skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As opposed to what the NSA is doing now, which is just debatably illegal, and if actually illegal is only illegal at the edges.

tptacek: "It's hard not to come to the conclusion that these activities were essentially criminal. I don't see how the administration can fail to disavow them, investigate them fully, and hold their instigators accountable. It feels like Special Prosecutor time."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641483

I don't want to take quotes out of context; the context seemed similar, to the point of it spawning interesting discussion. And I'd love to get your take on his position.
(Disclaimer: This is pure speculation)

While I'm sure pg has his reasons for disliking an article generalizing the program he's built for most of the past decade, he may have wanted to say something almost as a method of damage control. It sure shows that the article struck a chord somewhere, as he usually doesn't respond to these sorts of things.

(Though I do enjoy the fact that his response scores at best a three on his own scale: http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html)
I'm also in awe over the number of people who played along. This reminds me a little of the film Compliance, which I happened to see last night. I think humans are very susceptible to stories. Once a narrative gets rolling, people seem to just act out the part they invent for themselves inside whatever they perceive the story to be. The story has a life of its own.

All that aside, I thought there was little about police behavior that would surprise me. This surprised me a little. Butt-clenching as probable cause? Seriously?
Are you sure you're well versed in this subject? I detect more than a few dubious statements in your post.
Fair point. Macros in particular are frowned upon. Although.... they can be very handy when used sparingly.
Scientist sacked by British Gov't gets 2013 John Maddox Prize
>they have more than enough computing power.

No, they don't. Not even close. What they do have is enough money to print more ASICs than the Bitcoin community has.
Correct. Only the guilty have something to hide.
Yes, but there are downsides to cash which Bitcoin solves.

For example, crossing country borders with more than $2k-$5k in cash is a felony many places. Bitcoin, however, is as blind to borders as TCP/IP.
Tent seems to be posted every few weeks, but I still fail to understand why it's better than RSS, eMail, XMPP, and HTTP among other protocols.
This sort of stuff is just not very exciting to me. Latency is very important in gaming. Unless the servers are in the next room the latency will be probably be crappy. Companies have enough issues launching AAA titles these days without streaming them. It'll be like the Sim City launch every time.

The only really exciting thing going on in gaming (for me) is the Oculus Rift.
Outside of gaming maybe there are other use cases. Given how powerful and cheap hardware is, I just have a hard time believing it'll take off.
Yes, everyone should allow themselves to be subjected to a physical cavity search unless they have something to hide /sarc
What is Joosy?
Phrasing is a little weird, but I read it as that this is a zero-day that is actively being exploited, but a patch is not coming for a while.

Supporting evidence for this interpretation: http://blogs.technet.com/b/msrc/archive/2013/11/05/microsoft... which includes "We are aware of targeted attacks, largely in the Middle East and South Asia."
Governments who have tried that in the past find that groups of civilians start systematically killing government agents, particularly police and security forces.

It's generally a bad idea to go that route because the government is effectively condoning illegal actions and others will adjust their behavior similarly. Rather like the streets with graffitti and broken windows that seem to attract crime.

Now some would say the the government has already condoned illegal spying behavior, but that is not the same thing. Some groups have taken it upon themselves to spy back on the government but I don't know of anyone who suggests killing people as a response to illegal spying.

In any case, increasing the use of force leads to escalation and escalation leads to an expanding spiral of destruction that quickly becomes uncontrollable. For an example of what happens then, read a book called "10 days in October" and think about whether the USA really wants to follow the Soviet example. In addition, the Soviets themselves have pretty much abandoned that approach which is the main reason why the dissolution of the Soviet Union was so peaceful. Wiser heads prevailed. Can the USA at least match that as the American Empire fades away?
I've talked to bunch of people who've gone through YC and it doesn't seem like anyone is really missing out on much.

It seems to be more of support group than anything else, and really while a support group is important it doesn't justify near as much hype as YC gets.

