skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> ...someone has to buy weapons to hijack shipments

Yes, "soldiers" pay off debts by robbing banks and handing over money to dealers, whom in turn buy weapons on the cheap in Paraguay (country) or from corrupt police forces (aka milícias[3]).

> Sounds like this is a problem with slums and Brazil's law enforcement capabilities in general than anything else.

That's my point.

> Legal sales reduce criminal pressure on end-users

Absolutely, for the middle class alone. Can't say it for the poor.

> Reduce revenues to criminals

Not for the big organizations like PCC [1] or Comando vermelho [2]

> Why would a policy of open drug sales make things worse in Brazil?

I don't know if it would make it worse. But I'm almost sure it wouldn't make it better to most of the population (basis of my point) simply because violence wouldn't be reduced. Organized crime finds its ways to keep its dominance, and it has been like that for decades.

Thanks for the "debate". :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primeiro_Comando_da_Capital
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comando_Vermelho
[3] http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil%C3%ADcia_(Rio_de_Janeiro) (use a translator, sorry)
I have a software consulting firm in Malaysia and we use google hangouts, Skype, GitHub, and a cloud hosted CI setup to run all of our projects. We have a team that spans from south america to Australia and it works fantastically well.

The key for us is our daily SCRUM meetings, always on Skype chat room and a rule that everybody must commit and push something at least once a day.

This works beautifully for us and the people that we work with often really enjoy the experience. Also since we span time zones we have a couple Brazilian developers that work while the rest of us are asleep (but they do show up for the daily SCRUM meetings). This actually turns out to be really helpful sometimes when we have a hard deadline as we can effectively work round the clock.

For our company remote working is the only way to go.
And there wouldn't be any justification for seizing people's property before they are even proven guilty, if ever. Not that it ever was justified.

The Netherlands closed prisons after it decriminalized drugs.

Personally, I think this should be decided at the neighborhood level, like many social issues. If people are ok with it where they live, it should be allowed. If they don't want it around their kids, that should be possible as well.
If it weren't for Mozilla creating broadway.js, ORBX.js would never have happened. Andreas' work on this libary was they key inspiration for ORBX.js. Since May, Mozilla has helped us optomize the JS code (which was key post FF22 when the JS VM changed), and is helping us move the decoder entirely to the GPU in WebGL2. I think at some point we would like to open source the older ORBX.js codecs as we iterate on this first version, but even that doesn't make much sense until we get a stable file format for video. Right now ORBX.js is tuned for live streaming. That will change with v2, which is we're targeting for early next year with compression close to HEVC - see http://aws.otoy.com/docs/ORBX2_Whitepaper.pdf
It's just not safe. To use this would be trading safety for looks. If you ride a bike at all, you should plan on going down.
Nice work. I've also recently released my first Mac app [0] and I'm working on getting the word out about it by making it free, the idea being that if it's known by people, it can be spread through word-of-mouth, especially if it becomes indispensable. GitHub's API currently reports 600 users, and I'm working on increasing that to 1000 before making it a paid app and marketing it.

Nice to see both approaches here; I wonder which truly works better in the long run.

[0]: http://issuepostapp.com/
Open FF in privacy mode without plugins enabled. Or disable Chrome's "tracking" mechanisms (there aren't many). Problem solved.
they do, sadly
As someone who grew up with Blockbuster but now have become a hacker, I'm torn between the old fashioned enjoyment of getting out of the house to rent movies, and the efficiency of online services like Netflix and Hulu.
Which makes sense to me, or at least those do not ever enforce this patent on infringers…

I have had to do zip code to location lookups to find ( I think it's called the Great Circle Calculation ) "within x miles of $zip_code".

I found plenty of companies wiling to sell me the data, sell me updated data quarterly, or API that after testing did not have data change in over a month, though from what I know about zip codes, and for our application, missing a zip code was not the end of the world, I just picked another close one. When drawing a radius around a point, if the point is missing but with so many zip codes, there was aways one close by.

