skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So you stumbled on a piece of information which proved useful, notwithstanding that you didn't intend to look for.

If Justin observed correctly, you guys were very impressed with yourselves. Had you retrieved the answer by methods of which you were confident, you would've still been impressed, but not greatly.(I'm making a lapse conjecture here, of course)

Since you were confident that you would be able to find her, prior to looking at the picture, according to the article, I don't think you were looking for any information in the picture other than for confirmation.

However, some extra information in the picture(since it was taken very recently) enabled you to look further, which returned a result. Perhaps a building, an address, or some sort of landmark-ish location which narrowed whereabouts of the picture vastly? If this were the case, then I can understand that you guys were very impressed, because well, it is.

EDIT: Just saw the 'solution'; very nice touch!
Not Citibank. I have had an account at Citibank for over 20 years, and they've never, ever, made a single mistake. Highly recommended. I work for one of their bigger competitors.
Same idea from a different direction: Firefox OS currently includes a browser built in HTML: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/Browser with an API: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/BrowserAPI

Of course it's embedded in Firefox OS, but Firefox OS is really just Firefox built with special options, so in theory with some work you could expose that BrowserAPI to desktop. And there's actually a viable path whereby you could create a new browser as an open web app (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Apps) with the permissions to use the BrowserAPI and it could be installed as a normal application, including on desktop. Of course that's a bunch of steps and unimplemented bits, but you'll be following a path that "upstream" is actually committed to. So committed they actually made just what you describe ;) (Even though the design of the browser is pretty conventional – but it's the concept of a browser-built-on-html that you are exploring at this point.)
I think there are a few key benefits to a centralized manager over the distributed file listener.

1. coordination between services on reconf.
2. Consistent implementation on what constitutes a change through the API on the central server.

By making it API based you can hook into these updates and cause reconfs and coordinated responses (like rolling bounces) through that system as opposed to each system polling the file and hoping that the order comes out in the wash.

You could with enough work make it so that a client was aware of how to handle individual diffs from the file and coordinates through the file but at that point your now distributing common parsing logic across multiple systems (and potentially implementations) rather than a central system which sounds awfully un-DRY.
Elastic Search – reversed search with percolators in Java
This is the closest I've heard to one of the ideas that we expected to work, so I'll share.

- Create an ad on Facebook with her picture.

- Target people that went to her high school within 4 years of the range of years we thought she graduated within. Was only a few hundred people so the cost of running the ad would likely only be a few bucks.

- The ad copy / landing page just needed to be convincing that we weren't stalking her. We went with the "help us win a bet" approach but the "lost camera" approach would have been good also.

Ultimately we got the answer sooner from another approach after we found out that we had another picture of the girl that Justin didn't know we had. So we canceled the ad, but I think this would have worked if given enough time.
This makes sense. If they had the technical capability to filter out inadvertent collection of data on US citizens, they would already have filtered it. Therefore, any data shared with Israel may contain data they were unable to filter out. QED.
My problem is that NSA stories (of what I've seen) is that any NSA story will get voted up ad nauseam, and so people just try to post as many as possible, regardless of quality. Again, this is just from what I've personally seen, it may be different on a case-per-case basis, and I've definitely noticed the amount of this has decreased since the initial explosion of NSA topics after the initial Snowden leak.

Edit:

I also want to just express that this poll is kind of biased, because it seems to be implying that every NSA article that doesn't make it to the front page must have been flagged. While I don't like the sheer quantity of NSA articles, this doesn't mean I want to flag all of them.

I'd prefer a system in which articles were ranked naturally without flags, but less low-quality NSA articles were posted in general.
Third option:

I want HN'ers to submit less NSA stories that are just conjecture/opinion and more about concrete information as it is released.

Information is what we need right now - and is what we so desperately lack.
Just like pentesters are good and competent at breaking security but might not necessarily be good designers of secure software or systems.
I whole-heartedly agree, and think this also hints at another issue: as technical experts, we often just don't care about the politics side of things (I think most of us here would align best with a technocracy). We just want to assume that the politics side of the equation will be taken care of by democracy, and we can just invent and code and not have to worry about red tape.

And now, we've found out about the extreme invasions of privacy. The relentless, secretive gathering of information, of which we aren't even allowed to know what information is being gathered. Something clearly went wrong somewhere, which poses a drastic and invasive problem to every single Hacker News reader, regardless of country.

