skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Please forgive what may sound like an ignorant comment:

What if we ignored the NSA and security issues to think about the potential for new technology like this. If you never had to locally own your data, what could be possible?

How light could laptops become? We would no longer need as big of a hard drive and processor, and could probably reduce weight in lots of other ways.

And how many number of machines could you reduce to? Not only could two people share the same machine really easily, but you could access your personal workspace, work workspace, and any additional workspace with basically the same machine.
Could someone here please explain why this isn't copyright infringement? Aren't they taking other peoples work without permission, scanning it and making it publicly available? Also, presumably all of this works draws more traffic to Googles website, bringing them profits from advertising? I can imagine if a company that was less powerful than Google did this somebody would have huge fines and possible imprisonment.

And please spare me your "information should be free" arguments or the possible "benefits" to society. I'm well aware of those arguments but current law protects the individual against society raiding their work for its own benefit. Its a basic foundation that so much of our law has been built upon. So I'm interested in things as they are now, current copyright law, and not how you would like it to be as an outsider that would profit from more liberal copyright laws.
Forget the conditional: everyone should seriously examine the question of whether they are a jerk from time to time.

It's a surprisingly subtle thing, to be a jerk. No matter how good you are, everyone is not going to like you. No matter how bad you are, someone is going to like you anyway. This is a truth that politicians are intimately familiar with, since their careers depend on maintaining awareness of how they are perceived by large groups of people. This is also well understood in Silicon Valley, where some of the most successful entrepreneurs are clearly and openly jerks - but who are revered anyway.

Complicating matters is that the standards of jerkiness change. It used to be that cussing made you a jerk. No longer true. There is a strong cadre of egoists constantly looking to eliminate the association between "selfishness" and "jerkiness" - with surprisingly effective results.

Last but not least, the public likes to witness the degradation of others. Most reality TV and daytime talk is based on this premise. It makes us feel superior, a kind of milder version of the mob mentality. (And they get what they want because people are willing to have almost anything done to them in exchange for attention, including being demeaned.)

Most YouTubers who make original content, like Vi Hart, are not doing it for attention. They aren't willing to participate in pop culture sado-masochism. What Google has unwittingly done is force this unhealthy dynamic on content creators.

The solution, of course, is to give content creators more control over their comments, over the community of people that consume their work. That is entirely possible from a technical point of view and I think would address this problem to everyone's satisfaction.
I am pretty excited about this. I have been using Dart since it was announced and the only downside I have experienced so far was that I had to rewrite half my code every two weeks as the language changed, although this was entirely expected.

Now that the language is a stable target I am really looking forward to seeing what sorts of libraries can come forward and also how performance can improve using the VM on the server side.

Warning: The rest of this comment is somewhat controversial and speculative. Feel free to skip it if that is not what you want.

In the bigger scheme of things I have somewhat conflicted feelings about Dart. Google has been trying very hard over the last few years to kill whatever positive feelings I had towards it for their open-source, open-web stance. A million little things like dragging their feet on chrome/webkit prefixes, google+ infiltrating everything, etc, etc have made me more appreciative than ever for Firefox and Mozilla. But in the 2 years since Dart was announced it has gone from a basic spec and vm to a fully functional and pretty great language and vm, while Javascript has languished in committee as more slop is packed in while the basics (numerical types, non-terrible type coercion) are ignored. The current target is a late 2014 release date. How much further will Dart and its VM be by then!?

I love Dart for what it lets me do right now, and for its commitment to compiling to javascript so everyone can use it. But it's hard to trust that google won't use it as some sort of competitive weapon in the future. And so I am stuck, wanting to support the open web, while being unable to stand the leap back in time and productivity that is developing in Javascript.

I guess the only thing to do is focus on getting things done in the here and now and let the future take care of itself. And right here and now Dart is a pretty compelling package.
It's not stealing if Google Code never had them in the first place.

GitHub is running circles around everyone.
It was certainly true that in the US and the Soviet Union that the space program's primary "customer" was the military. It is an acceptable cover story to be "exploring space" when you are working on technologies that make for better ICBMs. And that was one of the interesting things about SpaceX to me, here was a company that didn't have some defense "minder" in the back rooms somewhere calling the shots.

The other thing that this reminded me of was that the history of the Arab world early on is one of excellent science and discovery. It would be nice to get back to that and away from what passes for state craft in the middle east. Sadly that seems like a harder problem than sending someone to the moon.
Google: Multiplex Multiple Works Loads to Increase Utilization and Save Money
Since this is Hacker News, it's worth mentioning that John Conway,
of Game of Life fame, has proposed a Strong Free Will Theorem:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.3286.pdf

Basically, a foremost expert on deterministic cellular automata is of the opinion that Universe is likely a cellular automaton, but not a deterministic one.

