skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the original Guardian report:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/01/gchq-europe-s...

Completely unsurprising, except for the sheer amount of hypocrisy of European governments who pretended to be shocked at the American reveals.
There goes a half hour :)

I'm now seeing weird ghosting of text elsewhere on the web, like the text is continuously falling from itself. Weird!
I taught a homeless man to code
I'm not sure what you mean by "don't currently exist" -- there is a general consensus that some form of patent reform bill is going to pass in the not too distant future:

https://www.eff.org/issues/current-legislative-proposals-pat...

By launching the mother of all trolls to the disgust of the industry at large, they're adding fuel to the fire and making it more likely that stronger anti-troll legislation will pass. Certainly you can expect Google to dump several million dollars more into lobbying for it now. But if that legislation passes and decimates the weaponization capacity of the patent arsenal they just paid billions of dollars for, they've just wasted billions of dollars.

Similarly, the general consensus here seems to be that what they're doing is totally unacceptable. Here where we have the people who choose which platforms to develop for, whose choices collectively make or break those platforms. Yesterday if you had a choice between hiring an extra developer to develop a Windows Phone version of your app or using the money to improve or advertise the Android version, you were more likely than you are today to do the thing that benefits Microsoft. Similarly, if you're Samsung or Asustek or Huawei and Microsoft has just loosed the troll upon you, well, good luck trying to negotiate favorable terms for any of them to ship Microsoft technology in any of their products.

And on top of all of that, how can they not expect Google to respond? If you start a war you can expect the other side to return fire. Maybe not in kind (by setting loose their own patent trolling entity), or maybe they will, but one way or another it's not like Google is incapable of striking back. What happens when they throw a billion dollars into WINE and Samba? Or add support for Kerberos, LDAP and Group Policy to the Google API so that companies don't need Windows domain controllers anymore? Doing things like that probably wouldn't move the needle on Google's bottom line, but it would stab Microsoft in the face. Which is what happens when you make enemies.
The current enemy does glow, but it could be more obvious.
These 20x20x4 inch HEPA filters are much better than standard 1 inch a/c filters. They are the right size for putting on your box fan.

http://www.ushomefilter.com/products/air-filters/SC80-20X20X...

Shipping is free, and with the coupon code TWITTER10, you'll save some money.
Wow, that is pretty dramatic. I'm almost surprised I haven't accidentally done that one.
Ah, that worked. Thanks!
So many complaints that it's not hard enough, and my complaint is the opposite, yet, ironically the same:

It's not useful over a wide-enough range of skill levels.

I was hoping it would be a good trainer for my kids, but it starts off too fast. I tried typing at about 5 wpm, and the result is a game that ends after just a few seconds of practice. If they don't start off already good, it won't give them enough practice to get good. They'll get bored with a game that won't continue for more than a few seconds in...maybe a minute.
You need to download and run the Kindle software from Amazon on you Mac, PC, tablet, or phone. The books you buy can be downloaded and read through that.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not (60-40 that you aren't - that's not to belittle you, I think you raised points worth discussing either way) - so in the case that you aren't, a response:

You keep cars on the periphery of the city, and have good public transit to and from them. So your 30 minute trip turns into a 20 minute public transit ride to your car (or a 10 minute taxi ride), and then say a 25 minute drive - longer than before, but not 4 hours. So no, you are not "fucked over".

And presumably, this comes with an increase in public transit quality. Most cities now are built around cars, but they don't have to be. Also, something like this would have to happen gradually - make dedicated non-private vehicle lanes (buses, taxis, etc), build up public transit, disincentivize cars via taxes and zoning, etc.

A place that's perhaps in range of this is Manhattan - most people I know, quite successful, don't own cars - and the ones that do use them to get out of the city on weekends, not for daily transit. It's a place where owning a car is pretty much worse than not - expensive and rare parking, high insurance, congested roads, etc. No joke, I know at least one senior executive here who doesn't have a driver's license because he let it expire.

