skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Has your book ever been messed with?
I recently found out that certain higher ed textbooks were messed around by the authorized regional publisher(eg: publisher of Indian edition, Chinese edition, etc) of that book. By messed around, I mean, the errors weren't updated or pages were missing and such.

Has this ever happened to you as an author, or even as a reader? If so how much of it did/would you tolerate and what actions you might take?

I'm just trying to understand what a reasonable course of action would be.
Why do you think so? I am sure they are proud of working for such a fine agency. With their skillset they certainly would have other options but choose to do NSA work instead.

The sad truth is that I'm not even being ironic here. I am sure the us vs. them ideology is deeply rooted with many three letter agency employees. Any form of backslash is therefore interpreted as a confirmation that they are doing the right thing and those not "with" them do not understand / undermine their "mission".
Visualizations that make no sense
Many people do not realize how bad things have gotten. (They have gotten very, very bad.) That is a big part of the problem.
New Advanced Sailing rules for Card Pirates game
Is this going to be a real product or just POC?

Alas, with Sony being the manufacturer, if this is ever released, it will probably be walled off and only use the SonyCloud or some bullshit.
it's much cleaner than Spotify or Rdio
I can't tell you how happy that makes us :)

1,2. Fair enough.
3. That is definitely on our to-do list. Should be out soon.

Downloads by default are in 320kbps mp3 for now. For any other format, you can make a purchase & shoot us an email.
Selling Game Keys in a Dutch Auction
Parallel construction is legal because the source of the data is legal, They need to do parallel construction to hide the source of intelligence for tactical reasons. i.e. when it was revealed that NSA had power to tap cell phones with a warrant, criminals stopped using cell phones or used 'burners'.

The emails being grabbed beyond the warrant NSA had was a result of encryption being used by GMail, so they had to grab emails by screenshot and keyword only, which caused collateral collection, but the amount of collection here is trivial.

I already addressed LOVEINT, and you're arguing against yourself. LOVEINT is a perfect example of NSA cracking down on abuses then addressing them in open court so that they can legally take action, or if they can't take action, that it's known about so that bigger reforms can be made.

I just gathered these facts by reading your article. It's clear that there are always two sides of the story, but nowhere here do I see NSA doing anything it didn't have permission to do.
Not Firefox (for Mac).
In Chrome only the tab crashes.
I'm not worried about being under surveillance. I'm neither interesting, nor engaged in anything interesting.

That's probably the feeling of most people. Martin Fowler wrote an insightful post about this subject:

Privacy Protects Bothersome People
…and isn't about me (or probably you)
http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html

He argues that privacy on the internet is important, not because normal people have something to hide, but because journalists and activists (or other counterpowers in a well-balanced democracy) need a certain level of privacy in order to work.
Looks like you can just set your price to 0 and it becomes free.
Seems real: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZSGZkEEVfQ
No. The Central Intelligence Agency is not run by a commission. It is run by the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who is directly appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the senate (50 USC § 403–4a(a)), as much a part of the executive branch as any department secretary, with no special term appointment.
I think he probably made a typo and meant to write "below" instead of "above".
Well, the government is paying for some degree of predigestion of the data. The alternative for the company is having a government black box installed in their machine room doing who knows what....
Thank you, I stand corrected. Mixed up the company name. :/
The door analogy does not carry over well. Its more like I had a yard sale on my front lawn with an invisible line beyond which you are trespassing.
Your comparison is flawed. The Android power meter shows the power consumption that has happened over a period of time, not just what is consuming the power the most right when you look at it.

If I disable WiFi, then check the power consumption, WiFi still appears to be consuming approximately 4% of the batter compared to 42% by the screen, which is the top listed item, and dwarfs the number 2 item, Android OS at 9%.

