skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're all responsible for the things done in our names, and responsible for changing them if we don't like the outcome.

I agree wholeheartedly. It's good for people in the west to read stories like this from the front lines and realise the moral ambiguities and atrocities which are inevitable in wartime. If you don't like this, do something about it, and vote against any politician who proposes to continue it, because in many cases our taxes are paying for it. The UK and Germany also host drone bases used in this expanding war.

I don't agree that drones are just like any other tools of war though. There are a few important differences from say cruise missiles or artillery - they are capable of stand-off surveillance for hours before and after strikes. They don't require warships or other platforms in the theatre of war, just an air base which could be several countries away and controllers who can be a world away. Also, importantly, many of them are tasked on missions directly controlled by the President or CIA (not this operator though). I think that has changed the way this administration looks at war and made Obama a very direct military leader.

Prior to drones, it was far harder for President Obama to order a strike in say Pakistan or Yemen, based on what his intelligence handlers tell him is a terrorist, and be sure of hitting targets moving on the ground so precisely, with visual footage before and after. Because they give a feeling of omnipotence over low-tech adversaries, even if the footage is blurry and the intelligence scarily incomplete, it will be tempting to use them more and more for surveilling and attacking as one operation, in any country in the world, without really having permission or a war ongoing. It will also be tempting to use them on civilian targets like houses or groups of people in ordinary life. That's a distinct change from previous engagements which if they killed civilians were far less targeted.

Drones, and this administration's use of them, have blurred the boundaries between war and peace, and of war itself, until it seems the world is viewed as a battlefield, and the war is an eternal one against enemies who look like civilians. There hasn't even been a formal declaration of war, and pre-crime assassination has been adopted as a tool of war. That is a huge change in how we view war, partly brought about by drones and partly by the nature of the enemy the US is trying to face down in this asymmetric war.
Then say "startup mail clients" not "most mail clients". I know if I surveyed your typical business persons and had them list out "popular mail clients", you'd almost never hear the "mail startups" you're referring to. I think there may be a bit of echo chamber going on, as if your only customers would be the HN crowd.
The last paragraph mentions past convictions based on evidence where this sort of notice should have been given, but it wasn't policy to do so at the time. Is there a group out there known to deal with this sort of thing? Do the ALCU/AI/Supreme Court even have a chance before there's some retroactive fix?

Also, based on their past decisions how would the SC rule?
Buffer app hacked?
The title is a bit misleading. They are working with Facebook on a program that would allow them to ban individual users form Facebook, not shutdown the entire FB, like the title makes it sound. Not saying they should have the right, as FB is the 21st century equivalent of the market square, and 1st amendment should prohibit what they are trying to do.
http://babygra.ms

Mail photo postcards of the kids to grandparents. It's cool because people like it and pay for it. It's also nerd-cool because it uses AWS SWF for order processing and gave me a chance to see if I could design, ship, and scale up a successful iOS app myself.
At the end of the day, the engineers that I personally know who contract at Apple are competent but not great. They happen to commute. The two are not related. There is no insinuation in the original post that all engineers who commute are mediocre.

I am however insinuating that the culture at Apple may have changed, which allows merely competent engineers to be hired in the first place, while great engineers like Bertand Serlet leave the company, to the detriment of OS X.

As for the 101, you must be trolling...
Related: http://lesswrong.com/lw/qp/timeless_physics/

>> Warning: The central idea in today's post is taken seriously by serious physicists; but it is not experimentally proven and is not taught as standard physics.
dig the simplicity and saving seems useful. any plans to let a user tag the location and maybe get their history via json.
Ethically speaking, I don't care if a database has "legit" tabs or not. (I downloaded 1000's of tabs in a zip a lot of years ago, that was definitely helpful as far as learning songs goes.) It's one thing if a it is a song that a band has actually recorded themselves, but an "illegitimate" tab is often the labor of the listeners. You could say that it is plagiarism, but I'd argue that it isn't as long as it doesn't pretend to be something that it is not ("my new cool song!"). It seems comparable to transcribing a video presentation (the video presentation might be copy righted).

Artists don't owe it to give out tabs of their songs, but listeners don't owe it to artists to not lay out what it was that they heard.
We sell tabs as part of our Pitch Perfect program (http://www.soundslice.com/pitch-perfect/), and for that we deal directly with the artist to clear copyrights.

The YouTube (free) part of the site is meant to be a loss leader / tech demo for Pitch Perfect and our technology licensing. We haven't run into any licensing issues. It'll be interesting to see what happens over time, as I don't believe in putting ads on the site, and I'd like to keep a free version and a pay-for version.
I don't know about EC2 but Linode provide you with a web based console you can use to set stuff up.
Agreed. Taking "ancient wisdom" too seriously and seeing it through a modern scientific lens is pretty much always too big-a-stretch to make.