1) How can they sell this? They don't apparently own it.
2) Why not use ones of the many zip, lat, long, databases that I seem to remember being pretty easy to find?

There's some logic behind the zip codes and how they are dished out. Unlike IP that has BGP to find the best route from IP to IP, USPS has none of this, so i imagine this was like trying to solve that "Traveling salesman" quandary with constantly changing and unknown locations. They had to make a sort of zip code prefix that at least gets them to the county level.

Lot's of good data here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code

This is like how telco's issues numbers, it was all well thought out ahead of time. You could get kinda dirty and run a loop from zip_code_1 to zip_code_1+1 with each one polling the USPS for a zip code lookup. You would have a pretty accurate database. At one "scrape" of data taking 5 seconds, in a month you would have your data. After that you would only have to test the gaps between numbers to see if new ones were added or just follow some usps page to keep up on new and deprecated zip codes.

There are too many sites that use geolocation with zip to not have this be a solved problem on the very cheap. Probably just another API, where in the future apps will just be lego like API's you copy and paste JS snippets to and from. :)
Emulating Google Megastore with Open Source Technologies
Yeap, it was early 2006 for me, in the pre- 0.96 days. I came to Django from Zope, that seems so long ago.
At the risk of getting down voted on what is an emotional issue for a lot of people, here's my (quite realist) view.

I was living in the West Bank when Arafat died, and I knew a bunch of people who worked in his compound. He got very sick, very quickly. The doctors around him were baffled by the steep decline, which is why he was flown to France just before he died.

I acknowledge that my theory on the issue is purely circumstantial, but a good place to start with these things is "qui bono?". Ariel Sharon (and Israel, and in my view, everyone) had a lot to gain by Arafat's death.

Whatever you think of the nastiness that he'd been involved in, Sharon was a remarkable human - Israelis aren't given to overstatement and they called him the "Lion of God".

Sharon was clearly making a dash for a grand bargain, and it's obvious that the "bulldozer" (another of his nicknames) wasn't letting anything get in his way.

By pure force of will, he withdrew Israel from Gaza (an absolutely wrenching move for Israel to make), and then left Likud to establish Kadimah so that he could move forward without blockage from the right wing radicals in his old party. In a very short time frame, Sharon bent a famously fractious Israeli parliament into a position to make a grand bargain that would stick - the last major road block to a bargain was Arafat.

Israel had had a real go at negotiating with Arafat with Bill Clinton at Camp David. It didn't work out. Of course, there are a bunch of conflicting opinions on who's to blame for the breakdown in talks, but the basic, unarguable outcome was that Arafat wasn't willing to take Israel's best offer.

Sharon obviously knew that, and also knew that Arafat's successor was going to be the comparatively mild mannered Abbas, who Sharon was already dealing with constructively. I think Sharon basically decided that, given Arafat's previous form, he was a very high risk as a grand bargain spoiler - Arafat's moral authority with the Palestinian population remained high. So, in the absence of any other option (since Arafat was essentially a dictator), good night Arafat.

If you think that Sharon wasn't capable of something that cold, take a look at his conduct in the massacre at Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_and_Shatila_massacre).

Sharon had a stroke shortly thereafter, and with that, arguably the only person capable of cutting the gordian knot in the medium term was out of the picture. Gotta love ash-sharq al-awsat.
It's not mind blowing stuff, but it's good. It takes an often unorganized process popularly characterized by a lack of structure and gives guidelines that keep stuff practical and centered on requirements. I'll be looking into this more.
Do they also get money from Motorola?
Personally I prefer the third one, I think it stands out more than the first two, and the last one seemed too 'shiny'.
New Internet Bug Bounty holds companies accountable, protects hackers
He probably didn't leave by choice.

Jumping off what is perceived to be a sinking ship like that (by choice) before it was fixed would be career suicide. It is however very understandable that he would be found a job to get him out of the way for someone else to do damage control.
According to the USPS website, API usage is free here: https://www.usps.com/business/web-tools-apis/list-of-apis.ht...

