skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lets ignore Google Glass for a moment and realize what she was ticketed for and how it will affect anyone with a cell phone in California.

She was ticked for having a display that could show non-car related information somewhere within her field of view. Any person that has there cell phone on their center console could be ticketed under the same law. Have your cell phone mounted on your dash, your just asking for a ticket if this goes through. Cops will give whatever ticket they can because they know part of that ticket will go to their department and pay for extras they like to have. More tickets, more overtime they get to have.

I fully agree, driving while distracted it bad. Very bad. But to my knowledge they haven't outlawed drinking coffee or eating yet in the car. Far more dangerous than being responsible and having your phone mounted in a place were it doesn't take anymore eye time than your speed speedometer does.

I have my phone mounted on the dash for a simple reason, I want to know who is calling me. I limit who I take to when I'm driving. I'm not going to take work calls unless it's my boss and he's fine if I hang up on him if it's important. I'm going to take calls from my wife, because of the same. But if it's someone else, I ignore it unless I know it will be urgent and worth the risk of talking while driving. Yes, I use Bluetooth. But is talking on the phone that is dangerous, not if you are holding the phone.

And the argument that she must have been distracted by the google glasses because she passed a cop while speeding. I'm sorry, but people get ticked for speeding every second in california without google glasses on.
Who cares about the collateral damage done to US citizens? The problem is the damage done to non-US citizens.
I'm kinda sad I didn't capitalize on this idea when I had it awhile back. I may still. I really like radius-based anonymous messaging.

Good to see the idea getting some attention anyway!
Isn't Glass always turned on and waiting for user input? Does "is operating" mean the device is powered even if it's not doing anything?

These are some of the things the courts have to figure out.
The app is pretty bare bones, but it has promise.

Localization request: for anywhere but en_US, replace "1 mile" with "1.6 km" =)
A journey on the Android Main Thread - part 1
Google will never do it, but they should drown the NSA in bullshit data. So much so it literally chokes the NSA's ability to spy on Google's services.

Google is one of the few companies that could pull it off. They have $56 billion in cash and nothing to do with it apparently. They generate $12 billion in profit annually and growing.

They have more financial resources, computing power, and brain power than the NSA does, and they're one of the few companies on earth that can say that (the only?).

A billion a year thrown at choking the NSA with a flood of data, I'd argue, would work extraordinarily well.

The NSA has a substantial budget (but how much spare budget?), but I don't believe they could afford the processing and storage costs that can be generated from a billion dollar per year effort of bogus data spewing (particularly if Google matches it with a dramatic effort put toward encryption R&D to multiply the cost the NSA suffers significantly more than just basic processing & storage costs).

The NSA's grand new data center in Utah cost billions and will have taken years to build. Google could probably force them to attempt to build a new one every single year forever, particularly given how bloated every effort by the government is and easy Google could generate 'infinite' volumes of data. Google should pro-actively help Yahoo, Facebook and others out in teaming up to drown the NSA.

The biggest threat to Google is the NSA. Google should act accordingly. Just as they would react with financial investments to any other competitive threat.
For example, if you're driving and you notice you are being tailed, and you say 'Glass record' and you look down at your speedometer, and up at your rear view mirror, and then record the entire traffic stop. Is that video admissible in court?

I wouldn't think so. It's a very short distance from here to "notice you are being tailed, slow down, say 'Glass record'"
Ladar Levison: The State of Email Privacy in America
I think we really don't have to wonder at this point.
Or even just

ffmpeg -i myvideo.mkv myaudio.mp3
Yes, it is, unless the TV meets the following requirements:

(A) The equipment has an interlock device that, when the motor vehicle is driven, disables the equipment for all uses except as a visual display as described in paragraphs (1) to (4), inclusive.

(B) The equipment is designed, operated, and configured in a manner that prevents the driver of the motor vehicle from viewing the television broadcast or video signal while operating the vehicle in a safe and reasonable manner.
> If you consider the number of people that want to lose weight, quit smoking, or get better at something, I’m probably wrong about the market size. It’s huge.

Everyone wants to improve something (or everything!) about themselves. Most people have a sense of what that is, and what they should be doing. Stop smoking, go to the gym, get more sleep, eat better, spend less money, make more money, etc. A personal analytics system may help someone optimize their life from seeing the hidden details, but I claim that the steps to self-improvement for most people are fairly obvious. The problem in self-improvement is not lack of data, it's how to execute on the obvious known fixes (how to stop smoking, etc).
—$10k to $0 (debt)
For government projects, sometimes they don't want to save money at all. They are more interested in how money can get in someone's pocket.
Can someone explain to me what the purpose of WebRTC is? Why does the browser need some kind of new protocol in a browser to do "real time communication?" I mean, don't we already have TCP/IP?
> Europe has largely solved this problem, and using your antiquated American credit card in Europe is not only difficult, but even if possible will elicit crazy looks.