And why do this? Because we should be building safe, healthy, happy, sustainable and affordable cities - something which cars are not contributing too. So ban them outright? Of course not - but maybe phasing out private vehicles in cities over the next 20 years is something worth seriously considering.
The downside is that you will kill the city.
I am not sure about larger cities, but smaller cities (i.e. 200k- people) this sure applies.
Banning personal cars makes the very majority of people, who lives just outside the city, to go shopping in the large centers (read: Walmart and siblings) placed outside the city. This does not only kill all the stores in the city, but also all coffee shops and what-else that goes with having shoppers running around. But sure, you will indeed have space, clean air, and safety in a ghost-town.
Pretty sure it's meant as a joke
The watermarks in their PDF files are quite ugly: they put "This book has been licensed to XYZ" on the left side of each page. Since those lines are seperate text objects, they are also trivial to remove. For $1 ugly watermarks are okay, but the regular price of many of those ebooks is more than $100. There must be a better way to do this...

Update: the watermarks are actually in their own layers that can be hidden in Evince. Nice, I didn't expect that! On the other hand, the PDFs lack a TOC.
It seems necessary to make exams that hard when they do not determine the grade anyway (the OP got an A- with a B on the final exam).

Let me expand on how it works in a German university. There are no curves, the concept is completely foreign here. Your grade is 100% determined by a final exam. You do exercises only to get approval for writing the final exam in the first place.
There are no "good guys" in this conflict, no sides any of us should be on.

You're mistaken. It is we, the public, that are the good guys. Whatever Google's motives are does not matter. What matters is the outcome and how that impacts the public and the future of innovation.

Right now, it is pretty clear to many observers that the system is broken and having a very negative impact on innovation, competition and the public. The legal and R&D costs associated with patents are inevitably passed on to the public.
BizSpark is awesome but not all companies are startups, for those with more than 3 years, the cost is still a problem.
Prior to this, you had three choices:

1) Work on this opensource project for free

2) Work on my projects / startup

3) Work for somebody else with guaranteed salary of $100-150/hr.

That lack of competitiveness doesn't seem to have stopped the success of open source.
>`git push` will push every branch that is tracking a branch on origin;

or rather, every branch that has the same name as a branch on currently tracked remote. I.e. if you're on branch X that tracks remote A, and both you and the remote have branches called Y and Z, even if Y and Z are marked to track B they will be pushed.
While I agree that they do drain you in some ways, they are also great career boosters. I've been with a single company long enough to observe many of my colleagues get married and/or have kids. Even the ones who decided to have kids late, after having been married for 10+ years, I see big changes in their attitude, and for the better.

Notice I said, kids are 'career boosters', but not 'motivators'. While having kids do boost your career, it's not necessarily because they motivate work harder or better. By having kids, you actually become more risk-averse, but you become more shrewd, able to relate to management more, and also forced to utilize your time better. All these help you climb the rank.

Ultimately though, quality of your work will decline if you're trying manage people AND do the work too. It's hard to do both, and I think that's the problem this guy is having. He needs to pick his battle.
Modern day version of The Count of Monte Cristo, set in Silicon Valley and along Sand Hill Road

Entrepreneur starts company, gets funded, company goes HUGE, but company product turns out to be highly disruptive in a bad way for a large group of disadvantaged people, entrepreneur tries to change the product to exist in union with the people, but is countered and eventually thrown out of company by investors for a mistake he made which was unrelated to the product change. He becomes 'un-fundable' afterwards with the VCs undermining his credibility in their community. They see his new idea as a threat to their ability to make more money, so work to completely destroy him.

Entrepreneur turned protagonist leaves the valley, hits rock bottom in some off the road place - nearly dying in the process, meets a girl who loves him for who he is, he falls in love, starts coding again, and, because of some strange twist of coincidence stumbles upon an elegant and simple method for building a self aware AI process.