One of the API's relates to zip codes.
So they did disclose them? No doubt under pressure from B&N. If you look at those patents, you'll see that they are bizarrely trivial. Such things should never be patentable in the first place. Surely invalidating them can be not so easy, but it can be possible. It's one of the reasons why MS attempts to push NDAs as much as possible (we are lucky this was disclosed in those cases). Probably only a minority of their patents are non trivial, and most of these racket attacks are based on these kind of junk patents.
Well this guy is speaking from the company side, so....
Maybe I should clarify: it's one of the most directly irresponsible things I've seen unironically suggested here.

If you don't see the irresponsibility of implicating an unknowing third-party in a serious life ruining felony, I don't know what to tell you.

Given that this is most likely filled with vendors who are either agents or guys who have been popped and are now confidential informants, your statistics are way off.
SEO has evolved however much of the published SEO advice is stuck in the past. People are proclaiming "SEO is dead"... that will only be true the day people stop using search engines to find information, more like "SEO has changed". There's a new SEO in town. What exactly is the new SEO you ask?

Check out my full answer here: https://medium.com/on-startups/f15264e5d790
For OP: here's a commercial source, but read the disclaimers and ToS:

http://www.unitedstateszipcodes.org/

For all, background info on the USPS budget/deficit:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/opinion/nocera-its-d-day-f...

http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-872T

Imagine for a moment working for a company that had
had been in business for 220+ years,
had policy and procedure manuals that
reflected every year of the history,
had thousands of physical locations,
delivered to millions of locations many times per week,
and had 535 people on the board of directors
(in the sense of trying to micro-manage
whatever they felt like sticking their oar into.)

I find it somewhat amazing that the USPS can still deliver
mail across the country for less than 50 cents,
let alone all the other stuff they can handle
- ever been shipped a hive of bees by mail?
It's in the Domestic Mail Manual, under Bees
http://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/601.htm
Microsoft used the same method back with SCO. Eben Moglen called it "the be very afraid tour" back in 2007.
There are all sorts of creative accounting maneuvers that can be done in order to hide the amount exchanging hands for various purposes. They can be exempt and still pay and then to be reimbursed (or receiving a heavy discount somewhere else they buy Microsoft licenses. Samsung buys a lot of Windows licenses for their PC business.
Silk Road was not an anonymous marketplace. Buyers had to provide some identity and address to sellers in order to receive shipment. There are obvious geographic limitations with how anonymous a person could be while still receiving the goods they want.
I think it will be interesting to watch, no doubt this time round the creators have been anonymous from the get go. Avoiding all the errors that DPR/Ulbricht made would be quite simple given the knowledge we have from court documents of how he was caught.

If these guys get caught then I think we can more safely assume that it was a case of parallel construction after the targets were initially identified by the NSA/GCHQ tracking them via Tor. Only the biggest dealers and the operators would be worthy of the resources required to undertake that task.
Works - thanks for the tip. A simple [x] icon (perhaps with a "click ESC to close" tooltip) will also be nice, as there's currently no visual indication on how to close it.
You surely don't see my point.

Read the link? Thought about the difference between books (paper) and data (bits)? Also the example you chose shows the problem with centralization. Never said "better off without the Internet Archive" but "I'd be happier with an improved one, but the existence of the present one puts everybody in a comfort zone".
Well, clearly I don't belong here because I don't own my address.
Looks like USPS API data is free and usable only for package shipping. Not that I bet they would notice. At any rate, this seems to be a great start with a great API recommendation: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7129313/zip-code-lookup-a...
What I would like to read is why the OP put his time into building a task app. Not because the world doesn't need another one (I'm not being sarcastic here...)...but if you don't have much talent or time for marketing, then something must have been guiding you, right? I would think that without any other external guidance, it's the programmer himself who finds the product useful and uses it everyday as he develops it.