Which I find intriguing.
I'm really curious what people's thoughts on this are.
Maybe they forgot to include "seems". Doesn't appear like that big of a deal. There's a "Take Action" button ready to fix the issue. Is such a thing illegal in the UK?
She will also fly with Virgin Galactic: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2013/11/lady-gaga-fi...
I think it would be interesting to have a tagging system on comments. For example you could tag comments as "abusive" "trollish" "insightful" "funny" etc. If enough people tagged a comment as abusive or trollish it would be hidden. Of course there are still huge problems with this, but it would be an interesting experiment.
This is fantastic. Firebase.js is spectacular.
It's the same trade-off though - how much security can I provide versus how much security can they provide?

The insurance is just an incentive to keep my stuff safe (and in the case of savings guarantees, an incentive to keep consumer-facing banks from going bust).
Google uses gov's black marker in transparency report
Facebook Says Its New Data Center Will Run Entirely on Wind
Show HN : List of broken apps in Android ART
Which kinda they do ... I have discovered a lot of stuff that way.

And any game that I have obtained and liked that way is already in my steam and gog libraries.
I guess the possibility of taking public transportation when in strange cities is off the table?
What's that? Inject the hand-soap directly into my veins?
Presumption of Innocence is not directly enshrined in the US constitution. It is implied by the 5th, 6th, and 14th amendments. However, it is acceptable practice in the US for local jurisdictions to relax aspects of the Presumption of Innocence. For example, for rape cases in some jurisdictions, it is not necessary to address the mens rea.

http://tipmra.com/new_tipmra/presumption_of_innocence.htm

"It is not that you are innocent until proven guilty as many believe. It is that you are assumed guilty because of the assertion made and until your presumption of innocence prevails your protestation of innocence is simply the challenge to the prosecution to prove its case...With the presumption is innocence you do not have to prove innocence as it is a given. The burden of proving otherwise is upon the party making the assertion."

So the Presumption of Innocence is simply placing the burden of proof on the accuser and therefore any lightening of the burden of proof is effectively an erosion of the Presumption of Innocence.

Is it really a right if local jurisdictions can simply decide to erode it?

Now, certainly there is another side to the story. The argument made in rape and sexual assault cases is that, "Of course, the defendant is going to claim consensuality." The position that mens rea is impractical in cases of rape and sexual assault is not entirely unreasonable. My point is that the commonly held view that US citizens have a right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty isn't so assured and cut and dry as most of us believe.
1. The article highlights many ways in which Lebanese people excel in the face of adversity. Manoug Manougian appears to have built fairly successful rockets with minimal funds and resources.
2. One need only read the daily news that comes from the region and specifically, Lebanon, to understand that the country is stifled by the ongoing conflicts in Syria and meddling from all sides: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, US, etc.. Regardless, Lebanon's banking sector remains strong. Property values continue to rise. Its people look beyond the current situation and invest for the future.
This is due to churn on the compiled files right? The fix would be to compile these files someplace outside of dropbox. (Because the important artifact you want to back up is source code, not binaries). Depends on your language / build tool for how complicated this would be...
Introduction to Hadoop and Mapreduce course seems to have the right amount of content. It could be completed in one sitting and content is polished, well presented , and easy to grasp. Respect to Cloudera faculty. As an added bonus, uses python instead of java for examples.
Thank you for all your responses, I'll pass that information onto him :)
Not sure of your angle here, are you comparing to coffee script or something?

I thought you were referring to wrapping functions to return modules in JS. Or over use of anonymous functions that leads to confusing brackets and pyramids of curly brackets.
> If it's true that he ruled this way because higher court wanted him to acknowledge fair use, judge was not objective.

"wanted" is the wrong word here. Chin previously issued a ruling without properly considering fair use. The higher court (the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit) took the case on appeal, found that the failure to consider fair use was a legal error, reversed Chin's earlier decision because of that flaw, and sent the case back to Chin with a legally binding order that fair use be addressed.

That's what we have appellate courts for; its not a failure of objectivity for a lower court judge to follow binding directives from higher courts.
IMHO the net effect is detrimental to the community. Points should not be awarded by clicking on an article or at least should be taken away by the community somehow in case of click bait.

The way the system is now encourages the creation of almost empty blog posts basically just linking to the actual interesting news just to attract more clicks. It does not promote the interesting news to the top of the page, which is the purpose of the system. Editorializing will occur be it here or outside, in said blog posts.

