil.
Python Weekend Challenge - $$
Is it available for download outside of slideshare?
Eric Blair (known to some as George Orwell) wrote two of the most biting descriptions of the grind of poverty:

Down and out in Paris and London

http://www.george-orwell.org/Down_and_Out_in_Paris_and_Londo...

The Road to Wigan Pier

http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/
Cool post, but those aren't sonnets.
There's a dichotomy here on HN:
Best marketing practice generally praises upselling and A/B testing conversions to increase sales and profits.

But, taking these to a natural conclusion typically results in exactly the Dark Patterns we see here: where users are tricked or misled into agreeing to things they might not if they were offered clear, open and full disclosure upfront.

We can identify dark patterns - but in many cases, these are here because they work. At least, large international businesses such as RyanAir believe that they have a positive outcome which overwhelms any damage to the brand.

I would like to know: how can we resolve these two ideas and run ethical but viable/competitive businesses?
"That was before the Patriot Act and National Security Letters. Now, presumably, Nacchio would just comply. Protection rackets are easier when you have the law backing you up."

Reminds me of this old chestnut:

Q: Why does the government prosecute the Mafia?

A: They don't want any competition.
Homebrew fails if you attempt to run it with sudo.
"If [...], it is possible to become the super user by running `sudo -k` and then resetting the system clock to 01-01-1970"

Can users reset the Mac OS X system clock without being an admin?
Me too. I use my e-reader to keep lots of recipes. Would like a spill resistant machine.
Espruino - Javascript microcontroller (web developers can finally hack hardware)
very nice. I am working on something similar for independent movies. Good UI
The Frederick Douglass speech is really good. But dipping into that list I mostly get the feeling "you had to be there".
i wonder how those links to linkedin are going to go over ?
Mr. and Mrs. Kidall, and back then IBM NDAs etc. were so onerous they would essentially own your product/company if they so choose. I was told this specifically about the MIT AI Lab's Lisp Machine, they were approached by IBM but turned them down after a MIT lawyer looked at the agreement.

Digital Research had an existing business to protect, Microsoft didn't have an OS business besides their licensed XENIX, and was just starting to branch out from computer languages (e.g. BASIC). It was a calculated risk for both, and for all we know against the Kidalls IBM would have gotten away with a lot more than against Bill Gates.

Who I'd note was massively connected through his family, e.g. his mother, per Wikipedia:

"Beyond the Seattle area, Gates was appointed to the board of directors of the national United Way in 1980, becoming the first woman to lead it in 1983. Her tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed with John Opel, a fellow committee member who was the chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation, her son's company. Mr. Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other I.B.M. executives.

A few weeks later, I.B.M. took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer."

His father was principle counsel and later a named partner in a major white shoe law firm. He wasn't someone IBM could casually screw over.
No more compile-install-run. On-device live previews of Android layouts.
The "Amadeu Antonio Stiftung" has a list [1] of 183 deaths after 1990, where they describe the circumstances of each death. There is also a German wikipedia article that discusses different statistics [2].

Sorry, both sources are in German. Maybe Google translate will help a little?

[1] http://www.mut-gegen-rechte-gewalt.de/news/chronik-der-gewal...

[2] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todesopfer_rechtsextremer_Gewal...
I'm sure you will think I'm difficult to deal with then, but I actually take it one step further.

If a person starts to tell me about an idea and I know that we're in the same industry, I will sometimes stop him and let him know that he shouldn't tell me anything that he wants to keep for himself. When you're faced with a certain problem, it's very likely that your solution will look like somebody else's and I don't want anybody upset with me because I "stole" their idea.

Signing an NDA puts you in a bad position and even if there is no real legal threat because of vague formulation or whatever, you risk making enemies which in itself can cost a lot of time one way or another.
> daemontools / supervise doesn't have it and it's a fairly popular solution.