Wait what does Europe do? Just genuinely curious, and a cursory google search didn't return anything.
“Look, NSA has platoons of lawyers and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole,”

Interesting how agencies, corporations and alike have the collective maturity of children. A grown up will say to a kid "you can't play with fire with your friend" and the kid immediately will think "he didn't say I can't play with fire with my other friend".
Your Docs are a Minefield
At least they didn't use windows/.net stack this time.
What companies have been at least mildly successful in Personal Analytics? From where I am standing I can't think of any.

Yes Fitbit is a great pedometer that gets people to walk more but last time I checked they weren't recording that much data and linking to connected scales is useful but its barely scratching the surface.

One issue with Personal Analytics is we need more data and it needs to be EFFORTLESS to record. The ROI is only high enough when the effort is very low. This is a challenging problem that requires "true innovation". I don't think a tracking app on my mobile phone is going to be the answer.

Another issue is the ability to improve some facet of my life with this data(weight, sleep, etc). Even if I can correlate drinking coffee in the evening is causing me sleep problems unless I can change my habits its not useful information. We need to be able to change our habits and processes based on this data. There are scientific strategies to get people to change habits and simply telling them they need to walk more or eat less do not pass scientific muster. Trigger -> Habit -> Reward. If we need to change Habits we must replace them something. If I need to stop drinking coffee then I need to replace it with something.
No, the libertarian obsession with the gold standard and other poor economic policies preclude the Economist from being lumped in with them.
Do you think that drivers should avoid listening to the radio? Should they pull off the road before manipulating their heater? Windshield wipers?

I ask because I kind of doubt you truly mean "100%", but you insult anyone going for anything less.
you can listen to more here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgV_Z6V_llk

started at min 30 or so
DoS vulnerability in #Varnish HTTP cache software.
Assuming it's a one mile radius for everyone, making it a chat room the app would either need to intersect or union everyone's area... This would make the novelty of the app unusable or pointless, respectively.
Don't Be Evil, Meet Spy on Everyone: How the NSA Deal Could Kill Google (2010)
$293Mln...Ok so it's like hiring a team of 100 web developers, pay each of them $100K a year, and they will work non-stop for 30 years...

Edit: Working non stop for 30 years.
A Real-Time Map of Births and Deaths
For $40, my return on investment is paltry. I understand why it cost that much because of the hardware, but for that amount of money I could do a lot more than buy a screen lock.
Rationalizing Python packaging
> I am not saying it's OK, but in that case, most US citizens aren't even affected.

There is a very strong line of reasoning that says terrorist attacks and thousands of America soldiers killed in combat are a direct result of these kinds of foreign policies.
http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

There are a ton of Java frameworks in the top performing benchmarks (See Lng:Jav). Whatever conclusion you've made from Java Swing applications running on top of WindowsXP machines in the early 00's are not applicable to modern web server performance.
I don't know how different - if at all - it is in CA, but here in NC, a traffic violation is still, as I understand it, a criminal charge. It's just that they try to speed up the process by treating traffic charges differently, and having the first trial in front of a judge only[1], no juries and all the normal courtroom / trial trappings.

But, since it's still a criminal case, and right to trial by jury is still recognized, there is a guaranteed automatic appeal that you can invoke[2] if you aren't satisfied with the decision in district court (or magistrate court). You then get a "trial de novo"[3] or "new trial" in superior court (or district court if appealing from magistrate court). Once you get to superior court, that's where you get a jury and the whole bit. It's interesting to note that some people consider it a legal strategy to basically use the first trial as a chance to size up the State's case, so they can construct the best possible defense on appeal.

Not sure if CA has a similar notion or not, but just wanted to point out that, in at least some cases, the bar on traffic offenses is still ultimately "innocent until proven guilty" (as it should be, IMO).

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bench_trial

[2]: http://law.onecle.com/north-carolina/15a-criminal-procedure-...

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_de_novo
Discuss here or on Twitter > https://twitter.com/bsdphk/status/395605262024732672
As far as I understand it is a way for a 1-1 communication between browsers. No middleman. So when I talk to another browser it is (browser<->browser2) NOT (browser<->Google<->browser2)
What?! since when non-us citzens can vote?

remember that democracy (even half-implemented as it is in the US) is the dictatorship or the majority (that can vote).
I seriously doubt that the static content performance of NGinx (or whatever) has anything to do with performance issues. They're probably spending more money on bandwidth than they need to, and offer a slightly degraded user experience, especially for people on slower connections, but otherwise...