At the end of the day what matters is that it's really hard to judge a article based on just one line of text and past experience with the source; using this judgement to rank with high influence is an error. The implementation here is well balanced, but not perfect.

As suggestions I would like to leave these:

Greater importance to upvotes, especially on new stories;

Make votes reflect toward the user's karma, encouraging active participation on the ranking;

Evaluate votes relatively, both for stories' ranking and users' karma, taking into account if the user votes a lot, how critical he is of articles, how his votes correlate with the reading interests of the rest of the population(but be careful not to drive away different opinions), etc.;

Measure time between interactions with HN to know how much time was likely spent on the article;

Make better use of the workforce reading the "new" page by showing them personalized pages with what they haven't seen yet
Is this Google only or anyone e.g. Microsoft and Amazon, can also now start scanning/distributing books?
Chart of Electromagnetic Radiations (W.M Welch Scientific Company, 1944)
I believe if you look at the IBM sites you'll find a number of case studies that display some of the results of applications using Watson.
I've always wondered why they had this rule in the first place. Each wireless device by FCC rules (or equivalent dept in each country) must operate withing a designated RF frequency range.

One would think that pilots would use a frequency range that would be in the private (not public like Wifi 2.4/5.x Gh) range and thus never be overlapped.

What am I missing?
> Why does everything always have to be the latest and greatest thing on earth?

To me, Go feels like an old friend that I've been missing for many years. I've always had C and Python, they serve me well, but there was a big gap of uncovered space in between them - you know, when C is too fine a tool for the job, while Python is a bit too "dynamic" - until Go came along.

I tried filling that gap with Scala, and while the cleverness of the (most of the) language did have its appeal, eventually I stopped using it, since it was just too much of a tool which got in the way.

Go hits the sweetspot. Everything about it screams unix. The toolchain, the speed, the simplicity of the language, the powerful concepts delivered in a dead simple to use way (goroutines/channels)... It's like a breath of fresh air whenever I have to work with Go.

Just like C and Python, it's a keeper.
The effects of welfare and various forms of economic stimuli? The effects of international trade, currency and central bank policies?

And of course, large investment banks derive alot of benefit from the study of economics. Was just listening to Abby Joseph Cohen on Bloomberg radio yesterday - she's an economist and a senior investment strategist at Goldman Sachs - they obviously make alot of money through understanding economics and making correct predictions. While you can argue about the benefit to society, it's clear that economics can produce prediction models that work.
Using it to facilitate a prostitute booking service comes to mind.
"Hi, I'm Phil! I'm ready to share a hotel room with you in Atlanta any night next month."
I wonder whether they have plans to analyze for suspicious usage. Often staying at hotels in the town in which you reside, for instance could be an indicator of this type of behavior.
Wow, that's way cheaper than 99designs. Is the quality similar?
Because it existed for 42 minutes prior to my comment, and in the few minutes since my comment (after hitting the #1 spot on the front page) there have been 9 new comments.

It's not a typical usage pattern for HN, even on non-controversial topics.
They do this to a certain extent, but the problem here is that the "R" part of "R&D" is not really at issue. While there's a lot of focus in the popular press on "finding" new antibiotics, that part can be addressed by basic research grants. I don't believe we're wanting for proof of concept kinds of things. Unlike with engineering, where once you've got a proof of concept, you can refine and iterate to make it production quality, biology is completely arbitrary.

The issue comes with the "D" part of R&D. That is the expensive part with drugs because you start having to do very tightly controlled animal model studies progressing further into clinical trials with humans. The popular notion that you "discover" a drug is not how things work in reality. Often you discover a whole raft of closely related chemical entities that appear to do what you think they do. You tweak based on further studies in order to improve efficacy and safety. But the system is sort of nondeterministic in the sense that even altering the structure slightly often has knock-on effects you can't predict. Assuming you get something decent, that's what gets made into the an actual medicine. There's a whole branch of applied chemistry that specializes in this called medicinal chemistry. In many cases, you'll read about some promising new antibiotic that has been discovered in an academic lab, but once the chemists take a look at it, you realize there's no way to make a drug out of it. The reasons can be any or all of: the therapeutic dose would be too high, it blows out the liver, it can't be made into pill, the compound is unstable and can't have a good shelf life, it can't be taken orally, etc... Working out all those kinds of problems has always been the realm of pharmas and biotech startups. Academics aren't interested in that stuff because it's not basic research, it's highly applied and is mostly trial and error based on decades of doing this kind of work.

