skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a proposed RFC (which I believe will be accepted before the end of the year) which provides a standard (assuming acceptance) way to transport identities between services on the Internet - http://www.simplecloud.info/. It's backed by some pretty big players and we're adopting it as the new version of one of our identity APIs at Penn State.

There is currently no mechanism for deciding which parts of your identity are available to different people, and retrieval of anything not marked public would require that they identify themselves. I think the ideas below are great, and adding your friends, business contacts and acquaintances to different circles/spheres/lists is an easy way for you to manage them. The hard part (I think) is that identity needs to be federated somehow so that you know who is asking for your identity and therefore which fields to provide (A&A strikes again).

I'd encourage everyone who cares about solutions like this to read the specifications I've linked to, then read and participate in the mailing list ... the discussions are amazing.
19-year-old Argentine Hacker arrested for stealing $50,000 monthly
Hmm, seemed pretty straight forward to me, clicked on databases which took me to http://www.bls.gov/data/

Clicking on 'Top Picks' (its a badge but its also a link) got me to here: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?cu with some series indicators in it.

Clicked on Food and Beverage, selected some years, added a graph and got back the CPI for food and beverages between 1990 to present.
Mutation forces organisms to explore evolutive paths quite astray and I'd expect it happens quite often that a 2 gene mutation propagates into the "global pool" for being very advantageous. Of course, specific or optimal 2 gene mutations are wildly unlikely to be found.

What I mean is, a more adequate picture of the process is not a simple "path" analogy. It's more like you have a high dimensional optimization space and a wildly varying survival function, and the organisms are bouncing around this space in a random motion. This allows them to occasionally cross valleys and take very distinct paths to each far away maxima, specially if there are a few minor maxima along the way.

My point being organisms have a given capability to bounce around: they don't have to take a monotonically improving path, although this capability is limited because otherwise (if the mutation rate is too fast) the results are too chaotic.

They're somewhere in the middle of monotonically improving, guaranteed optimization (low mutation; gets stuck at local maxima) and completely random (high mutation; does not retain advantages well and leads to many deleterious results).
I think they're looking over the social aspect of this. Areas with highest birthrates tend to be the most uneducated ones, and thus you will have a greater amount of people who will more likely make irresponsible decisions for the planet's sustainability. Look at how many people still don't believe in global warming, and how fiercely they're opposed to the government taking initiatives to solve these problems. Look at a list of countries by population growth rate, and look at a list of countries by how much they recycle -- you'll see a compelling correlation.
Click on the screenshot to see it in action. (That doesn't make sense, if you ask me ;) )
block in all

pass out all

last rule wins, and obviously if it is remote allow ssh port etc.

You can read more here: http://home.nuug.no/~peter/pf/en/long-firewall.html
That is a fantastically stupid thing to say.
I'm aware of how words work.
I can't see rivers in the example. Here's a screenshot.

(http://imgur.com/7zGhP9X)
>The point of the article isn't really "this can't be done"; but "if this is done, it's inferior to a non-modular phone".

And it's only inferior if you choose to look at it through that lens. As far as I can see, the idea is that modularity brings its own benefits, which, for some people, might outweigh the perceived disadvantages. If someone's already decided they'd never be in the market for a modular phone because they don't want that inherent tradeoff, what point is there in being negative about how that modularity is achieved?

> even for laptops we're seeing that people tend to prefer a bit of size/weight/battery life rather than modularity.

Applied to phones, size? Maybe. There's a place in the world for a Samsung Note, so I wouldn't write it off on those grounds. Weight? Arguably. Battery life? Beyond a threshold of about 18 hours, a vast number of people demonstrably don't care.

If I were to pick an obvious problem point, it's simply that the hardware is bound to be more expensive for a given set of functionality.

> Modularity imposes a cost, it's a tradeoff

Yes. That's exactly it. It's a tradeoff which some people may find it worth making.
Simple. Disable IPv6 - it's probably not worth the tradeoff, and your network provider probably doesn't support it anyway.
Good to hear that I'm not the only one with this opinion. While I'm all for keeping resource-consumption in check and keeping sustainability in mind, I don't like what people say about overpopulatiion.

Sometimes I would hear people hoping that population numbers would decrease by natural catastrophies or diseases. Or they caution the expansion of health services in Africa "because it would make the problems worse".
The framework here is fairly general and you should be able to run other code directly under Xen eg Python. Node would be harder as there is no threading which libuv needs.
I eventually noticed that this article practices what it preaches, after reading a few sections. The sentence-spacing is wider than the word-spacing.

I found it easy to read fluently all the way down (this is moderately unusual for me) - with good typographic choices in line length and colour contrast helping.