Things may have changed since October 1st, but on second page load of the home-page, I'm seeing the majority of content as either cached or served by CDN, a relatively small functional payload compared to a lot of HN darlings, and an 79ms latency for the main request.

None of that is really alarming IMO.

Even so, half these assets are trackers and 3rd party resources that would probably be CDNed externally. If storage IO and bandwidth isn't your limit (and internally the URLs could easily be routed to different servers entirely as well as caching proxies), then it's pretty plausible that there's practically nil overall performance impact as far as service availability goes.

Also, I think the whole "you should only use one of each type of asset" philosophy is debatable at least.
Seriously, that number is staggering.

CGI Federal literally ripped off the government, screwed the American people badly, and "stole" hundreds of millions. They should never be allowed to work on another project again and should be required to refund the government. The project managers should be fired and publicly humiliated.

I STILL cannot even login to the website. The site has said "The system is down at the moment." for the past two weeks.

The only reasonable explanation that I can imagine is sabotage by someone who didn't want Obamacare to succeed, the same thing that happened in Congress recently.
We still use miles in the UK too.
Webtalk.io - real-time chat while browsing any website
> Google had no knowledge

Citation required.

> Not only that, but Google launched a high-profile effort to encrypt the communications inside and between their data centers.

When exactly was that announced? Before or after Snowden went rogue? If after, the agency had to tell the PRISM partners that they were going to be exposed if they were willing participants in hosting a back-door.

Otherwise, they only got paranoid after that fact?

I'm wondering if there is a state with a particularly restrictive privacy law that can drag Larry or Sergei to the witness stand and find out if participation is willing or unwilling.
What an unbelievably stupid line of thinking.

Kidnapped their children? Get a hold of yourself here. Google is a tech company, it is a perfectly reasonable expectation that they get the big parts of their security model right. Not encrypting data going through leased (or even their own) fibers? Big, big mistake. NSA and US government aside, Google dropped the ball big-time here.

> Why do I sometimes get the feeling that people specifically want to hate on these companies when the real outrage should be for the government spooks.

Funny you say that. Because I was pretty much a Google fanboy before all of this happened (oh, and their recent changes wrt privacy policies). I am very angry at the government, but that is a separate issue.
Browsers currently can't do any "hosting" so there is no way to directly connect to another browser. WebRTC solves this problem.
—$100k to —$10k (debt)
I've seen Engineering a Compiler get recommended as well, have you read that one?
For me it seemed to have problems syncing, forgot my password frequently, and just various other problems.

I tried it very early on and then again recently--my more recent issues were more than it is almost too busy when compared to Mail.app which gets the job done.

I couldn't say they fixed everything however as I didn't really spend too much time in it in my more recent experimenting with it.

It does create some Gmail labels/folders which can be a problem if you find that annoying--I have enough as it is haha.
I see no source code. And until I do see the source code, this isn't news, this is just hot air lies from a big corporation.
The real issue is that in practice it is often difficult to separate these two changes.

??? No it's not
Let's not pretend that this has anything to do with preferring gadgets over safety. People are making this argument over and over and over in this comment thread and it's just dumb.

It's pretty clear that people who justify this are doing so because they don't think it's unsafe. You may disagree, and that's fine, but realize that they disagree with you, and do not see it as a safety issue.

If you don't think it's unsafe, how would awareness of car accidents or respect for human life affect anything? You're aiming at the wrong idea.
—$100k or more (debt)
You're off by a factor of 10, but yes, it's terrible.
Diary of a newly wedded couple
Not that it becomes a reasonable number, but according to the Post[1], it's more like 175 million. So 20% of a billion dollars...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/10/...
Are the world’s chat apps really worth $48 billion?
I like the concept of re-centralizing all personal content.

Dispersed services, central location, central analytics.
I would just cut all cables to the US, ... deny US citizens to enter any foreign country and then just do your shit over there and get happy with it.

Whoah, there. Your grievances are well-placed. But keep in mind that it's a certain subset of agencies in the US government that are responsible for the problems you're upset about, not all US citizens. As for fixing things, the government has become literally unmanageable, and things are a mess right now.
Realistically you would need to double that 100k to pay for other expenses (hardware, benefits, office, management). Even then, CGI Federal screwed the American people and should be fined for what they've done.
I've been taking a similar approach to a side/hobby project that relates to personal spending/budgeting.