Plus there's a difference between talking about psychological perception of time, as most religious texts do, and time as a measure of the evolution of physical systems in the scientific sense. Not the same thing.
CS Education is Broken
I am working on https://nutty.io - share terminals using browser. If you use tmux/screen tools you will find this useful.
Ah, that's much clearer. Thank you! ^_^
Buffer app hacked
Buffer's Facebook tokens have been used to post spam to Buffer users' Facebook walls.
UK's Chief Geek showing how we could have avoided Healthcare.gov
That is a sick looking plane! I would fly that thing in a heartbeat.

Make no mistake though, if that plane makes it to the market it will be extremely expensive and will burn a whole lot of fuel. The engine they're using, the 200 HP Deltahawk, costs more than our entire plane at $70,000,[1] and while it is very fuel efficient for an engine with that power, it will still be burning 7-11 gph in flight.[2] It is unreasonable to think that this plane could make it to the market for under $200,000, and its hourly operational costs when you factor in engine overhaul will be around $50. Ours is less than $15.

The frustrating thing however is that since this plane is still in early development stages, it will be several years at least until it they are ever able to deliver an aircraft. The nature of the industry is that everything takes a tremendous amount of time. We were able to avoid this for the most part by using an airframe design that was created in the Czech Republic a few years ago, but before this our plane took 7 years to develop. Even given this huge head start, we've been working almost 2 years on SkyCraft and are still a few months from being able to deliver a plane. Flight testing, certification, and setting up production are all enormous tasks, and unlike a lot of technology startups, you can't release a minimum viable product in aviation since any product defect will mean death.

There are a lot of things keeping flying very expensive, but I laugh when I hear people in the industry talking about how General Aviation is dying. The fact that the GA industry even exists right now when it is so absurdly expensive is a testament to the fact that people will do pretty much whatever it takes to fly. We're one of the few companies right now actively pursuing the goal of making a safe, high quality airplane affordable for a middle-income person, and when this goal is achieved, General Aviation will explode.

[1]http://www.deltahawkengines.com/Firewall%20prices.shtml

[2]http://www.deltahawkengines.com/econom00.shtml
I used this to start up an extension for use internally with my company for quickly adding discussions to a Basecamp project. Definitely takes care of a lot of the basics for you. Back when I used it, some pieces weren't maintained anymore, so look out for that. (Seems like the settings interface was from a non-active project?)

Great way to get started on an extension. Would love to see this go cross-browser.
Hackathon Team Builds ‘Open Radioactivity Warning System’ For Crowdsourced Data
Quite the opposite. The video -- because it's huge compared to JS, CSS, etc. -- /does/ make sense to host on YouTube. The /player/ does not belong embedded in the page though. Take a screenshot, host that on your own crummy web server, and link to YouTube, ideally with a notice to the effect of "Clicking this link will share your information with YouTube..."
Yeah, I was expecting him to say at least a 5-figure number for each system and something about one-time-use.
> You are oversimplifying a lot of the problems.

I only have so much space here, and I only have so much time to
actually think these things through. So I'm just going to ignore this
fully general counter argument.

> And saying that the problems won't even arise until we start to
sell these cars is just nonsense.

Let me put it this way: if no self-driving car is ever sold, these
won't be a problem. These problems are conditional on a working
self-driving car actually existing in the first place. The only
problem right now is getting the car to drive.

Now of course, foreseeable future problems do influence current
decisions. But let's not get into Timeless Decision Theory.

---

> Also enforcing a 4 day work-week? How does this lower unemployment,
except on the paper?

Why wouldn't it?

Speaking for about 400 actual companies of various size in France, the
slight increase in hourly productivity does not match the rather sharp
drop in hours per week per employee. To keep their total production
from going down, they had to (and did) hire more people (about 15%, I
guess, it depends). It meant more employment. In the real world. Now.

Also, the salaries were maintained. No pay cut. And the costs did
not increase either. This is because they have a deal which allows
them to pay less taxes (specifically, those who go to our national
unemployment insurance). So, so increased costs and no pay cut. In the real world. Now.

The only thing that's only on paper right now is the macro-economic
calculation: what if everyone did the same? So far, it checks out: it
doesn't cost nor bring any money. You just have more people working a
bit less.

---

There is this saying that employment is not a cake, that more work
spurs more employment or something. But at any given point in time,
it is a cake. Basically, work equals demand divided by
productivity. In a consumption society, to have more work, either you
increase demand, or you lower productivity. There's limits to the
first, and the second one is Ludism. So there's a point where you
have to divide work among the workers somehow. You can let the market
deal with it, and that gives you unemployment, or you can enforce
shorter work weeks.

Unemployment is bad, because it drives down demand, which ultimately
drives down work, which under the current system increases
unemployment… One of the causes of World War II by the way.