At the least, I find the author to have some credibility on this subject.
I think most of these types of posts are not seeing the forest for the trees. If you for some reason have become a direct target the NSA has been tasked to investigate then you've already lost. They have much more manpower, money, and clever ways to get their hands on your data than you have to keep it from them. Most probably don't even involve some techno conspiracy supercomputer type RSA cracking fantasy, but simple social engineering.

Keep using what you are using and it will protect you from the 99.999999% of the world who has no idea who you are, doesn't care, and can't be bothered to spend any amount of time backdooring your system because you aren't interesting enough.
(translation: why aren't the Pirates more popular after the recent events regarding the NSA etc)

my personal opinion: people don't really care that much about privacy and like "strong leaders"
That's actually the entire point they are trying to make. They don't make an enormous difference to your welfare. At least not when compared to someone making $15k / year and trying to support a family. You really can't understand what it's like to not know where your next meal is coming from unless you have been there.
This is the most purblind, misguided editorial opinion I have read in weeks. It repeats an old saw often repeated by people who don't understand the Logistic function and its role is describing biological systems:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

The Logistic function concisely describes the behavior of biological systems that don't have any control over their numbers, as humans most certainly do not.

At the left, the function's curve is nearly flat because there aren't enough living organisms to support a higher birth rate.

At the right, the functions's curve is nearly flat because mass starvation and death prevents a higher birth rate.

The Logistic function models a growing biological colony in a finite world, and it applies to any biological colony. For such a biological colony, eventually mass birth is balanced by mass death.

Does this model have any bearing on the human biological colony? Let me answer by saying as time passes, more and more accounts of mass death are met by less and less surprise or alarm among the world's population.

At Sandy Hook, a boy has a fight with his mother, so -- being a healthy young boy, possessed of normal instincts -- he kills her, then goes to a local school and kills as many people as he can possibly manage. The story makes national headlines for a few days, all those innocent children systematically killed by an amateur, acting on a whim. But that story evaporates, pushed out the public's consciousness by another story of mass death, and another.

By contrast, when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped in March 1932, it made national headlines for years -- years -- until the perpetrator was apprehended, tried, and executed in 1936. It's the story of one family, one child, one murder. Today that story wouldn't be able to compete with the latest mass murder account. "Oh, Bashar Assad has killed 1,500 people in a nerve gas attack. Oh, well, they're not anyone I know personally. What else is in the news?"

The author of the linked editorial concludes his article by saying, "The only limits to creating a planet that future generations will be proud of are our imaginations and our social systems. In moving toward a better Anthropocene, the environment will be what we make it."

Both claims are likely, but with one important difference -- future populations will wonder what we were thinking, as we struggled to avoid considering the consequences of our own actions. As to "the environment will be what we make it", that is certainly true -- we will gradually tolerate more and more mass death, a process that has already begun.

At the next Sandy Hook mass killing, people will say, "Hey, what can you do? Boys will be boys. But this can't be allowed to stand in the way of progress."
That is a VERY impressive record. I guess you really are a step ahead of the AI. ;-)
Battle of the Tech Ecosystems: Boston vs. New York
No, because the rest of the world isn't doing that too. But if the WORLD doesn't need everyone to be doing crappy labor, why would we invent work for them to do, instead of just sharing in the new wealth created by our technology.
The author is railing against people who care too much. They are not advocating double space. They are telling the self-important twits who write Salon articles telling everyone how ignorant and stupid two spaces is to Shut the Fuck Up. And telling the rest of us to ignore self-important twits that care too much.
or from here if you already know all the series codes: ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/time.series/
Show HN: Hollow, an interactive documentary
For Example: how some of the NYTimes' best visualisations were made.
There should probably better documentation for all of the data, since it isn't uncommon to see headlines that use the wrong time series for a particular concept.

That said their phone support is pretty excellent, and you'll likely get a direct line to the researcher preparing the data.
So, in your view, the most "overpopulated" regions in the world control the biggest part of the global economy?
That's a little neurotic to be honest.
From the article> Although there were other magnetic tape cartridge systems, Philips’ Compact Cassette became dominant as a result of Philips’ decision in the face of pressure from Sony to license the format free of charge.

It is interesting that _Sony_ pressured Philips to license the compact cassette "free of charge". One of the often quoted reasons for Sony's later loss of the Beta vs. VHS videocassette war was Sony's refusal to license their Beta format free of charge. They did not listen to their own advice that time around.
Bug report: When the page loads the caret is focused in the textarea but using the arrow keys moves the entire page and not the caret inside the text area.
Girl’s Suicide Points to Rise in Apps Used by Cyberbullies
Wow that sounds like some kind of german from the distant past, if at any time we spoke that way. Don't get me wrong! It just sounds, let's say interesting :-)

So, why is the pirate party not on the top with all the NSA turmoil? Well, basically they let slip any chance to exploit the topic for their benefit slip. They used to have an pretty good start with a not too weak stand at first. But then leadership and politics within the party started and the whole thing basically just started to crumble. They might have gotten over it with their new party lead, though I feel that girl just screams too much; at least their leadership and inner politics have subsided (or thats what you get as a bystander).