The future of Silicon Valley's greatness is not within the reach of YC. The power of media and investment dollars is decentralizing fast and for the better.
Isn't this true of a huge number of people, given the state of Desktop Linux?

Additionally, many people can't afford to give up having commercial support for their OS as a target for software products (Adobe's in particular, in my experience).
The ironic thing is the whole expedition was to produce evidence for a criminal trial, so unless stuff gets "lost" everything will be well documented. If things do get lost, people pretty much need to hang.
19-Year Old Finds Way to Clean up World's Oceans in 5 years
Suing is not enough. This sort of egregious behavior won't stop until people go to jail. The cops involved should be fired for cause - which means, they will never be hired by any other force in the USA.
>they have more than enough computing power.

All the servers, personal computers AND super computers in the world COMBINED do not share enough computational power to put a dent in the Bitcoin network thanks to the widespread use of specialized Bitcoin mining hardware, i.e. ASIC Bitcoin miners.
"Back of the envelope calculations put the cost of car ownership around $7,000 per year."

You could buy a ten-year-old used car every year, plus insurance, for $2,000 or less [1] (assuming insurance is mostly the same as in the US). When it breaks down, buy a new one and sell the old one for parts or junk.

Owning a car provides courses of action you wouldn't consider without it. There's an extra level of planning involved if you have to try to find a car first, or take a train or airplane; if you have a car, the first step to any medium-length trip is to jump in the car, rather than to try to work out the logistics of how you'd get there.

[1] http://montreal.en.craigslist.ca/search/cta?query=&zoomToPos...
Yes, but most industrialized countries are parties to a tax treaty, right? So Table 2 would apply, I think.
http://www.irs.gov/publications/p515/ar02.html#en_US_2013_pu...
Bitcoin gone wild
New ec2 gpu instances
They mean that it is being exploited in the wild, not just theoretically.
Ha. Gone are the days where you pay for a game. You're paying for a service. Didn't you read your ToS?
Looks like those links have been taken down so your post essentially lacks context.

I was curious to see what those submissions were
"Value" alone doesn't necessarily imply "monetary value."
> It is possible there is a reasonable explanation

Ok, I'll bite, what could possibly be a reasonable explanation for excavating a man's anus half a dozen times?
That's just a fancy way of starting off the conversation by saying "you're wrong"

Not pointing out when someone is demonstrably wrong in a discussion is as useless and futile as pretending to want to solve poverty and hunger but not addressing the core issue.

Discussing topics like this on the Internet is already fairly useless. No sense in making it worse with a bunch of disingenuous and logically incorrect validation of opinions.
I don't want to use NoScript, but I feel like my hand will be forced.
So VNC...? But in your browser? I don't see how making VNC work in the broswer is 'revolutionary.' What does it add to the table more so than a standalone VNC client?
https://brendaneich.com/2013/05/today-i-saw-the-future/ is a much better link. To quote:

OTOY’s CEO Jules Urbach demo’ed an entire Mac OS X desktop running in a cloud VM sandbox, rendering via ORBX.js to Firefox, but also showed a Windows homescreen running on his Mac — and the system tray, start menu, and app icons were all local HTML5/JS (apps were a mix ranging from mostly local to fully remoted, each in its own cloud sandbox).

Personally I find that much more interesting than anything to do with gaming.
If you're using NFS, CIFS or smbfs to host or synchronize repo data, You're Gonna Have A Bad Time (YGHABT?) regardless of which VCS you're using - it's only a matter of time.
What does it add

Advertisers haven't figured out how to embed ads into your standalone VLC experience yet.

It's revolutionary- for the advertisement market.
Why is that interesting? Has VNC been EOL'd?
Nothing will ever come of it.

Warrant canaries are a cheap feel-good tactic for public relations. Even if served 215, Apple will continue to keep the warrant canary up, because it makes its customers feel safer, and because they're wise enough to know it would never fly with a judge.