Shorter work weeks on the other hand, provided there's no pay cut,
drives demand up, through the sudden decrease in unemployment.
Also, less unemployment means better salary negotiations, which means
more money to the workers, and less to the "stakeholders". (Mind you,
it can go too far and stifle investment. Currently however, workers
get 10% less of what they did 30 years ago. And that money don't tend
to go to investment. It mostly goes to the Global Casino.)

---

Source: http://www.roosevelt2012.fr/ (In French, sorry. I hope
automatic translations are good enough.)
Some of the hardware was built (one of the projectors), some of it is purchased (a second projector due to time constraints, and all of the DACs). The games, graphic engine, DAC comms, etc. are all programmed in a mix of Python and C++. Most projection software available is commercial and expensive, so I've rolled my own stack.

I'm working towards surface distortion mapping, which is increasingly important in the umbrella concern of rectifying multiple projectors onto a single coplanar/colinear surface. I'm going to project a series of grids and have OpenCV automatically align all of the projectors. From there I'll be working with a logical "frame buffer" (really coordinate/transform buffer) that is relayed over the network to a graphics server that will dispatch the drawing jobs and topologically sort objects unless they have preassigned projector-affinity.

As far as I know, nobody else is building a beowulf cluster of laser projectors for interactive display. That's my endgame. Really fluid, bright, fast laser light with incredible geometric output capacity. It won't be limited to 2D if I can get design a decent wireframe or clipping/culling engine.
grecy, the meter is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.

A second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.
They are similar risk to airforce units (ie: little/no risk to pilot). They are similar cost to airforce units (about 2/3 the cost of an F-15, which is certainly significant but not completely game changing). They perform similar actions to airforce units. I am always surprised that people draw such a big line between the pilot being in the cockpit and out of it.

It's also totally possible Bin Laden did hold up his hands. None of the points you are making really have anything to do with drones.
https://psychsignal.com/ Quantifying crowd psychology. Initially our granular sentiment technology is focused on financial sentiment. We plan on changing the way real time news is sourced and reported on.
Buffer was hack3d
Shut Up & Sit Down (http://shutupandsitdown.com & http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/shut-up-sit-down)

A board game review show and a few secret projects.

Cool because: Very funny.
> The most efficient brain will have the highest information-processing rate I, and the lowest mass M, hence the highest ratio I/M. Since very large exponents are involved, for the convenience we define the Sentience Quotient or SQ as the logarithm of I/M, that is, its order of magnitude.

Doesn't dividing by mass give small things too much of an advantage? If we have a construct of 3 atoms that can process some small non-zero amount of information, wouldn't it be likely that this construct would be many orders of magnitude more intelligent than a human, based on the very low mass?

Further, the Apple II and Cray are rated at +5 and +9. It seems like it'd be quite straightforward to cut the mass in half (maybe multiple times) for both of those machines and radically improve their score. Is that rating based on the computer with case and cooling, or just the chip and package, or the silicon without packaging, or just the transistors on the silicon? Each of those answers would, under the current formulation, radically change the sentience quotient, right?

I suppose I'm saying I'm concerned about the mass having too great of a role in this equation. This either indicates some kind of misunderstanding on my part, or perhaps it'd be improved by using something like sqrt(M)?
For reference, Belle Isle, which is across the street from the southern edge of the project, is a huge park owned by the city. There's deer and stuff living on it.

It was recently the subject of a conservative utopian fantasy.

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

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/belle-isle-commonwe...
Because that maintains the imprecision. Multiplying won't somehow scale the precision up as you go. It will in fact magnify the imprecision.
I don't think the problem is that we can't get anything that big to be precise, but rather that we just don't have any mass experiments that are precise enough period. If you look at the definition of a second, you can see that scientists aren't squeamish at all about multiplying things.
They do? What would that be? What have you learned about it that you can tell us about?
Totally understand. We're pretty close to launching a "stacked" display that shows the tab in rows, with vertical scrolling instead of horizontal scrolling. I suspect this will address that for you nicely.

To answer your questions: you can repeat/loop stuff by dragging on the timeline (or clicking annotations). You can view the whole tab by using the zoom UI in the lower left corner.
it's not because of Twitter but because of Buffer: http://twitter.com/buffer/status/394170769254932480
Awesome job. I'm impressed how many interesting and complex open source projects you created / contributed to. And you are only 19! What age did you start coding? And how did you learn? By yourself? Early CS degree? I'm a bit envy.
Github hired you for a good reason probably.
Slash looks really interesting, will keep a watch on it. I have some constructive remarks but it was all said already in other comments. Are you using it somewhere in production? What is the runtime? How is concurrency handled? Do you have performance benchmarks?
Great stuff overall. Keep it up.
Actually, no. By employing more people, you can cut the money you need for unemployment insurances. You can actually have your cake and eat it too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6618615
They just won't put their bases near civilians, because they won't need people to operate them. Then we can pretty much just designate some spots to put each other's base, defend those as well as we can, and war will be "whoever can destroy the other guy's base first, wins".