If I run without WiFi for a period of 24 hours or so, then presumably the WiFi battery consumption would drop to 0%, or at least begin approaching 0%, but either way, this is a far different test than just seeing if the refrigerator light is on.
I heard a rumor a while back that Facebook Chat was rewritten in C++... but I can't seem to find anything to verify that. Do you know if it's still Erlang?
That's true in the case of USA, ex: you can never get a credit card processor to accept your application, source forge/google code/ google apps are entirely blocked etc ..

We tried to make a change by starting this :

http://www.change.org/petitions/united-states-government-lif...

in the case of Germany I think Government are not the bad people here, they have actually tried to make it easier for Syrian. but most the people who work at embassies / banks etc .. make it impossible for Syrians abroad to reach Germany.

I have friends who managed to get their visas after filing lawsuits against those embassies, but those who only have german friends/relatives who understand and know the German law.
Godaddy is slightly worse. Though this is a side effect of things like "government required disclosure".
It does have media keys, by the way.
Scientists Grow Miniature, but Distinctly Human, Brain in the Lab
So, you have just made the demo harder. :)
I want the exact same thing, but in a 60" model, to have changeable artwork on the wall.
Jeff's keyboard reminded me of the happy hacker: http://elitekeyboards.com/products.php?sub=pfu_keyboards,hhk...

I've never used it, but it seems like similar overkill.
I would like to know: how can we resolve these two ideas and run ethical but viable/competitive businesses?

There is no way to "resolve" the fact that there are always ways to make money unethically, there are always people taking advantage of them, and if you are a human being you will always feel a twinge of regret and unfairness that you can't join in the fun.
1) Get a job in the EU.
2) Have your employer work through all the necessary hassles for you to move there from their end. It will be much easier than you trying to do this in Syria and most European employers will have experience with this.

I don't know about Germany but I know in Amsterdam booking.com is always looking for smart folks.
Show HN: Screencast on Meteor Dynamic Scoping
I wonder if she tried GLS Bank? They style themselves as a fair/alternative bank only investing in ethically good things. Lot's of people I know moved their bank account there. It would be interesting to hear if they reject to give bank accounts to people in need. Although perhaps there is something in German law that prevents banks from doing that?

https://www.gls.de/privatkunden/

There are a couple of other banks with a similar public agenda, but I don't recall their names.
at university i had an EE professor with such a strong russian accent i dropped the class. couldn't understand a damn thing he was saying.

my parents are foreigners - it's not that i'm not used to it.

sorry folks, but it's true.
I've also dealt with the data and can confirm it's a stunning headache. Try building a search UI around the inconsistencies and you'll go insane. Even Gatherer has issues!

From what I can tell, there's only one or two guys at WotC that come close to understanding the data. With the rest of the organization in mind, I highly doubt WotC will open up their data - the business guys wouldn't understand it. It's a closed-source kind of company.
What Tron Can Teach Us About User Support
Open source online cross-browser drawing board using HTML5 Canvas & RaphaelJS
Exact opposite, actually.

The dev team learned their lesson from the earlier days[1] and do strict evaluations of cards and interactions before releasing them. The most popular format, "Standard", is played with the last 2 "blocks" (3 sets of card "sets"), and 1 "Core Set". So basically the last 1.5—2 years worth of cards. Those interactions are studied carefully before being released. Very infrequently do you run into something truly overpowered and needing to be banned from the competitive scene.

Not to mention, in the most basic sense, cards like Counterspell[2] will probably never be printed in a Standard playable set, but cards like Cancel[3] will. One being too cheap to cast and being almost game breaking, while the other has its power balanced just right for the cost.

[1]: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/dai...

[2]: http://magiccards.info/jvc/en/24.html

[3]: http://magiccards.info/m14/en/45.html
Great screencast @mathec — loving Meteor!
I would advise against the asylum route for all the reasons that others have already mentioned.

What you could do right now is to travel to Turkey and apply for a German tourist visa there. Once you are in Germany and out of harm's way you can think about your next steps.

This page says that the German embassy in Ankara or the Istanbul consulate will process your visa application while the Damascus office remains closed: http://www.ankara.diplo.de/Vertretung/ankara/de/06__Visa/Vis...