Ok, it doesn't exactly support the quoted feature ("stop restarting if it exceeds X attempts in Y seconds"), but it does sleep for a second between restart attempts to mitigate the same problem: http://cr.yp.to/daemontools/supervise.html
> Most of what they do should be classified.

Which leads to the current abuses.
Let's just accept that it is a poor analogy and a sensational title?
If you're talking to someone in a public park, and a stranger with a badge comes up and starts video recording your discussion while commenting "don't mind me, it's just an administrative search", and this happens to pretty much everyone all the time, you DON'T respond with "well, there is virtually no situation in which you should have a reasonable expectation of privacy."
$150 each, correct change only.
Saw the post on the front page about Spotify for indie music ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6301478 ) so I figured I would (finally) make an account and submit this one too. This company's coming out of the UVa Darden i.Lab incubator here in Charlottesville, VA.

(Disclosure: I'm a co-founder at another company in the incubator.)
Really like this. Now a few songs in from the hot recommendations on your homepage and already hooked. I have a small side venture that could be a nice integration point for your artists (free as well). If interested, email is in my profile.
I think USPS is basically the same way. I just shipped something with Signature Confirmation. The only thing I needed was the tracking number, and then I could sign up to receive an email with the signature in a PDF. Maybe you have to sign up before it's delivered though.
Finally a chance to learn Haskell and iOS development at the same time! Will I be able to do this all from a Linux machine or do I still need Apple hardware?
anon, sorry I was not completely clear:

I hate to make this request, but I need half to 2/3rds of the students to drop the course. I'm hoping that you will still be able to learn a lot from the class -- but I need to find a mechanism to make the class smaller. Being strict on attendance seemed like the "least bad" of several rather unattractive alternatives.

I'm hoping that someone has a better idea, and I'm completely open. Please come and see me in 739 Soda.
There are a bunch of e-ink readers out there already that do well with PDFs.
I have an e-reader made by PocketBook (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PocketBook_International) which is 10.5 inches long and does PDF very well. Amazon also made a bigger Kindle called the DX. That one wasn't quite as good as PocketBook at doing PDFs, in my opinion, but it offered all the other Kindle features.

It will be nice if Sony makes a 13.3" e-reader. Hopefully the software won't be terrible...
Then I guess you would have no problem giving him (or anyone else) a read-only access to all your mail that doesn't mention authentication data (passwords and such)?

Or a read-only access to whatever online service you're currently using?
Is that really a dichotomy? Tricking or misleading customers may increase conversions and upselling, but you don't need to do that to achieve that goal. Instead you can offer legitimate value and information that might help a customer make such a choice.
>I guess I'm one of the few people(?) who like the OOM killer.

Diff'rent strokes. I also like the OOM killer, its a dastardly wonderful thing to tie lots of safety-critical things to .. and in the SIL-4 OS business (my domain), it is indeed a crash imperative to understand how to use the OOM properly. Or: not.

So in this light .. I know Erlang is "the thing" right now, but I feel I must just mention that:

>Of course, this works better when you have many small processes rather than few monolithic ones. But now you're designing an Erlang system :)

.. one could also be designing a Lua-based distribution, or JVM, or whatever you like, essentially, and integrating with oom_killer. There's nothing Erlang'y about it. Because if you're playing with the oom_killer, you're really making a distribution choice, in the topology.

If your app cares about oom, well kiddo .. you better not be doing anything less than excercising complete control over your distro, its launch policies, its use of the TextSegment as installed, and so on. Absolutely you're making Distribution decisions about the functionality of the combined system. oom_killer isn't useful by itself.

My point being, worrying about oom_killer isn't just something Erlang users need think about, nor are they the only ones who really 'get' why an oom_killer can be used nicely .. if you're building a distro, either for use as an embedded machine, a tight secure server image, or indeed even as a desktop user, well .. careful memory integration is, as you say, a harsh pass.