The public will continue to think Apple was never served 215, and there's absolutely no way we could ever disprove it.
The existing system significantly favors the incumbent, who only needs to win a single match to retain his title for another cycle. Most other sports do not hand the title holder a free pass to a 1:1 match. Anand could have shaken up the chess world, and won himself a great deal of respect, by offering to go through qualification himself, but he didn't.

He holds the title which because of its tradition and all the battles fought for it has big value for chess fans around the world.

You're begging the question here. The author is saying that the title should not have so much value.
Facebook's Distributed SQL Query Engine for Big Data - Presto
With Great Joy
Product-market fit? Team's ability to execute? Resource constraints?
Pretty poor form to down vote this comment without a response. Seriously, what the hell?

I pretty much agree with this. There may be cases outside of gaming that this will be useful though. It's funny how on the desktop market everyone wants to run everything in a browser and on the mobile everything is moving into an "app".
Meteor in Production
I have not received any email communications from adobe on this matter. That said, I did receive a letter in the mail and was forced to change my password upon logging in to adobe.
The professional breaches of ethics are shocking and horrible, but the worst part of this is that it's bad test case for the legality of more and more invasive/dangerous bodily searches.

If the warrant was invalid to begin with, my concern is that a court won't be able to strike down the medical procedures as unconstitutional because the search itself was unconstitutional on simpler grounds.

I hope Eckert will win a civil suit, but my guess is that the worst part of this story will be the lack of deep constitutional scrutiny.

I am not a lawyer.
I would like to say that I'd be surprised if any court would find that the right not to be cavity searched without probable cause was not clearly established, but nothing surprises me any more.
The problem is that the public pays, and the guilty parties do not.

What is needed is a standard of liability insurance for police departments that is paid for by their pension fund.
> Do we really need all this Databases? What's special about this one?

Good point, Comrade. I will propose to GOSPLAN that we rationalise the development of all new technologies, to avoid such accidental evolutionary convergence in future.
nothing trolling about it.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=120003

2011 people having problems with multiple apps trying to use audio at the same time. This is one of the things that drove me away from desktop linux in 2008. 3 years later it still isn't a solved problem. My gut tells me that in 2013, it's still not a solved problem.

I've no doubt that some people get it to work for their use cases OK. But the fact that it was, even 2 years ago, enough of a problem that people still encountered it... architecturally, that's a symptom of something really broken.

I'm not really interested in learning the ins and outs of modprobe and kernel driver recompiles to try to get sound working as I expect it to - it works the way I expect it to on my macbook, which leaves me time to do other more important stuff.
Marketing, Dumb Luck, and the Popping of the Indie Bubble
You're not operating without reason when you go back to where you left it earlier

Just like I'm not operating without reason by pointing out that whole villages that are hungry are just making the problem worse by breeding without much restraint.

Your reply is written in a very condescending way. You should know that.

Yeah, I find it really childish to ask people for statistics as some kind of counter-attack when straightforward observations should suffice. What's your excuse for being condescending?
A printer IS a computer. The fact that it translates a language (the "bumps" on the cams) into action is the computational part.
That'll cover it. The IRS will stand down now. Thanks!

abnb know they are on pretty thin ice and I am starting to think the bubbling of this trope on HN is a marketing scheme by some people who bought a bunch of apartments and want to unload them on the "new 49ers."

6 FIGURES! Then down at the bottom... "It's a business. It's a hustle. You gotta stay on top of it." Sounds eerily like the MLM pitch. You make your hours! Run your own business! Get rich! Someone starts pitching that there will be landlord collectives and network payments... just get some friends in who you want to share the good fortune with!

Or in layman's terms, you are about to give up a dream job to become an inn-keeper who can't afford, due to your lack of economies of scale, to hire the maids, concierge's etc. abnb offers a mostly non-frills stay at a place where only the bottom line matters.

Most hotels offer a value proposition outside of a narrow range of clientele. abnb fixes a problem for rich kids. $150/night? Hostels and shit.