The whole NSA stuff has come up over the recent weeks and basically intensified--but that might be my biased reading as well--and the pirate party has not made any visible attempt to get hold of the issue, make statements, propose solution, ... nothing.

So what does the pirate party stand for? I'm not quite sure. At least I don't feel like they are the ones who would ensure that the NSA spying would get thoroughly investigated as well as the general surveillance that is happening all over the place.

Neither seems any other party to be particularly interested in handling that topic. The two big parties CDU/CSU and SPD have their focus on other things. FDP seems to see a popular interest in the NSA/spying/surveillance, and tries to position itself. Though with the FDP this is always a gamble. Maybe they /really/ /really/ want to do something, but just can't because they are always forces in a coalition? Or maybe they didn't want to fix that in the first place, but pay lip service? DIE LINKE, well I don't really know what to say about them. One thing though, their Gregor Gysi is a hell of a skilled speaker.

EDIT: Completely forgot about the Green party; they do seem to be interested in tackling the problem, though it's just not their core competence.

Bottom line, I find it hard to single out a party that would truly attack the privacy issue.

EDIT: Thinking about it, it's probably the imperative form leading into the sentence. If we reword it a little, it gets a lot better:
Eine Frage an die Deutschen: warum haben die Piraten so wenig Erfolg? In Bezug auf die NSA Affäre, usw., meine ich.
The Emacs Calculator
I enjoyed (at the time) technical writing using WordPerfect, FrameMaker, and InDesign. Getting the typography, page breaks, word wrap just so is very satisfying. Driving FrameMaker was a lot like programming, in the level of control and precision. Still miss it.

I was ambivalent towards PageMaker. Never used Quark for work, though I've met many fans.

I reserve special loathing for Word.

Word 6 was pretty good, and I used it enthusiastically.

But everything since has been user hostile. Getting the document you want is like fighting a surly baboon with Tourette's syndrome. You just have no idea what's going to be printed. There's no way to predict cause and effect (so you end up using a very limited set of features). And god help you if you change anything about your install (eg open the same doc on another computer, upgrade a driver).
Random, urandom, same thing. That meme is ridiculous.
You are correct in stating that LaTeX is no silver bullet. The clear disadvantage of LaTeX is the tweak-recompile cycle, whereas graphical tools have instant feedback which is more suitable for design. But for automated typography (≠ design), it is still unsurpassed after all those years.

The default LaTeX styles are still way prettier and easier to read than the random muck (12pt Times, small margins) that would be more widespread otherwise. For scientific papers this is truly awesome, especially when the author does not care about typography. But you are right, LaTeX is not the correct tool for every job.
Some Notes On Torrenting
This strikes me as a rare case in which the article itself contains (the academic equivalent of) middlebrow dismissal.
The page actually has a stylesheet which sets white-space: pre-wrap, which tells the browser to preserve the double-spaces. It's like <pre> but with line wrapping enabled.
Boston Strong.
I agree that the kinect is more convenient for casual gaming.

That said, I have yet to see a convincing demo of the new Kinect, so far only having seen increased resolution on the depth visualisation. By the very nature of the technology it will still have the same limitations as its predecessor.

The technology in the PrioVR may be a more cumbersome than ideal, but the proposed sensors are already smaller than those shown in the visualisation (http://i.imgur.com/oSBEloE.png - the middle ones are the new sensors). As for further miniaturisation, well it has to start somewhere (hence kickstarter, i guess).

As for power usage, this kind of device (low powered sensors with a single wireless hub) combined with a mobile phone and some kind of communication bridge would likely give you hours of full-system use (the PrioVR, this: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2041280918/vrase-the-sma... for display and some bridge to access the mocap data on the phone) off a simple 5Ah battery.
Or you could go the oculus route, and just have a laptop in a backpack, powering everything through USB.

This isn't just about gaming. This is capturing full body movement for usage in a huge variety of applications. I'm worried that given the current traction this project has, it will fail to fund, and we're going to end up setting back immersive AR/VR for another decade.
The logistic model especially assumes that the carrying capacity is constant. Which it's not, for humanity.
Because the Pirates are disorganized internally and didn't make good use of the NSA scandal. Their biggest problem is their self-proclaimed IT-know-how which on average in the party is at best only slightly better than in other partys.

I've got friends involved in the Piratenpartei and i shudder thinking about their internal discussions. At least their mailinglists and recordings are public... Which is good in one way, but doesnt really help them win votes.
Terrebone Parish teen arrested for using app to "shoot" classmates
After some successes in state parliaments, some nationwide leading members have been acting pretty unprofessional (i.e. immature and just plain weird) on TV during the past two or so years.

