skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't this one of the big reveals that we've been waiting for-- that they are attempting to track our physical movement? With this geographical information history, their ability to smash dissent without physical force is unparalleled, given that nearly everyone has visited a sketchy location at one time or another.

Doesn't this revelation prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the USA is even worse than the imagined world of 1984?
Reddit is more-or-less the Usenet of the masses, but without private messaging (and the fact that it's hosted on the World Wide Web).
An automated web agent isn't a replacement for a browser. It's a replacement for a browser plus person.

And a person using a browser to access HN does need to learn how to interact with HN. This is helped somewhat if the person in question is familar with the general concepts used in web fora.
Yes, and if you'd read anywhere else in the thread, You'd find that the Linux Mint issue does not happen because there's a package in the LM16 repositories for steam. Which means that the entire issue of LM not running steam is moot. Which means there is no fragmentation issue in Linux as related to steam.

Which means we're left with your Ad Hominem, which you don't see.
What we are observing right now - is technology becoming more like magic to common people, and that is disturbing.

Instead of understanding operating principles behind devices we now quantify them by few superficial quantities at best: screen size, pixels, gigahertz, amount of bytes. None of that tells you exactly what device does.

Goverment is able to deploy complex 1984 monitoring technologies without massive negative sentiment - because average person does not understand technology, direction it is going, and long term implication of such surveilance.

Amount of information available to us taught us to ignore things, so we often ignore things we do not agree with. In the age of information we have all incentives we need to stay ignorant.

And as technology continues to get more complex this will get worse, not better.
The Feds created Bitcoin and used it as a honeypot. The whole currency will dissolve due to its links to the criminal underground. That's my guess...
Gary Vee is great at this. Noah Kagan has some good blog posts on this too. Has anyone read Gary Vee's book and would they recommend it?
It sounds snarky, but I don't mean it that way. I like the guy who runs lobste.rs and I'm happy he published the code, and I'd really like HN to have some real competition. But, sorry, nobody uses lobste.rs. It's a ghost town.

For what it's worth, I think the answer to site quality isn't pre-filtering users; it's having a simple process to nuke bad users. Lobste.rs put a big bet on pre-filtering; it hasn't worked out. I'm not surprised; one thing I look for on great HN threads is the random first-party (owner of company, primary author of package, &c) commenter who joins just to comment on that story, which is something that can't happen in the pre-filter model.
Please keep this sort of comment on reddit where it belongs.
> It will probably take me around 6mo - 1year to make it live(beta).

The rule for estimating project time is to take your estimate, multiple by 2, and then change to the next unit of time. So this means it will actually take you 12 years.

Of course, I'm (only half) joking. I started a project 7 years ago that I began in my spare time and...it's still not done. But I started from zero programming and had bad habits and put it down for months at a time. If you are already a programmer and know what you're doing, yes, it may only take one year.
That paired messaging protocol we used was called email. Filtering was pretty sophisticated using scorefiles and killfiles. You didn't have rich media because the Usenet was about exchange of thoughts and knowledge, but people were pretty opinionated about formatting to make reading your posts pleasant for everyone.
The 5 billion dollar bar is shorter than the 3.9 billion dollar bar...
I have literally no idea what you wrote here. Start-ups? Priors? Beta for Bernoulli RVs?

"That is the likelihood generally dominates"?

"My results are generally very robust to choice of prior parameters"?

Neither of those sentences are comprehensible.
Ok, I have to ask this, and I apologize in advance for it being out of topic.

How on earth are you well informed on so many topics spanning different fields of science and literature? Your comments are amazingly well informed, and I would like to know how you do it.
Sorry, I’ve been trying to be less cynical lately. If someone does something good I prefer to take it, not dig for nefarious motives.
Not directly. Google is bound by the statutes enforced by the federal and state governments who are empowered by the Constitution to govern. That is why Google can censor its index to clear it of things it does not like, if it so desired. Additionally, it could establish that the official religion of Google is from here forth Pastafarianism and while that might run afoul of some workplace regulations in certain jurisdictions, there is nothing in the Constitution that prevents Google from doing so.
Has StackOverflow saved billions of dollars in programmer productivity?
There was actually a pretty good article about the Denisova human in one of the recent National Geographics. One of the researchers mentioned in the article made a similar point, that for him the most likely indication of the Desnisova find is that we currently are separating into sub-species where there aren't any and that what we are finding are differences between individuals and not new sub-species.
I wonder when/if that will be the established view and some of these species will be consolidated.
Agriculture. It's a several orders of magnitude improvement in the population density an area can support, which makes population centres possible, which makes specialisation viable, which makes everything else possible. If someone had developed agriculture 100,000 years ago, we'd currently be about 90,000 years more advanced than we are now.