Here are the tourist visa guidelines in arabic:
http://www.beirut.diplo.de/contentblob/3951508/Daten/3401582...

I wish you the best of luck!
I cannot seem to figure out how an Indian startup has mostly foreign artists. I am asking because couple of years back, I tried to do the same thing and licensing was the biggest issue. Have you got funding in India?

Moreover, most of the artists and songs I see up there are just at bandcamp.com and no where else. Are you just scrapping Bandcamp and reselling their music. E.g. googling for the album "Creatures" on homepage (https://www.google.com/search?q=creatures+new+campaigns&oq=c...) loads up only from Bancamp and other albums too.
How long do artist song approvals take? I submitted a second one about an hour ago, but the first took until the next day. Just curious :)
That's great to hear. I think every freelancer wants to end up there.

So you never have problems with clients no paying (either on time or at all)?
The First Code Acquired by Smithsonian’s Design Museum Is Released to the World
I agree with a lot of what you're saying but one thing that's always bugged me is how we account for sub-optimal decisions.

What I mean is that if I make 60k per year and I choose to spend very little of it by driving an un-fancy car and cooking all my meals at home and living in a small apartment (perhaps with a roommate) I might be able to save half my net income. Or I could spend nearly all of that income on a bigger place, nicer car and meals out. And then I would potentially be in the exact same mental place as the person in poverty.

What if that gets scaled down to 20k instead of 60k? Is there still nothing I can do to figure out a way to save money? Even if my cognitive load is high due to being poor, which way does causation go? Maybe I consciously decided to live in a bigger place and eat more meals out and as a result I now have more financial worry.

I guess what I'm asking is which way does the causation go? Does being in poverty cause you to become overloaded or does the inability to prioritize well or think under stress cause the poverty? To me this question is neigh impossible to answer because you can't look at a single decision or experiment to determine the outcome.

My naive thinking about this kind of thing is that it's like a betting game. With 50/50 odds you might be up some or down some but in the long run little changes. A hundred $1 bets on a coin toss should leave you with just as much money as you started with. But if the odds change, even just a tiny bit, the outcome of a hundred bets gets really different. Having a slight edge on the house, 51% instead of 50%, can cause you to slowly but surely come ahead of the house. And similarly, going from 50% to 49% can cause you to slowly bleed to death.

Now some math. A 50% chance of winning is the same as a 100% payout. For each win you double your money, for each loss you get nothing. 51% is a 102% payout. 49% is a 98% payout. We'll neglect the notion of a finite bankroll since these are small bets; our bankroll is the full $100.

With 50% odds:

1^100 = 1 so you never make or lose money

With 51% odds:

1.02^100 = 7.24

With 49% odds:

0.98^100 = 0.133

Now of course I don't know how this game would scale to real life. Would a person have only a few chances in a lifetime to make these kinds of "bets" or do you get these chances several times a day? And what is the quantity of the bet? Is it how much I spend, or how much I choose to spend versus my other options of how much to spend?

For example if I feel thirsty I could choose to drink water from a drinking fountain (free) or buy a soda ($2). Is the bet quantity $2 (how much I spend or don't spend) or is it $1 because I either "double my money" (which is to say, I don't spend the $2) or I "lose that bet" buy the soda and spend the $2. I would tend to think it's a $1 bet.

Anyhow I'd love getting some kind of real feedback on the math here rather than just "you're an asshole for not thinking those in poverty are victims"
You wrote the answer I was just a little bit too lazy to write...

As to the GP: Geoff Hinton (probably the most well-known neural networks researcher) said in his Coursera course that neural networks thrive at problems with a lot of structure that could be encoded, while simpler models like SVMs or Gaussian processes might be better for problems without as much deep structure to discover.