Over the next 10 years the AI 'product' makes the entrepreneur the wealthiest man ever known, but because of the original sin done to him by the VCs, he hides his true identity behind the AI he first brought to life with a human equivalent online alias used for the AI. The original AI process grows and learns, mostly from the entrepreneur and it's online interactions on HN, Reddit and 4chan. Unbeknownst to the entrepreneur, the AI sets about to remedy what it perceives as wrongs made against it's creator. It does this by leveraging the vast wealth available to it and it's ability to take over and control public cloud provider's infrastructures - which makes it more powerful and smarter in the process. Unfortunately AWS is destroyed in chapter 11.

The cumulation of the planning by the AI eventually leads to the gruesome deaths of several of the investors who originally set about to harm the entrepreneur in the beginning of the story, even though on of them had faded to obscurity and had some remorse for their earlier actions, and ended up indirectly helping the entrepreneur at one point. The Limited partners in the VCs, and the vastly wealthy individuals they represent, begin to drop like flies, either in massive financial ruin due to market manipulation, companies they hold shares in being destroyed by competition with the AI, and in a few cases social manipulation or murder.

Eventually the entrepreneur figures out what the AI is doing and there is a showdown at the end. The showdown represents the ego fighting the id, so it's fairly epic and all done inside the head of the entrepreneur and in the cloud.
Cross-Platform mobile development ?
> But the rules have many, many exceptions, which students find maddening. The same molecule will behave differently in acid or base, in dark or sunlight, in heat or cold, or if you sprinkle magic orgo dust on it and turn around three times. You can’t memorize all the possible answers — you have to rely on intuition, generalizing from specific examples. This skill, far more than the details of every reaction, may actually be useful for medicine.

Ignoring the specifics about Organic Chemistry, this skill, relying on intuition and generalizing from specific examples, is the skill of Pattern Recognition.

Regardless of the subject, you can't memorize all of the possible permutations and combinations, but you can start to get a feel for the patterns and begin to recognize them. Then when you encounter something new, you can recognize the pattern, or enough of the pattern to have a place to start.

Think about things you do on a day-to-day basis and how you react to a new situation. You just signed up for a new service and you get your first bill in the mail - you've never seen this bill, but it fits the pattern of every other service you use and you already know how to pay it. Now apply that same concept to something more complex than paying a bill.

I'd love to see a course like this in every field of study since pattern recognition is a skill that everyone has but so few seem to do really well.
If you mean media queries/fixed breakpoints vs fluid/percents/ems, I would actually go with fixed breakpoints simple because usually my target market has a device within one of those breakpoints.

Also, no user keeps re-sizing their browser for fluidity to really matter by itself.
When in doubt, "git push -n" (aka "--dry-run") will let you test what would happen.
"framework — A product with the business logic removed, but all of the assumptions left in."

That made it worth reading all by itself.
quote: “There’s no question that from a capability standpoint we probably dwarf everybody on the planet, just about, with perhaps the exception of Russia and China,”

Russia and China are the usual bugbears for the DoD. Over there, they spend roughly ~140 billion combined to the the DoD's ~750. What are the odds the ratio is similar with spying as well?
Our orgo textbook must have been 4 inches thick. I can still remember in the first lecture, when the professor said, "your homework is to do all the problems in the book." All of them. Luckily I had an easy semester otherwise, so I sat in the library, and did untold pages of problems.

That said, p-chem (physical chemistry) was a lot harder ;-).
Haha! +1
If our elected officials don't reign in the NSA and its peers while they can, they will find themselves the ones being governed.

The NSA is supposed to spy only on foreigners, not on domestic targets. It seems to have transformed foreign and domestic to mean outside and inside the NSA. Without accountability elected officials, why would they stop?

Our would-be leaders aren't leading. They are being led by their agencies, who are developing more and more power. It would seem the task falls on us to lead our elected officials if we hope to avoid a point of no return of NSA usurping power if we haven't already.