At a macro-level, this is fundamentally what ails the entire pharma sector right now. The development part of making drugs is so expensive and such a complete and utter crap-shoot, that few new drugs of any sort are actually being produced. The last decade has been one of prolonged decline in the industry in terms of truly new drugs and there is no obvious mechanism available to us to make it less so.
Students looking to fill out portfolios. Flat rate $200 for wordmark, logo, etc. It is student work so I've had mixed results with sometimes stuff being awesome and other times stuff being just OK.
E-gold had a central provider. Bitcoin has anonymous miners all over the world. Has anyone shut down Bittorrent or The Pirate Bay?
I almost finished the Language Tour when I went to the faq and was dissapointed to see that the dart2js compiler supports only ie9+ (https://www.dartlang.org/support/faq.html#what-browsers-supp...).
Too bad, honestly.
You can't dismiss an entire subject matter as nonscientific just because many of the major players aren't advocating scientific methods of exploration.

At its root, science is about testing, observing, forming conclusions, and retesting. It just so happens that in the subject of economics you have an extremely large number of variables because of human behavior.

While concrete conclusions are difficult to come by, we should absolutely continue trying to understand things that we do not currently. Consider a future where the entire human brain could be mapped, and we entirely understood behavior. In this case studying economics and decision making would be much more realistic.

Just because our tools are extremely limited doesn't mean we should stop observing, and that very act is true science.
When I was younger I was much more confident of my ability to discern other people's motives and make absolutist moral judgments. Now that I'm in my 40s, I've come to realize that many of those youthful judgments were quite mistaken.
I think its worth nothing, to "comply" with this ruling, it would have to be limited to music, and you would have to find songs that are not being otherwise offered as a "buy one", but rather come within the entire album.

In other words, if the judge said that its okay to scan and make available _parts_ of the book and this serves as "new income" for authors, then similarly you could weed off one song from entire album and make it available and try to fall under the judge reasoning, shall MAFIAA comes after you.

But if I were you I wouldn't try, unless you are Google/Apple/or Ebay too big to fail/jail.

IANAL tho.

Alternatively, envision torrent network that every person shares only part of a song. Noone, technically shares online entire song, but only lets say 25 seconds of it. This would completely fall under judge's reasoning :)
This article was very relevant to me. I've been writing bash script for so many years, yet I didn't know you could just "set -u" to make bash stop when I accidentally use an uninitialized variable. "set -e" is also incredible useful (bash quits if any statement fails).
Court: Homeland Security Must Disclose ‘Internet Kill Switch’
Many upvotes aren't organic votes but instead are duplicate submissions which each count as an upvote for the first submitter.

OT hijack: This can lead to news from popular sources being submitted because they are known to generate lots of votes. This leads to lots of people trying to be first to submit which leads to them getting lots of "upvotes", which further contributes to that source being known for upvotes. This leads to certain sources now always appearing regardless of the merit of the actual articles.
i don't think the reasons are convincing. I don't think that it benefits the public is a good reason.
"Inelegant" is really a matter of opinion.
99% of people looking for information about big data and 99% of people looking to do data science, don't have nowhere near big data, and don't need to be taught hadoop. Those people are instead often lacking fundamental knowledge and are looking for a trick technological solution instead of reviewing their basics.

A "data science" track should hence be 90% about algorithms, data structures, linear algebra and computer architecture. People need to know how to compute with matrices, how to use B-trees, what R-trees are, what SIMD is, what cache locality is, what package to use for practical linear algebra, what the gpu is good for and when and how to use it. Teach databases, but include also some of the theoretical database stuff, and teach how to correctly use relational databases in the first place, since this is most commonly useful and people don't really understand it. PostgreSQL is a real pearl, and few people know how much capability it has, how to use the geospatial indexing, the full-text search, how to do basic optimization and profiling.

Even for people who really do large scale computations, learning hadoop or mongodb (is anyone legitimately doing big data really using mongodb?) is just an afterthought, considering how much you have to learn first about mathematics, algorithms and computing to do anything sensible at that scale at all. If you bubble sort, MongoDB won't save you. If you know the fundamentals already, you likely don't need a separate course in mongo or hadoop.

For people looking to learn something more genuine, I would recommend, for example, this book:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds.html
REMOTE book cover design follow-up
Microsoft did do it, they found no profit in it and quit. Google is still not making the full text of books available, although I'd guess long term that would be the smart move for authors. You'd go straight from search to purchasing an ebook in a click.
>Can anyone give me a fair example of something positive produced of of economics? Some sort of phenomenon we didn't understand before?

Gains from trade between two countries even if one of them has an absolute advantage in producing every good.
This has a lot to do with Rob Pike's programming style, as you can see from the plan 9 source: https://github.com/cao-xx/plan-9/blob/master/sys/src/librege...