In my honest opinion, I think the backlash against the NSA has been losing steam. So let's throw some more coals into the boiler ladies and gentlemen, because this is something that we not only have a fundamental obligation to discuss, but something we have to fix. Let's keep the steam up.
I would be very happy if we could get over the things exposed by Snowden et al. and we get back to our normal lives. Sadly that doesn't happen by sticking our heads to the sand, so I guess the NSA stories must be let to continue plague our frontpages even if the stories are repetitive and chip away my faith in modern society. There just aren't good solutions.
Maybe this?

http://uzbl.org/

It's a good project that could use a few hands.
It's a very, very memorable game, but what do you think about replayability? I can't really bring myself to play it again.
The stories are fine, because I don't have to click on them. And it's one of the most pressing technological-communications issues, so it belongs here.

BUT, it's getting really tiring people making NSA-related comments in other stories, and expanding into huge threads, like the iPhone article yesterday. Please, let's just keep the NSA discussions within the articles themselves, and stick to facts instead of conspiracy theorizing. Otherwise it just seems like trolling.
What is considered a Peter Thiel failure even?

Someone coming into a program like HN and not realizing net profits towards millions of dollars would be considered a failure in that circle, but even a profit of $50,000 per year would be enough to see the participants earning more than the average college graduate.
He said she only bought the dress recently. They did a image search and found a local store that stocks that particular dress - and she had checked in with foursquare?
Some ideas...

- using tools like http://www.pictriev.com/ or similar offline solutions to get a pretty good estimate of her age.

- using image analysis to "fingerprint" the camera used to take the picture. Then crawling sites where she would be likely to post pictures (twitter, etc.) based on the suspected area and comparing to find matches (i.e. pictures taken with the same camera). I'm not sure what the current state-of-the-art is for those algorithms, but if for instance the camera displayed an obvious visible flaw (darker spot), it would have made it easier. On a perfectly clean camera without visible defects I assume that more than one picture is necessary for effective camera fingerprinting.

- using tools like http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/im2gps/ to try and determine the location just based on visual features.
Another good resources for learning JS: http://javascriptissexy.com/how-to-learn-javascript-properly...
It sounds terrible and is awkward to say.
I think the conversation has turned into an echochamber where everyone rehashes the same old arguments and complaints as before. I don't get anything new out of the newer NSA stories. No one seems to be really ready for a real debate about privacy.
> I don't think you could keep up with app updates alone much less actually "do" anything with only 300 megs/month.

You probably don't want to have automatic over the air app updates enabled. In fact, I'm not even sure if that's an option. Honestly, 300 MB/month would be sufficient for most months even for me, and I'm a fairly heavy user on LTE. I pay for the 2GB plan mostly to cover months where my usage peaks. I suspect that 8 months a year I use less than 300 MB/month, and I use iTunes Match, occasional video streaming, and occasional Facetime calls.
Chicago digital food startup looking for developer #2
Thanks rdl! :D

> probably wouldn't make the app public pre-submission; after is fine. this is a minor point though.

I submitted the application at the same time as I posted it to GitHub.

> video: [...]

The audio seems to have gotten muddier in transcoding, but maybe I'm making that up. Like a dork I deleted the original (can you believe it?). :-/

As far as points two and three go, do you really think there's time in the video to go very deep with those? The video is already twice as long as called for. I've spoken and written a lot about these themes over the past year. The links, especially under "What's new?" lead further down the rabbit hole.

But what you're saying is that those points need to be punchier, not longer. I'll stew on it, maybe record another take in a few days.

> "I helped launch an organic produce growers cooperative." -- maybe another sentence about what you specifically did. As it is, it could be just coming up with a sign for it, or setting up a mailing list...

Fair enough. I've added: "I did everything from writing bylaws to pricing and sales to driving truck."

> I'd downplay the wife/kids/mortgage.

I took out the sentence (from the concurrent commitments question), "My wife is open to discussing the possibility of my being in Mountain View for three months if it makes sense for Gittip."

> Live near Pittsburgh and expect to come back is good BECAUSE it helps your business -- great developers and less competition for them. Same result, but phrased in a more productive way.

Hmmm ... I've got a lot of connections and friends in the tech scene here, but I'm not depending on Pittsburgh for talent. Gittip today is a global distributed team. I'm in Pittsburgh because my family and friends are here. You think I need to explain Pittsburgh in my answer?

> In general I'd try to make the "big picture" more clear on how vs. why. "care for one another, inclusion, etc" are more like goals vs. methods, I think. Talk about how gittip will move the world toward those goals more.

In the video or in the application somewhere or in blog posts or what?
People are supposed to flag submissions that do not belong here. It's obvious that many of the NSA articles didn't belong here - there was nothing intellectually stimulating about them and they contained no new information. The discussions didn't have any useful advice about protecting your information, or about what to do as a startup if a government agency requested your data, or etc.

There are repercussions for too much flagging - you (so I've been told) lose the ability to flag anything.
Then don't use the websites that offend you by daring to offer a free service by using advertising to pay their salaries and overhead.