Edit: This is what I hear from tech folks. Other people just don't get what Piraten stand for. You can see that from the other replies as well. They appear very contradictory publicly. It can be argued that this is part of their concept, but people do not seem to get that.
The "wouldn't find anybody to take care of your garden anymore" approach isn't that valid today - just look at the lifestyles of rich people and compare them to earlier times.

The "0.1%" are far more wealthy than ever before - however, they are not employing more people for their personal needs. Assistants, butlers, maids, chauffeurs, live-in nannies/governesses, dedicated gardeners, etc. are a very rare breed nowadays used by tiny numbers of ultra-rich, while a hundred years ago many "upper-middle" class specialists (doctors, lawyers, civil servants) employed other people for their personal needs.

In fact, I'd say that it's entirely the opposite - the rich don't need or want the common people anymore, they can do almost without them; so they're not associating with them and not redistributing the wealth to "common laborers" by paying for their services, almost all of the wealth is invested in capital not in labor. So labor as such loses; the lower class would be better off being employed as gardeners rather than rotting without income, but they aren't. The top 5% can't afford them, and the top 0.1% need/want just a few.
The problem is, search engines are looking at this content, and they are pushing spam links up their listings as a result.
Wow, that's some passion there!

I find it ironic that this is the first article I've seen in a long time for which I've had to bring up Safari's reader in order to read comfortably. Black text on a dark-grey background? really?
Yes, there are a number of us in the oculus forums working on various solutions with (the current) kinect for positional data.

For me, oculus aside, facial capture is probably the most exciting thing the new kinect can offer (due to increased depth and optical resolution), but it still has all the same limitations as the last one for full body capture (as its basically the same mechanism).

There are a number of full body mocap solutions built by third parties that utilize the data from multiple kinects. This certainly helps, but it still can't be as accurate as something like this, solely due to you being a coloured point cloud blob instead of collection of bones in the softwares eyes.
Also this used to enable a significant negative vote weight effect.
Where voting for your preferred party with your second vote could actually make them lose seats if your party had more overhang mandates through direct first votes than through the proportional second vote.

This was ruled unconstitutional by the Bundesverfassungsgericht in 2008 and the law was eventually changed. The current voting law in effect in 2013 reduced the effect but it's still there.

So to balance those overhang seats, balancing seats are introduced which might increase the number of total seats beyond the originally intended number by quite a significant amount.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_vote_weight
Twitter Co-Founder Evan Williams Lays Out His Plan For The Future Of Media
Effectiveness of subliminal messaging (i.e. visual and audible signals which are so quick/quiet/subtle that they're available only to your unconscious mind) is not that hard to test in a laboratory, and studies are pretty conclusive that it it doesn't influence decisions unless the stimulus is presented within a few seconds of making the decision (i.e. grocery store aisle).

People are definitely swayed by overt, liminal signals in subtle ways, but subliminal messaging specifically was created by an ad agency and the science was pretty well debunked.
Show HN: What we built this summer, Automated testing from the browser
from what i can see, both chrome and safari respect the rotation data.
There's a river starting on line two "sentences." through the period in "habit." and down through the space to the right of "set" 'anymore." and "practice."
Desktops are modular because the high price components used to have. Look at manufacturers now and you'll see a trend towards non-modular designs (iMac, Vaios,…)

This is not a scheme to take your money, BTW. Most of the consumers wont upgrade any part of the PC during their lifetime, so you are being held back in design and build quality by a feature only a fraction os the population demands. By held back I don't just mean design wise, although is one of the main advantages. You have to support legacy ports, slower buses, etc...

By going to non-modular designs, you can make better use of the space. The tradeoffs are big, especially on laptops (increased battery life), and more so in mobile.
> While I'm all for keeping resource-consumption in check and keeping sustainability in mind, I don't like what people say about overpopulatiion.

That's your argument? That you don'e like it? I don't like it either, but mass death is how nature deals with species who exceed the carrying capacity of their environments.

> Sometimes I would hear people hoping that population numbers would decrease by natural catastrophies or diseases.

People don't hope for that, but they expect it as a natural consequence of biological growth. And they're right. The evidence is clear -- eventually mass birth is balanced by mass death. We're already seeing the first stages.

> Good to hear that I'm not the only one with this opinion.

Oh, you aren't the only one, not by any means. Most people think there's no reason to think about this. Natural selection efficiently chooses those who don't believe it's worth thinking about, and over time they become the entire surviving population -- people who accept mass death as a practical regulatory mechanism.

More here: http://arachnoid.com/evolution
yay black & white comparisons.

and climate change isn't due to human activity!