Agriculture appears to have been developed independently in the Middle East, China and Americas about 10,000 years ago, but I and some others believe there was more dissemination of ideas, mainly via individual travellers or small groups of travellers, than conventional historians take into account.
WP8 has been gaining momentum [1]; brushing it aside is a mistake. I also wouldn't count out WinRT. Surface 2 and the Nokia Lumia 2520 have received relatively favorable reviews. I don't expect their sales to double overnight or anything like that, but I expect they'll increase steadily throughout 2014.

Full disclosure: Windows Phone employee

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/29/5041666/nokia-lumia-sales...
But can you see the entire line of that chart without moving your eyes at all? In terms of a single 'snapshot' of our vision, the resolution is atrociously bad. Only a very small area in the middle of our field of view has significant detail (test this by looking at some writing in the distance then stare at the first letter and try 'reading' the rest of the writing without moving your eyes - it'll just remain an indistinct blur).
The authorities regularly withhold information that could assist defendants so it would be business as usual I'm sure. But yeah, that's one giant can of worms!
Helpless
Does anyone know the site that lists all the sites that have been compromised?

Edit: Found it, this was the one I was looking for. http://dazzlepod.com/disclosure/
Require people to pay some amount to Kickstarter itself to buy a "large funding credit" (a virtual currency.) That credit must be spent, along with whatever actual donation you make, if you want to contribute over, say, $2000. The credits also don't "activate" until, say, six months after they're purchased--well outside of the (legitimate-vendor) chargeback window.
I thought we could all take a moment, a deep breath and listen to someone say what we have all said in our own heads.
The "invite only" growth hacking tactic (i.e. generating impression of exclusivity) only works if you have great demand. By limiting registration without the demand, you're making it too much effort for people to check your startup out.
itdoesn'tseemanyharderthanthatcrazycomplexschemetheguyabovehad
You can hook up your twitter to your website and then have the Tweets rolling if you've retweeted them. That's an organic way of doing it.

I did it here at www.Twiddle.ie.

Just reposting Tweets would probably require permission out of courtesy, but the organic way has a better impression on site visitors.
It was lucky in a sense that if adobe required complex passwords more important password would have been leaked. It was also lucky in a sense that adobe itself got hacked instead of entity that has one of my more sophisticated and thus valuable passwords.
If the raw number of DNA differences don't scale with genealogically and morphological 'similarity' - does that imply that the number of genes that get expressed in ways visible to us (facial shape, hair, etc) are really few in number?

Either that, or the analysis you described was plain incorrect, or we are looking at DNA 'wrong' - seeing patterns in noise and noise in patterns.
Can they do animated ascii art too?
Simpler explanation/story (Pun intended) == Battlestar Galactica
Thank you for your input. I am still contemplating about this. On one hand, I want to be able to limit spammers from signing up freely, but on the other hand, it's the reason you just mention.

I am still on the fence here. Once I opened up a fake page just to test out and within 24 hours, I got many spammers signing up for no reasons.
Have you been paying attention to Intel's graphics improvements? At the rate they're going, we'll have the power of (current gen) desktop graphics in just a few iterations. I think you could even make the claim that the current Iris graphics are as powerful as current-gen consoles, though you wouldn't know it from all the crappy ports and the lack of a low-level graphics API.

(Also, people still overclock their CPUs?)
The way I think about it is that there is a tipping point in intelligence where a species can build on its own discoveries at a much accelerated rate, similar to the concept of a singularity in AI. As 10,000 years is not that long from an evolutionary perspective, we are about the dumbest that a species could possibly be in order to reach that singularity point, otherwise we would have done it earlier.

Of course, this ignores factors such as non intelligence based adaptations (such as thumbs), antibiotic factors (climate). It also ignores the facts that intelligence is composed of many components, and our singularity might have happened after an improvement is some metric that does not contribute much to overall intelligence. For example, the ability to speak does not make an individual animal more intelligent, but it does facilitate the accumulation of intelligence through generations.
Foresight is always easy in retrospect. MS was a partner, not a treat, until the Windows Store.
NSA taps into undersea cable (2001)
Fragmentation won't be an issue because, in all honesty, if people want Steam to work, they'll use either Steam OS or the recommended Linux distro - Ubuntu.
Buy an Ouya with Bitcoins
This article isn't about a leftist view of cyberlibertarianism, but about a liberal view of cyberlibertarianism.