Do you get paid for the work you do? Do you think others ought to get paid for their work? Well, if you don't like advertising don't steal their work product by using their sites through ad blockers.

It really is a simple concept. All arguments to the contrary sound like a five year old kid crying "I don't care! I want it! I want it! I want it!".
I like the grey color of your comments. Where did you get that? :)
What teachers make
Here is how I think it was done:

I assume the author is not a Facebook friend with the girl. Otherwise it would have been too easy.
But friends of friends is not the only privacy leak on Facebook. There is a very old feature (which is about to get deprecated) called Networks.

Networks are created for schools, universities and other big organizations. They had the name of the high school so they have to list it as their own high school in their Facebook profiles.

This will automatically put them in the same network as the girl. I am assuming here that she has listed that on her Facebook profile.

Then performing a graph search for women who has gone to that high school and live in Austin with an age between X and Y will narrow the search a lot. Even if some of that information is not public on Facebook it would be public to them if they are not same network if she has the default settings. This is a neat trick which is still usable.

I don't think looking through the pictures would take more than half an hour.
It's interesting to me that every time another company is discussed, we usually get posts by a few people who work there, and often even have relevant information about the subject at hand. I don't know that I've ever seen a post here start with "I work at the NSA..." even though we know that the NSA must have a substantial staff of experienced technologists.

So, do they just not wish to identify themselves, or is it an agency-wide prohibition against revealing employment? (I realize they couldn't reveal any details about the issues that concern us here, but they could comment in general)
I am thinking that this whole narrative, this whole development needs thorough and detailed documenting. Humans in general have a hard time recalling all the facts and future humans, aka, kids are not going to be told about these events or that the compromised technologies exist or even if they are told about it it will be a story that is molded and dressed as to not make the good ol' USA look too bad.

I don't think people, even here maybe, have yet fully internalized what these developments mean to all of humanity. We are entering a post-national age and the enemy is that which poses a risk to the system that is barricading itself behind financial, legal, and political walls.
http://hnrankings.info/6367465/

I don't see a steep drop, the tell-tale sign of a mod adjusting ranking weights/gravity.
yah I was actually thinking of facebook ad just after I replied, with that criteria..only thing that turned me off from it what that you made it sound as highschool was a post-processor (validation) vs pre-processor (targeting)
Essential news that affects us all in our jobs and in our lives. They should be as visible or more so than just about any other topic for the time being.
How easy is it to upgrade the RAM and storage? Are they easily accessible?
There is evidence from my remaining friends at Cisco that they are targeting the 'longer tenure / higher paid' segment in their layoffs of 4000 to reduce overall salary costs. Unlike last time when they offered "early retirement" where they acknowledged they got the 'wrong people.'

But in fairness, Cisco layoffs are not uncommon. One former employee likened them to a humpback whale, feeding on 'krill headcount' from acquired companies while squeezing the excess out through their baleen filters. Looking at their history suggests that this has some truth to it.
The NSA subject, when there's actual news, is on-topic and relevant. But most of what makes it to the front page of HN is gossip and speculation and tinfoil-hat conspiracy.

And the results to this poll aren't going to indicate anything useful, because there's an asymmetry of interest -- it's like setting up a poll to ask if there should be more Libertarian stories. The few people who really, really care will find a way to make their obsession "win" the popularity contest. Everyone else yawns and walks away, knowing that Eternal September is already a few months in the rear-view mirror.
We need more NSA stories.

If anyone is going to "fix" this in the next 1-5-10 years, it will be the kinds of tech people that read sites like HN.
This is a pointless poll - it's like asking if there are too many Ruby stories on HN.

It's not the keyword that matters - it's the content and importance of the story itself. Let the story live or die on its own merits, not on the matching keyword.
C'mon Phil, spill the beans now!
I'd be welcoming stories doing technical analysis of what has been going on, but there hasn't been. I'm tired of just seeing repeated stories over and over about every detail of what they've just learned the NSA is up to. That isn't hacker news, it's mainly just complaining.
Show HN: Rails based Asset Manager for business environments
I started work on this Asset Manager as my first ever Ruby on Rails project at my first job. I've spent the past couple of months refining it and making it business agnostic and now it's ready to show off fully. Happy to take advice and answer questions.