So, did the OP find his own product useful?
Agreed. When we went into Blockbuster, we started at one end of the New Release wall and walked the store perimeter. If we didn't find anything in the New Releases, we usually just left. Every once in awhile, we checked out the middle shelves... but rarely. Blockbuster would also carry dozens of copies of the same movie... devoting entire sections of a shelf unit it. I don't know how many copies any given Redbox machine has at any one time. Since you can return the disc to any machine, the stock self rotates a little.
One of my biggest takeaways from WWDC, as a student, was that even really great products don't launch themselves; they need an immense PR effort to get them off the ground — however, this doesn't mean a big budget.

In my opinion (of limited authority), a lot of 'spin' can be spun, mostly for free, that can generate a great buzz pre-launch.

It's something I'm going to invest a lot of time and effort in next time I do a launch.
Barnes and Noble tried to make the list public. They got, IIRC, a billion dollars and a "partnership" (mostly the money) in exchange for shutting up.

AFAIK, the list is still secret.
It's also a mis-perception to assume the hood is where all the gangsters are, a block outside the poverty stricken areas here the gangsters are suburban kids from affluent neighborhoods who are just as violent when it comes to protection rackets, extortion and taxing minor dealers.

Anybody running a small delivery line is almost always carrying an illegal gun, and willing to shoot competitors over peddling 8ths of coke.
Yes, but that is payment for work done. At best, they are a government contractor.
It's called Alibaba. I haven't checked in about a year but I recall finding MDMA precursors, Meth precursors and bulk Opium for sale on it.
Google is effectively utilizing the same strategy Apple used with the iPhone. Namely, ignore the corporate market and capture normal customers. Deliver a great experience and integrate your products into their lives. If you capture enough of them you'll create a backdoor into the corporate marketplace by increasing employee demands for a modern experience.

I think it's a great idea, and it's the only way I see the web moving forward at a reasonable pace.
GetGlue Acquired By Video Discovery Startup i.TV
The API-ization of everything
A sloppy (no reboot or browser restart) run on iOS 7 on an iPhone 5 gives me the following scores, highlighting the difference between Safari's JIT and the Webkit view available to apps:

Safari: 2793

Chrome: 443
Released From Prison, and Starting a Company
Thanks. Really glad you're enjoying it. The code is a real mess, but I'm hoping to gradually improve it now it's open source.
This is the second or third post I'm seeing today where a dev person could use some help with marketing their product. This is what I consult in, so I'd be happy to try and answer any questions you or anyone wishes to ask. Fire away!

If the answer requires more information then I'll ask you to email me instead.
While I agree that the the Google search experience could probably be better than it is, I find most of the proposed UI changes in the linked post to be absolutely horrible, especially the idea of "render the target page in a frame with scrollbars on the search results page so I can 'navigate around' the page while staying on the results page".

Dear God, if I want to see the whole target page while keeping the SERP open, I'll just open the link in a new tab.
Yes.

I work on contract iOS jobs and I need to track my time to invoice my clients. It sucks using my web browser to start and stop the timer. I also wanted quick access to all my tasks, past and present without going through a slower web UI.

Also the app comes in handy when I need to jot down a quick note or remember something.

Maybe I should incorporate some of that ^ on the site.
It's very coincidental that somebody would die of AIDS at the same time he had a lethal dose of polonium in his system.
Would you be interested in making more people contribute to open source code?

Gittip lets people give money to their favorite open source contributors.

https://github.com/gittip/www.gittip.com

CodeDoor is a way for programmers to leverage their open source contributions to freelance work. (Note: I'm the founder of CodeDoor)

https://github.com/CodeDoor/codedoor
Used to be less risky now they slam you with interstate trafficking charges which can climb to 10+yrs whereas getting jacked on the street and losing $50 doesn't sound too bad in comparison.
Myth: All I have to do is get TechCrunch. That’s marketing.
Reality: You’ll have 2,000 unique visitors today and zero tomorrow. Spend five hours on the HackerNews front page and get a few thousand uniques from the most cynical, judgmental visitors you can imagine. Traffic from press outlets and link aggregation sites are NOT primed to buy your product and thus come and leave.