Meanwhile, civilians are over there, just waiting for the game of Playstation to end.
It has been my pleasure!

Also a thank you to tintup.com for sponsoring this great event feed -> http://www.tintup.com/thomasdavis-1382673881
"Parallel construction" requires investigators to discover independent probable cause or an arrestable offense by the target; it refers to the use of surveillance information to be "at the right place at the right time", but is not a generic mechanism that transforms surveillance intelligence into admissible evidence.
Yeah, automatic music transcription is the holy grail for Soundslice. Given a song, automatically generate the tab and chords. It'd be amazing!

There's software now that claims to do it (Capo, Riffstation, Chordify), but they all fail miserably on non-trivial music. It's a Very Hard Problem.
I'd expect them to drive themselves most of the time, but not always. On some places you'd have to "switch to manual" and drive the car yourself to a place where the gps tells you that it's suitable to turn on automatic driving.
My guess is that the defendant covered his tracks well, so the DoJ couldn't come up with a parallel construction in this case, and felt, based on the wiretap, that this guy was dangerous enough to risk the whole program on.

I hope the challenge is successful, and that they can eventually use legal means to nail this guy later. :\
Chromium installs Greasemonkey userscripts as normal extensions (minus update support). This tool turns them into XPIs: https://arantius.com/misc/greasemonkey/script-compiler.php
For each individual situation it is probably better to let the suspect get away instead of engaging in a high speed chase. However this makes it so people are more willing to break the law and then just run from police because they know they won't be chased, that makes society as a whole less safe. For example in New York City police will not chase suspects on motorcycles because it is so dangerous. You see groups of motorcycles and ATVs doing high speed wheelies through red lights regularly. So there are two sides to the issue we must look at.
Those reactions were justified then, and reactions to drone warfare (several orders of magnitude more distance) are at least as justified now.
Americas' own Brookings Institutes' conservative estimate is 10 to 1. That is still heinous.
pganalyze (https://pganalyze.com/) - Performance Monitoring for PostgreSQL databases.

Its cool because:

We visualise the metrics & counters that are usually hidden away in PostgreSQL internal tables.

Plus we check that your database is fast and configured correctly.

Also: I'm a techie with a UX hat, and data visualisation and pattern matching is fun :)
Well, they're using the static, known density at 4 degrees Celsius to produce water with a known mass, and then test what the measurement of that mass comes to. Basically they're using a known mass of water as a calibration aid. But I don't know that this level of precision could compete with the efforts underway.
I'm so sorry to hear it. This is why we're working in cancer.

We all work as fast as we can, but I've already seen too many cases with poor prognoses. The hope is that in growing this technology, we can catch cancers earlier when they are more treatable.
Pointing out the JTAC's role and its lack of connection to war mongering politicians is not worshiping war.
https://builder.addons.mozilla.org/

Firefox equivalent. Probably not as detailed, but still.
Better live coward with dead enemies than a brave corpse.

The problems is not the cowardly weapons but the ... I don't know how to explain it precisely - the ease and recklessness with which the US army is deployed outside of the US territory.
The vast majority of guitarists still use those ASCII tabs, not Guitar Pro -- but, fair point!

The biggest problem with Guitar Pro is that the playback is synthetic/MIDI. Our philosophy is that learning from a real recording is the best (only?) way to catch subtleties of music like phrasing, timing and feel.
Airmail is really good. I have a couple of problems but the developers are really responsive and bugs are getting fixed pretty fast.
... is something pretty much only people who haven't actually spent time living in the nicer parts of Croydon says, and presumably a large part of the reason why it's so cheap.

(and for the record, the prices I cited are for some of the nicer parts of Croydon - in the (few) shit holes you'd pay much less)

Frankly, I'm not moving anywhere else in London again. If I ever strike it rich, I'll still stay here, because what you get for your money here is insane compared to elsewhere in London.

Up to and including huge mansions off private roads (Croydon is home to one of the wealthiest areas in the UK, in parts of Purley) of a size and with gardens that require "staff", that go for less than what many people pay for tiny flats in Central London.

If it's worth thousands a year to avoid having a Croydon post code, I have no sympathy.
1-based indexing is insane. In the literal sense. I can kind of conceive of a mind that doesn't run away when introduced to a 1-based language. Some young, inexperienced mind which doesn't understand numbers yet. I cannot at all conceive what madman would actually like 1-based indexing. Their mind must operate on principles completely alien to the rest of us and should, preferably, not be allowed to write programs.
"I didn’t think that people without root access would ever use mod_python."

And without support for reloading, that pretty much guarantees who'll be using it.
This Killer New Service Lets You Connect To Any Popular API--Without Wrappers