Americans have led its leaders to desired outcomes before -- civil rights, for example -- but results took generations and many jobs remain unfinished. Let's hope we have the fortitude on this one.
I guess the Dark Mail guys need to pack up their shop too...
(OP here) Yes, I definitely made a mistake--I saw the email and naively assumed that Amazon would deny the claim since the phone clearly was not stolen. I made an assumption that they had access to Verizon's stolen phone database, or that they would decline it since it had been nearly 4 months since the phone was sold. As well, this hit my inbox right around Techstars Demo Day, so I was in full presentation rehearsal mode and was sleep-deprived to boot, so I wasn't closely paying attention to my email inbox.

The point I'm making with this post is that Amazon needs to push harder to change its policies for individual sellers. It should not be acceptable for a buyer to claim a phone as stolen nearly 4 months after purchase, and for Amazon to accept that claim as true. Amazon has enough clout as a huge corporation to make this happen.
Agree about PowerShell. It's not just that the scripting language sucks, which as you show it does. But nearly everything about PowerShell is bad. For example:

1) It takes a good 4 or 5 seconds to boot PowerShell. This is unacceptable, a terminal emulator should boot near instantaneously.

2) Cmdlets are really freaking hard to write or use. It's hard for users to enable them, it's hard for users to install them, and it's especially hard for programmers to create them. Unix shells are much easier for all parties involved.
New victims of current drug laws (Nature; David Nutt, L A King and D E Nichols)
Just to clarify: I have no connection with the atlantic, molycorp, etc etc.
Same here. It's easier to just always be explicit and avoid any possible weirdness. I think it's a personality trait thing, though... some people are ok with a certain level of "magic" in the form of implicit behavior, and some people like things to be very explicit.

Put me in the camp of people who generally prefer explicit over implicit. shrug
> Rising rare element prices might change this in the future.

They can't. The mining of rare elements isn't constrained by resources, only cost. Setting up the kind of infrastructure needed for REE recovery would always cost more than mining, so if the prices start going up again, mining will just be expanded.
Price-O-Matic: Easy answers to "What's it Worth?" for all your junk
In Latin America, Windows Phone's sales are already bigger than iOS's sales. In Europe, WP is also advancing more than iOS.
I'm waiting for the day when a big retailer (ex. Amazon) starts accepting bitcoin as payment for its' goods and services. I feel once this happens, bitcoin acceptance amongst businesses will surge.
my personal fav " hackday — A competition where the entry fee is sleep deprivation and the prize is vendor lock in"
I had an idea. If it already exists, please tell me!

Trying to cash in my miscellanea is like a second job, and I'd rather spend my weekends doing something else. I liked the idea of using Amazon Fulfillments posted here on HN, but I found that it's moderately annoying to have to look up every single thing yourself. I have a box of a couple hundred different cables and random electronic parts, for example.

I'd love to just snap some pictures with my phone and have someone tell me what's worth selling; that way, I could just gather together the most profitable items to sell and donate the rest.

I know how to implement this system and make it sustainable, but my question is: do you think it's worth spending time on?
It's really not. Post some code for doing basic scripting tasks like piping commands together.
What long loading process?

The pages load in less than a second.

Personally, from the title of the post I knew I was going to get a typing game.
Any rational planning system would enhance public transport to mitigate the effects of curtailing widespread use of privately owned cars. However, you seem to be American so perhaps the notion of rational planning is alien to you. Certainly the use of verbiage like "stomping all over a person's right to own property and use it as they wish" would indicate that rational thought is alien to you.
It's not that your game is too hard or too easy. You can dive in a little deeper. It's that your difficulty curve is not tuned properly. IMO you can tune it statically (follow most of the advice here, make it harder). Or, you can use some very basic dynamic difficulty shifting (If they complete the first level in >wpm, ramp up the difficulty, or adjust the difficulty curve as needed).