Also, a lot of the current research with neural networks involves using neural networks to learn better representations of data. These cleaner representations of data (which can be thought about as a sort of semantic PCA) often make classification far easier, which explains the great results. Learning representations also makes transfer learning (transferring knowledge from one domain to another) much easier/more possible.
"Sir, he commented on a blog post from that annoyingly smart
Schneier guy saying he's not interesting. Plus his last email places him within 100 miles of the attack so we should be able to justify it later."

"Right. Send him to Guantanamo!"
Pronunciation is absolutely a part of spoken language. You could probably make a decent argument that somebody who can't pronounce the spoken word in such a way that other people understand them doesn't completely know the language.
Safari Version 6.0.5 (7536.30.1) still alive and well after viewing this page. Was I supposed to not be able to view this thread?
cool design! the images load quite slow tho, inspecting them shows that they are fullsize images even when used as mini-icons. quite noticable on all pages...
Thank you Ballmer, from the open source community with love!
What if you set up a Dead Man's Switch of sorts, that you were unable to disable, that would go off and notify a trusted journalist/blogger/etc if you ever tripped it? Tripping it would happen as a result of whatever rules you put in place that make it overwhelmingly likely you're snooping around in your user's data.

The logistics behind this might be hard to pull off. I really don't know enough to know whether something like this is feasible, but if the concept was feasible to implement, it seems like you can just publicly announce ahead of time that the system is in place, and it's out of your hands.
If you could tell me your usrername, I'll have that looked into.
Well for one, once you've hit the demo button, you can't actually get out of it without signing up. I wanted to re-read what your app was about after hitting the demo link quickly and now I can't.
Smile first, then market - every day
Surfing DMZ - North Korea 38th Parallel Beach
You're welcome to come to Israel, we have a booming startup scene here.
Yeah, very familiar with that story (and a big fan).

We very well might. :) Thanks!
> the men had only 12 minutes of oxygen left when they were finally rescued

Jesus, you seriously think we'd believe it's been 3 days then it goes down to 12 mins to death.

Life is not hollywood, please stop trying to make it that. It's kinda interesting as it is.
Why not just narrow it down to communication barriers? It has really nothing specifically to do with accents. Two people with the same heavy accents may perfectly understand the other - or maybe not at all. That still comes down to issue with communication. How about making the statement that 3 year olds are terrible CEOs - they're terrible at conveying a story, and I'm not even sure they're speaking English when they make sounds!
Doug, don't you feel that you could have told us about this before the first day of classes? Nobody blames you for the budget problems, or for the shortage of TAs. But you're just another person in the long chain of people who have made horrible administrative decisions, culminating in this terrible situation. And on top of that, you certainly came off as extremely cold and unconcerned, both in class and when I spoke to you in person regarding the matter. Trying to look understanding when you are on a public forum doesn't change a thing, and I highly doubt that you can do much to save face at this point -- you've really gone out of your way here to make yourself a villain to the undergraduate community. And there is simply no excuse for waiting until the first day of class to inform us of these circumstances.
You can submit a pull request ;) https://github.com/shiffman/The-Nature-of-Code

I think that's so amazingly awesome, that it can evolve as a living document in this way.
I was under the impression you could only use their prefunding services for clients you sourced on Elance or the marketplace, not with any clients you sourced elsewhere.
1) Smaller accelerators (especially university-based ones) will accept ideas — for example, Xavier University is accepting applications right now http://www.xavier.edu/williams/xlab/

2) Angel investors will sometimes put money in on an untested idea.

If you can go get pre-orders from real clients, the odds of getting money will go up a lot.
Period architecture, majestic views, history of madness
The fact that the numbers were all present at the robberies doesn't imply that the owners of those numbers are guilty. It's merely a lead. The result is just records anyway, the very same that the FBI would get from a more permissive request.

The only thing at risk is that the carrier would mess up the query. But if anything FBI could provide the SQL/whatever query as well.
I'd say any specifics – size, people involved – on such a program could be damaging, and it also gives other nations more ammo in defending their own such programs, by pointing out ours. I know everyone already probably knows we have things like this, but it's even more public now. They also talk about a document in there revealing the specifics of counter-surveillance for the Bin Laden raid.