Demo environment http://ryanmacg.com/

Source code https://github.com/RyanMacG/Asset-Manager
jbg331 - while we wait for people to ferret out the right answer, can you tell us how the woman in question has responded to the "game"? Genuinely curious.
Hate to sound cynical, but this seems like an attempt to solicit responses to identify good engineers to hire or promote some upcoming feature of the web app.
Java 7u40 released with commercial feature Mission Control
If it's on a technical topic, then I say post it. But, we've seen a lot of repetition and hand-wringing on the subject. If it doesn't add anything new to the conversation, whether that conversation is about the NSA or any other topic, then I say to ditch it. With the NSA stories, the signal is unusually important, but the noise is also unusually high.
I wanted to mention that in the original post, but I can never remember the syntax and was rushed. :(
Is there any data to support that? My experience convinced me that other way.
As a full-timer looking to start freelancing on the side, I'm interested in this as well. I've heard too many horror stories about oDesk and friends. A popular approach I've heard is doing pro-bono work and getting a referral, but I feel like that would fall into the trap of "well you did that guy's stuff for free, what about me?"
This is important, and HN is my main channel for staying on top of the news. That said, the discussion leaking into the other threads is getting a bit tiresome.
I think the NSA stories are mostly interesting. I'd only flag the obviously duplicated ones (there's not much need for five different newspapers' stories on the same news item, based on the same sources). However, I can understand why people might flag stories like the ones you cited about Israel: important as they are, these are mostly political issues, and have no obvious technical angle. People who are interested in that kind of news probably read about it in other news sources. HN readers are probably more likely to want to see stories about how the NSA broke TLS, how internet companies cooperate with (or resist) the NSA and what the ramifications of NSA spying might be on the ability of U.S. tech companies to compete.

When in doubt, read the HN guidelines:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As someone who has fled (multiple!) other online communities due to them emphasizing things which truly do not matter (eg, a minor update to a product that was never all that revolutionary to begin with), I can only commend attitudes like this. Of course, perspective being what it is (ie, the horizon of most people being effectively zero), I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at the status quo.
While the article certainly lacks hard proof, the "he didn't pick the right kids" argument is even worse. The ratio of successful college grads to non-grads may not show causality, but at least it is some sort of metric. Until someone can quantify "the right kids", it beats the alternative.
Intel Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) support in the GNU toolchain
The Patriarchy Is Dead
Evidently, since people in government feel the US Constitution is no longer the law, we end up with this sort of thing. Get used to it: there's no going back now, as they've tasted the awesome guava-flavored Kool-aid and they like it.
> or even realize he's using one.

Uh, this happens all the time. Scala programmers everywhere are used to the pattern

for {
a <- optionA
b <- optionB
} yield ("Both options have values! A = " + a + " B ="+b)
So much that I considered learning how to write Chrome extensions just to hide anything that contained the words NSA or Snowden
The Gruntmaster 3000
The two options aren't really fair--I want less NSA news, but I still want them ranked naturally.

I think it would be best for everyone to concentrate any given topic (not just NSA stuff) to at most a couple of threads at a time. This way discussions are a bit less disjoint and there's more room for other topics. In fact, this is exactly what's happening right now, but we have certainly been oversaturated with NSA topics in the past.

Also, I think artificially changing the algorithm to deal with any particular topic is probably not a good idea. I believe it's better to let the community implicitly choose what to talk about. Trying to work around a specific topic is going to obscure useful signals from HN readers and will only help until the next hot topic arrives.
Actually, especially if you're desperate. Asshole counter-parties can smell weakness and if you are, they'll exploit it.
Exactly. File systems resemble modern namespaces, not namespacing by type. You can put an executable and a data file in the same directory, or not. Your choice.
Funny. I've had an account for 10+ years, but the new business I account I opened two weeks ago got "corrupted" and none of their systems can access it. They had to open a new one for me, because they didn't know what else to do! (But besides that, I've never had any issues with them.)
Networking. A friend of a friend needed a website. When you're freelancing everyone is a potential customer. Early freelancing projects are not that hard to get, it's much more difficult to turn a small portfolio into a reliable revenue stream.
Of course it's baby steps. Publishers are terrified, and loaning is only one tiny step from what they fear second most, aside from pirates- a burgeoning used game market.
We see HN differently. To me, this place is a lounge. I come here to recuperate, waste a few minutes with like-minded people. I don't see HN as a political vehicle, a place to take my Cause, or a group of people who could effect positive change or whatever. It's just where hackers hang out, in whatever sense of the word you favor. But "Complacency" isn't a crime you can be found guilty of in your lounge.
I meant I wouldn't make it public until after I heard back from YC, not just until you submitted it.

Yes -- the video should be shorter (a minute), and punchier.

I'd add that gittip is already a global distributed team, but that you like living in Pittsburgh (family, friends, etc.), then.

It's essentially a hard requirement that you spend 3mo in MV for YC; other than that, flexible (although if you raise money, I'd plan on spending at least a few days per month in sfba ongoing, and a few weeks at a time during things like raising...)
Play is the Best Way to Work