I am seeking to apply the "easy data entry" + "subjective good/ok/bad" measures to help folks discover patterns of bad spending decisions. While most every budgeting/spending app will show you "how much you have left" or "safe to spend" the real measure of improvement is whether you made good decisions or bad decisions given your life circumstances. This also has the effect of softening the penalty for missing data. If you miss some data, you just pick up where you left off. You're not trying to balance your budget. You're tracking decisions. Although I'm not (yet) biting off the notion of correlating it with other personal analytics, that's an interesting extension of the idea.

I'm really convinced that a behavioral approach to spending/budgeting would lead to longer lasting positive changes than fretting about exceeding your grocery budget by $19 due to unexpected company joining you for lunch.

The general gist is described here: http://www.spendlight.com/land-3.html
Whitespace changes in an open source project are the kind of thing that depends on the code style enforced at the project level - certainly not something you would submit as a newcomer. Do you happen to have an example of what you're explaining here?
What guarantee is there that a codec which doesn't even exist yet won't lose to Microsoft/Cisco/Nokia/et al the next time we need to standardize a MTI codec in some spec? This seems wishful thinking.
http://near.im/ is a mobile web implementation (in Meteor) of the same concept that I work on occasionally, although the frontend needs to be redone. No longer requires a Facebook login.
Sounds like happy/content people to me.
I'm all for bulldozing the Mission right after bulldozing Cupertino for high-density cubes.
I had this. For me enabling the "All Mail" folder in Google's IMAP setting fixed this after a lengthy resync.
Very nice. Do you have a background in restaurants or did you identify the market?
"Stay connected with
the Dark Mail Alliance

[Enter your e-mail]
"
> So basically you need to use strict ownership at API boundaries as that is the only way to avoid this. This isn't always optimal. It sounds like you're sacrificing quite a few goats at the js altar for no real benefit.

No, but when somebody I'm working with makes a potentially breaking change to a shared codebase, they either ensure that they also fix the now broken code, or they flag it up to the people whose responsibility that is. Aside from that - most people simply avoid making a breaking change - or if it absolutely must be made, then a process is followed.

> Your question about why a developer would need to change an internal function's signature is ridiculous

I wasn't asking why the developer was changing a function signature - rather why they're so eager to change a function signature without following up and either fixing the things they break, or flagging those things up to the people who require it.

> This isn't a necessary fact of life. Even most sane dynamic language will error out when such incompatibility arises, instead of blaming the developer for using a process incompatible with the js way.

There's no such thing as a random error. If there's an error, somebody made a mistake. Some mistakes are stupid, others are subtle. Changing a method signature and then not doing something about the callers is a stupid mistake.

> Not to mention the other argument, that with all the discipline in the world, humans will still make mistakes. Instead of translating to errors, they translate to bugs.

Of course humans will make errors - but your job is to minimise the frequency and severity of those errors. There's no excuse for sloppiness - you either keep on top of shit, or you don't. Call it whatever you like, but a shitty broken codebase is only the fault of the developers, not the language.
Transparency Is Not Just About Github, Crowdsourcing, Open Source And Open APIs
Strange, I can say most engineers never heard of this by the time they leave college.
Wow.

Years ago, I remember reading Richard Stallman's "How I do my computing"[1], an essay in which he explains why he usually does not connect to any websites from his own machine, downloads web pages from a headless browser running in some server, does not have any user accounts for any web applications, does not buy anything over the Internet ever, does not use any social networking sites, and otherwise abstains from using the Internet like most normal human beings.

"Jeez, that's way too paranoid," I remember thinking.

It turns out Stallman was just (far) ahead of his time -- as usual.

--

[1] http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
I'd like to see the binaries released as deterministic builds. This would avoid quite a few concerns for Mozilla supporters.
Neat idea! But what makes you think that graphene super capacitors are the best option? Why not some combination with solar battery(if it's going to fly outside) or some other kind of energy source?
San Francisco Chronicle gives up ‘Redskins’
As much as I hate promotion emails, I do hope they make sure that companies can still send mass "dark mails" securely, rather than sending the one by one...
Also agreed. It's for the same reason I don't like the name darknet. The FBI was already lobbying Congress and saying the Internet is "going dark", implying that they thought that will scare congress into acting, and giving them more powers.

It should be named the Private Mail Protocol, or something. If it stands up to scrutiny, as soon as there is a nice looking e-mail client for it, I'll start using it, and try to use Gmail as little as possible, or not at all. I know Google won't adopt it, so I won't even bother to ask them to adopt it. I'll just switch.
Were you guys at the YC startup school? I remember talking with someone about a similar product, although the target market was slightly different...