This is barely a temporary disruption. How many times do you want to wash someone else's sheets and towels before you figure out that $1000/mo ain't that much money given how much time you spend. If you start making 6 figures by playing monopoly IRL, the IRS will step in, local regulation will step in, and that arbitrage evaporates. Now, you're trying to dump an apartment into a glutted market.
In the Future of Programming, Bret Victor talks about how computers should be able to distinguish the API/language of one another using goal directed programming. Is anyone at work on that? It's nice but API documentation isn't usually the problem.
No, resisting means you don't want to be subject to force. You are possibly confused with being evasive.
>>That's not a language issue but a library issue

What is this, 1985?

Libraries, frameworks and the community etc make the language these days.
What is shocking is, they conducted everything. I mean, why? It's like they really wanted the drugs to be there.
I realize that it's human nature to want to discuss disturbing things like this, and that hackers fall under the category of humans, but this is really off-topic for Hacker News.

There's no intellectual discourse to be had here; it's just the dissemination of fear.
They do keep adding stuff to the open source portion, but you're right that there's plenty of closed source code running on a stock OS X kernel. This is loaded in as kexts, so the mach_kernel binary itself is open and reproducible. Drivers for anything vaguely recent are all closed, as are any security related things (crypto, firewall, sandbox, quarantine, etc.) and a few other odds and ends. Recompiling the kernel is entirely doable [1] (and occasionally useful for kext development), though running a kernel with literally no proprietary code will be quite a lot of effort. (and various important bits of OSX userspace will cease functioning)

[1] I've personally had success with the instructions at http://shantonu.blogspot.com/ - not that Apple has accepted any of my patches...
But it's not a legitimate method of obtaining (a lot of) data. The only legitimate uses I for BT I've used are WOW updates and maybe getting Linux distros.

The Pirate Bay may still be up, but it's a shady corner of the internet.

If businesses can't legitimately use BC, it doesn't matter if I can still do shady things with it.
Unless the people involved are SUSPENDED, there is no justice.
I mean in that we have a news article from a biased (if biased in ways I generally agree with; I like Reason) news source, and a filing from one side in a civil case.

I generally do trust police, and especially federal judges. Everyone involved in the drug war has gotten corrupted, and to some extent the lawlessness south of the border causes lawlessness in enforcing the law north of the border; Nietzsche and all that.

So, before hanging people, I'd rather get more evidence. But on its face this isn't so much a miscarriage of justice so much as a string of felonies committed by law enforcement and medical professionals.
It's good to know I'm not the only one who feels this way. I really hate having my travel restricted by bus stops and time tables.
This and schools. There are no non-racist solutions to this.
I would say media types don't give you a full definition [1] because they really aren't meant to do so. They are meant to be used to express resources in a certain way that clients and servers can understand them.

Additionally, your resources should be described through link relations, which, along with media types, allow your API to be self describing and discoverable.

Take, for example, the Business API that is listed on the site [2] and picture Collection+JSON [3] being used to represent the business collection resource and the business item resource. If you used Collection+JSON, what would be left to describe? It would seem like you wouldn't need a Swagger file because your API would be describing itself.

Lastly, even though media types may not be actively promoted or used at this time, I think we should push toward promoting really good hypermedia types.

Edit: I wanted to also add a couple other interesting media types to check out, HAL [4] and Siren [5]. I'm sure there are other really good ones, too.

[1] By definition I'm taking it to mean fully describing an API.

[2] https://github.com/ongithub/businesses/blob/gh-pages/busines...

[3] http://amundsen.com/media-types/collection/

[4] http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html

[5] https://github.com/kevinswiber/siren
I think civil liberties issues are some of the most important things we can be discussing. The hacker idea involves bending rules of all sorts, and to do that involves understanding those rules and how the game is played.