Incidentally, I use the oom_killer exactly as you mention, in a few embedded distro applications, specifically indeed, a kill of whatever 'lua' is hogging resources. Its an extraordinarily functional mechanism for recovery ..
SO doesn't allow talky SV navel gazing opinion threads though.
Google Brings Waze Integration To Google Maps Mobile Apps
Tyler, good post. I agree with you on most of it. I think your issue really becomes (and this is why I refuse to sign them most of the time): the cost of defending an NDA is usually not worth the cost of the engagement. I.e. if the project is worth under $20k to you, its not worth the potential cost of hiring a lawyer to defend it. Also what are these people building? nuclear weapons? most ideas aren't as original as people think.
On top of everything else, you should probably look into what schizophrenia actually entails.
Very clean design and the UI is really nice to use - great site and great music :) I would suggest however to show genre on the "What's Hot" list or add filtering by genre like on the "Explore" list.
> "You should expect that everything you put anywhere is going to be read by spies."

I assume this is hyperbole, but even if it is, the whole point is that we shouldn't have to live in a world where this assumption is anywhere close to valid. The spies, after all, are paid for by taxpayer dollars.

> "You should assume a well-funded government is reading everything[1] all the time. I suspect that makes more of a difference if you're in $Oppressive_Regime than in the US or UK."

The latter sentence might be reassuring today, but since both countries are building the infrastructure of a surveillance state today, who's to say that years from now living in the US or the UK will be any different than living in Myanmar or Saudi Arabia? Better to prevent the infrastructure from being built in the first place than to trust that it will be used responsibly by a government which fundamentally has no incentive to do so.

> "And if people really did care why would they dump so much stuff onto Facebook?"

Maybe they just don't understand how their shared info can be used against them by governments, advertisers, etc? People were up in arms when some employers started demanding passwords to their FB accounts. That indicates that people understand on some level that their FB data can be used against them.
I was unaware of being placed in the admin group by default. Is the admin group similar to the wheel group or is there also a wheel group for sudo access?

And yes, I very seldom run scripts copied from somebody else so when I do, I make sure I know what is being run. Granted, I'm a Linux and Windows user so the OSX philosophy might be different.
> But if you want to see the code and hear about the non-public deals then you sign an NDA.
I think most people would be fine with an NDA that just covered the code and a small slice of the deals. As long as it just covers specifics. Most people probably would just tell you to not show stuff you want to keep that secret though.
They became popular because of Founder Fame by Association.

They started requiring registration because they belong to The Cult Of Registered User Metrics and they forgot the internet is 98% read and 2% contribute.
I observe this at the grocery store. The ones I visit have people from a wide range of economic status. When I go in, I grab what I need and don't think about price - it's almost always just the staples like bread, milk, fruit and eggs, and I know with certainty that I can afford it. And that I don't think about price is literally true until I'm told how much it costs, then I pay it, then I promptly stop thinking about it. I know my eating habits, I know my income, and I know that my eating habits are well within my budget, so it's not worth spending any more cycles on it.

Contrast this with the people who, upon learning that some item in their basket is not actually on sale, put a different item back. Or split the cost of the groceries across a WIC card and cash. Or use five coupons for a small basket.

For me, going to get groceries is an afterthought - I'm out of certain food, I'm out of my place, so I'll pick them up. But for some other people, it's clear to me that visiting the grocery store is an exercise in risk management and weighing priorities. In other words, being poor is hard work.
Ask HN: College starts Monday. Any software to optimize my class schedule?
About a year or so ago, I wrote that I would be returning to college to complete my CS degree, after dropping out from a different college in 2006 after my first year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4702484

Due to some bureaucratic snafus, I only got my electronic acceptance letter yesterday, with classes starting on Monday; but hey, c'est la vie.

As I said in the post I linked to, I've become much more strategic about life. I want to optimize my college schedule so I can make the most efficient use of my time. The university has published a list of available timeslots for the classes I'll be taking. Is there any software that allows me to input the subjects, and available times, and then have it solve for things like "early classes where possible, no classes after X PM, available free days, etc.?

Help a hacker out!

PS. Feel free to throw in any college tips :)