So "serious" damage is probably too far. But how does this benefit the American people? The US has pretty good reasons for keeping such an effort covert, and this stuff doesn't come across as an affront to people's privacy and freedoms, not like the domestic surveillance programs did.
While Zen Pencils is using older written quotes (it's the theme of the comic), the recent comics documentary 'Stripped' has the honor of the first audio interview with Bill Watterson. He initially declined, but after their interactions with dozens of other cartoonists, word got to Bill that they were "the real deal" and passionate about what they were doing. Rather inspiring.

http://jimromenesko.com/2013/03/11/reclusive-calvin-and-hobb...
MySQL vs PostgreSQL and Encryption
It is difficult to have empirical evidence for a subjective thing like the understandability of someone's accent.
I think it is quite clear that he is not saying his quarrel is with dictionary definitions. You should [re]read what he wrote, particularly the second paragraph of it.
The little thumbnail image next to someone's name ("Somebody liked this track") is huge: http://s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/musicfellas.entertain...

Make that smaller.
Predecessor: http://blog.jpl-consulting.com/2012/04/why-i-wont-sign-your-...

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3844893
Oddly enough this is a re-hash of the same types of arguments used for why engineers could never be CEO's and run startups. They didn't speak the language of business, weren't good communicators. "Go hire a 6'3" white sales guy CEO if you are really serious about this startup and raising money from VC's"

Is this the proper definition of irony?
You're missing:

0) Your personal hardware has lots of holes in it. which changes the equation quite a bit, doesn't it?
Let's not beat about the bush: the King Estate is a bunch of dumbasses and if they want Dr Martin Luther King to be forgotten, they are doing a great job.
This feels like a troll review. I recognize that it's not, but it feels that way.

His main objection is that the CODE keyboard is not ergonomic. The ergonomic keyboard marketplace is very small compared to the 'standard' keyboard marketplace. In fact, once you get past the Microsoft Natural 4000 (which I'm typing this post on), the field gets esoteric, very quickly: http://www.amazon.com/Kinesis-Corporation-KB800PB-US-Freesty...

Second, the things he doesn't like about the CODE keyboard are the very reasons why the CODE keyboard was created:

- No multimedia keys (because really -- they're a pain in the rear)

- App launch keys (see above)

- Can't press alt with thumb curl (this isn't even home row at this point -- I can't imagine a thumb curl being seen as ergonomically safe).

I don't really see this as a review of the keyboard in as much as I see it as a rant about a keyboard the user doesn't like. I don't even see evidence that the user has actually purchased the keyboard, which I feel like should be a requirement if you're going to review a product.
It totally does mention that their scores changed after they got the harvest... they went up, presumably because the cognitive burden was gone. Similarly, the experiment with car repairs of different expenses showed that the cognitive impact is correlated to how 'bearable' an expense was: rich people weren't impacted by a thousand dollar repair, but poor people suffered an impairment that wasn't there when the repair was only $100. This is pretty clear evidence that they didn't just pick a bunch of dumb poor people: the poor people started performing worse when there was financial pressure. This could probably be extended to test the impact of financial pressure on 'rich' people: propose they're hypothetically unemployed, or disabled and see if this has a cognitive impact. The problem is that rich people don't deal with that kind of problem with any regularity, so they might be able to shrug off a hypothetical situation.
Never explain yourself to people who misunderstand you on the internet. They'll just use it as an excuse to misunderstand you again, which is worse because not only are you a terrible monster who said those terrible things, but now you've had the unmitigated gall to defend those terrible things.

It's a universal truth of saying things in public. No matter how clearly you say things, somebody will take it the wrong way. The only approach that doesn't make things worse is to simply ignore those people.
Really? My humour is getting downvoted? Hilarious. Seriously, lighten up..