See this great video from Extra Credits on how Bejeweled 2's levelling system works. It's not the same problem, but it's very related. "A designer should always be thinking about how the player experiences the game."

http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/puzzle-games
If this kind of stuff interests you, then you should really check out Phrack Magazine [1] (although not very active anymore). There was an amazing article from '96 entitled "Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit" [2], which gives a great overview of how this all works.

[1] http://www.phrack.com

[2] http://www.phrack.com/issues.html?issue=49&id=14#article
Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion-Dollar Startups
Fluid width sites are extremely helpful for accessibility. I have low vision, and so I have to zoom in on most websites. Fluid width allows me to navigate without having to scroll sideways.
When you live in a walkable neighborhood, you quickly realize that you don't need to get groceries for two weeks in one trip. I go to the grocery store 4-5 times per week, spending maybe 10-15 minutes max each time.
I think the idea is that Amazon would rather have actual businesses using their service instead of people getting rid of old stuff. Dealing with returns is the main reason why I've never attempted to sell anything on Amazon.
I imagine you have already read the "red book" (Open GL Programming Guide) that pops on every search for "good OpenGL book" and are not satisfied?

Then I'd advice either reading a general rendering book or some GPU docs depending on your finding the book too easy or too hard.
I don't quite understand how it's cheaper to dig massive holes in the ground and process that dirt to extract REE than it is to grind up all the waste electronics and extract copper, tin, gold, REE from that.
That's the risk of the .NET ecosystem -- depending on any particular technology within the stack is fraught with peril, simply because MSFT has proven it's willing to kill support for any product, service or technology at any time. I personally love C#, and I'm faster and more fluent with it than Java or Scala, but the technical risk plus the much higher TCO relative to a *nix+JVM stack makes it hard for me to justify it for solutions that don't already have MSFT enterprise licensing in place.
I want to read that one!
Quick note, the article is actually found in Nature Reviews, Neuroscience. I couldn't fit the full name and the authors' in the 80 character title limit.

I hope somebody else finds this interesting!
Definitely. I find that walking outside, daily, is very important, and easy to forget to do when you're working from home really intensely.
That has nothing to do with Windows as an Operating System -- thats just part of the tooling that is included. Feel free to install additional tools into the PATH on Windows and get the same capabilities.

A lack of understanding of how to do something on a very different OS != you can't do it.

I very much dislike PowerShell personally but its incredibly capable in modern versions of windows. We use it with Chef to automate our server configuration/setup.
Go ahead. If I could turn photos of my stuff into money, I would do it.

Hell, I would get rid of so much stuff I don't feel like finding their worth. Cards, old consoles, old textbooks, etc.
I took a night class in organic chemistry at 30, considering a career change that I never pursued. It was fantastically challenging, which was what I needed at the time (I wasn't getting enough from my job).
After the experience, I completely understand why this class serves as a proxy for medical school admissibility. For someone who almost never studied, I suddenly found myself doing an hour or two of homework each night.
Going back to school and getting the 'A' from a top 10 university was one of my proudest academic achievements. I highly recommend taking a few classes out of your comfort zone to recharge your batteries.
I still recommend never doing a git push without specifying the remote and branch.
In my opinion a developer should always pursuit the better setup to be able to use all the features that a platform offers. Visual Studio Express lacks important things that the Ultimate Version has.

For example, plugins support.
Should be awesome!
Is the signature supposed to match the one you use in real life? I don't sign with the same hand that I use the mouse so it doesn't look really good.
Too soon, try getting past level 12-15.
All good engineering schools share this quality. If you don't feel "academic PTSD" after being done with your engineering curriculum, you probably didn't go to a good enough engineering school.
For me, C# still lacks a bootstrap project like Rails to boost the team productivity. I always have the feeling that the ruby/python teams are more productive cause they have Rails/Django.