Furthering the appropriateness of having the discussion here is the fact that other venus are more appropriate to other aspects of hacker culture, and the dearth of content available otherwise. (We have github or twitter for technical discussion, and success stories and productivity articles are essentially naval-gazing)
How Bitcoin Could Take Over The Credit Card Industry (Video)
Report of Nazi-Looted Trove Puts Art World in an Uproar
EVEN IF he did had drugs in there, this would still be not right to me. Aren't there more effective ways than this to combat drugs? Let it go.
IMO, everyone related to this case (besides the victim) should be fired, divorced and ostracized. Sounds like a DOJ case.
So the encoding is done by Nvidia in hardware; I guess ORBX is doing the decoding. Is there some reason why asm.js + WebGL is better than <video> + DASH/HLS?

When it comes to watermarking, I'd like to see a cost comparison between watermarking and a static CDN (e.g. Netflix can serve 15+ Gbps per server).
Wow great post - good luck finding the right person. If I was 10 years younger and no wife I'd be moving right in with you guys. Sounds like the perfect startup culture
Checkout Loom - https://loom.com
It is not just about these cops, these doctors, or this judge. It is about institutional rot, a rot so wide and deep that to point it out will get you scorn and ridicule in most quarters.
Interestingly, he agrees with Mackenzie's allegations about inaccuracy, but he is far more forgiving about them.
9/11 Explosive Evidence – Experts Speak Out
> I generally do trust police

You probably never lived in NY.
One way for the issues to get a decent amount of scrutiny would be in the officers' appeal of their loss of certification, and the medical workers' appeal of their loss of license.
Those are pretty big to be throwing in your pocket. A lot the time I leave the house with nothing but my jeans to carry stuff. Pocket space is a limited commodity.
Is there anything new in the world of Tent? What's interesting about it now, OP?
CiteSeerx is a search engine for papers in computer and information science.
Well, I guess after you've unlawfully probed a person's anus once, you're kind of committed, and your best hope for avoiding a backlash is to justify it by actually finding something.
Most of those seem hopelessly simple (Just for the image bit, it only has one thumbnailUrl and no thumbnail size information).

I understand that this is a basis for further evolution but these APIs are gonna be hitting version 13 before they are usable in the real world and by that point they will probably be skewed towards use cases based on whoever updated them.
Thanks for your comments. We are working in communicating our message better. The design is not final and right now we are focusing first on the functionality while keeping the design a close second. We do have some new designs on the lab right now that will be used as an update to the campaign in about 2 weeks. I'm sure you'll like it. It is smaller and as you mentioned, becomes less noticeable.
Maybe they're hoping for some coverage from the malpractice insurers?

Not that I think that'll get very far, perhaps another lawsuit or 5 to try to force them, but if they don't bill the guy they wouldn't have a claim against them to begin with, I'd suspect.
I like the fact that data is dimensional.

What's the scalability model? It's not clear from the documentation.
>> I can't see the use case for a car. I live in the Plateau Mont-Royal neighborhood of montreal. Everything I need is literally a five minute walk away in any direction. A bike gets me downtown about as fast as a car does in summer, the metro can often cross town faster, and taxis are a minute's call away. You can pay for a lot of taxis with the money saved not buying a car.

Congrats you're in the top 0.01% of US/Canada.
Thanks Eduardo. We are aware of it and are working on making our message better. Being finally out in the open is teaching us a lot and showing us our opportunity areas. This is a project not a product yet and will be continuously improved.
I'm not 100% sure but all signs point to this being the case. I have used multiple Bluetooth unlock proximity apps in the past and they all do the same thing. They throw up their own lockscreens in place of the real one. I am fairly certain that, as mentioned in this same comment "family", that this lockscreen is less secure than the system lockscreen. There was speculation that this might not engage all the security mechanisms like disk encryption. If I were one of the developers of this app I would be first in line to tell my visitors/customers that my product didn't compromise at all on security. Unfortunately, I don't recall any such claim on their site (if I'm wrong please let me know, I'm on my phone).
I think this comes down to, does a device need to be Turing complete to be considered a computer? If not, then what level of complications is needed for it to be a computer? For example is a watch, or a record player, a computer?