We've built a bootstrapped $5M Revenue (70% pbt margin) run-rate business in ~1 year on the back of a HN post. Generated business that led to something like $500k on the first few days alone.
I'm anticipating a fall to the more realistic $14 immediately after open, similar to FB.

What I'm actually doing is something completely illogical.
This is awesome, thanks for sharing!

Redshift looks to be order-of-magnitude faster than Impala or Shark in all the test. Does this mean that once RedShift supports user-defined functions, there is no competing solution that is any match? (Unless you want to avoid using the cloud)
FedEx and UPS put lots of money behind forcing the USPS to pre-fund union pensions. The goal was to both weaken the postal service, which was trying to move into "fast" shipments (1-2 day vs. the usual week+), and demonstrate that unions were bad for businesses in the delivery industry.
It's a welcome message, but Kofi Annan is one of the most corrupt and least credible politicians out there. It's a shame the message isn't coming from someone more respectable.
Doesn't the new Android Studio have all that sort of live editing built in?
Just sent you an email with wording "marketing" that can help. I'm interested to see that good things don't languish and I am a strong writer--happy to give.
Additive may not mean what you think it means perhaps? FM involves modulating the frequency of one oscillator with the value of another, whereas additive synthesis involves simply (lol) mixing multiple sinewave oscillators to generate a harmonic series.

Unless there is some more fundamental way in which they are equivalent, in which case I would be eager to learn more.
The USPS has the massive benefit of government-protected monopoly on first-class mail. Even if it's not a direct infusion of funds, it's a major subsidy.
Sorry to keep replying, I don't have an edit button for some reason. This one is cool too:
http://api.zippopotam.us/us/ma/belmont

I found a town called Bakersfield that has more than one zip fro the town, it does JSON back with more data than I thought would be part of free plan.

For some reason I could not get "san_francisco","san-francisco", "sanfrancisco", or "sf" to work.
> What interesting here is that Google seems to
> leave its OEMs to fend for themselves

This might have been a valid criticism a couple of years ago but at the moment I believe Google is defending claims by Microsoft against Motorola claiming that Android device makers don't need third-party patent licenses. So it certainly seems like they're doing their fair share to stand up to MS -- more than any other OEM (it's not like Samsung is some mom and pop shop that couldn't put up a fight).
Pilot flies homemade jetpack around Mt. Fuji in Japan
Presto does read Hive data directly out of HDFS, bypassing Hive/MapReduce. However, neither HDFS nor the file formats like RCFile are efficient. The entire design of HDFS makes it difficult to build a real column store. Having a native store for Presto allows us to have tight control over the exact data format and placement, enabling 10-100x performance increases over the 10x that Presto already has over Hive.

Additionally, in the long term, we want to enable Presto to be a completely standalone system that is not dependent on HDFS or the Hive metastore, while enabling next-generation features such as full transaction support, writable snapshots, tiered storage, etc.
Why don't browsers just generate a UUID on first run per user.. then anyone tracking can do so server-side.. with a browser/user option to re-generate a new one. It would effectively be the same.. then have a white/blacklist for sending this id.

Or they could make a system where a site can set their own unique id, that they can use.. oh, maybe have a custom key for this value.. and maybe they could call it a token system.. ooh or maybe cookies.

/sarcasm
Sometimes I think that rather than get tied up in the arms race that can be SEO, you're better off building a decent site and then focusing on alternative marketing opportunities.

e.g., if you're a bed and breakfast, you're not going to win on "[location] accommodation" or "luxury accommodation in [location]" because it will be dominated by directories and the like. Instead, you're probably better off making sure your listings on TripAdvisor/etc are good, make sure your service is exceptional, and then quickly respond to any negative reviews that may arise. For a B&B, I don't think I'd put much effort into backlinks or even tailored content.
Even more unreasonable: His original reason for wanting the list of zipcodes was to correlate the zip codes of some health inspections in some county in Oregon to a specific location. Undoubtedly, these health inspections are older than one day, and therefore using two year old data from the census would probably provide the same accuracy as the zipcodes updated daily.