I doubt that many leftists see the capitalist Western states as "the realization of democracy".
It sure is and if you think they have no ops i dont know what to tell you.
To be fair you're not describing "people who play games", you're describing gaming enthusiasts.
Well this explains why I was contacted twice. My expertise is in robotics and each time I asked them why they were interested, since I wasn't aware of much robotics work at Google (other than self-driving cars.) First time I asked the recruiter to email me so I could contact him at a more appropriate time -- I was at work -- and never hard from him. Second time was by email, and I responded but never got a reply. Oh well. I just don't understand why they would get my hopes up and then never respond -- anyone know how Google recruiters work?
So you're like Shyp, but for international travel. Cool.

Have you heard of "Banged up Abroad"? How do you allow travellers to check the goods before they travel with them, and ensure that goods don't get damaged?
> > Can I write a method that's polymorphicly nullable?

> Sure. You should see the crazily cool stuff we can do with stuff like the signature of max(). You'll be impressed, I promise!

From the docs:

> A nonempty iterable is an iterable object which always produces at least one value. A nonempty iterabe type is written {String+}. Distingushing nonempty streams of values lets us correctly express the type of functions like max():

> {Float+} oneOrMore = .... ;

> {Float*} zeroOrMore = .... ;

> Float maxOfOneOrMore = max(oneOrMore); //never null

> Float? maxOfZeroOrMore = max(zeroOrMore); //might be null

While this is interesting, is it enforced by the compiler? i.e. is the following a runtime, or compile time error?:

Float maxOfOneOrMore = max(zeroOrMore);
Thanks for the tip! This emulates exactly what I wanted.

I admit to just throwing my hands up and, as a result, visiting the various stackexchange sites less often. Certainly my loss, and not theirs. I should have looked into what the advanced searching options were. I stupidly didn't think of that. I did find out a way to get all the newsletters without signing up for them, but it wasn't an ideal solution for me as they were only questions by week, not by month.

Time to write a script that throws out these search links for me. Thanks again!
> I can opt out of Google's tracking in a number of ways.

At face value, yes. But with the news that companies are tracking web users via browser fingerprints and other methods (even when users have "do not track" enabled), it seems that it is difficult to avoid being secretly tracked by corporations.
>>The original 9/11 attack showed how simple traditional weapons could be used to leverage using four whole airplanes as nontraditional weapons, three of them with devastating effect, all of them with lethal effect.

For the record, I think this is complete rubbish and USgov isn't being truthful about what/how 9/11 happened. I can't believe a plane full of people were too scared to fight people with box-cutters[1].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLvkftuCFlI&t=1m55s
Yeah, and the soldiers don't make the orders, the generals don't make the politics, the politicians just try to keep the military industrial complex fat and snugly and the citizens happy, the citizens just crave security because that's what the media says is what citizens crave while the military industrial complex just seeks profit because it's required to by stockholders and everyone else involved, who are just trying to put food and/or yachts on their family.

"Just doing my job" has been deprecated in 1945. For a reason, and finding out why the hard way is considered harmful.
3 Ways to Measure More Conversions Using Estimated Total Conversions
You're all talking as if Google are the good guys here. Whoever wins, we all lose.
Dear rest of the world, we (our US gov) are tracking as much of everything that we (our US gov) find relevant. When we don't, we encourage fund companies who do.

Dear US citizens, can we also stop being surprised that we are doing such things? We have a long history of doing this.
Pointless in what sense? In that the Washington Post needs to make money or that you want quality journalism, no ads, to pay nothing for it, and golden unicorns to ride on?

Also, the original page has a single page, no pagination:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tr...
Experimental Instrument UI in Fiddlewax
>That would be equivalent to, say, buying a desktop from Dell (300~500 USD) and an XBox One (500 USD),

As a reference, the fastest home consoles now(XBO and PS4) are based on an AMD Jaguar core (AMD's version of the Atom), with 8GB of Ram. You can build a (Faster) AMD A10-based machine with the same specs for less than $400 in Canada.
What about any of the other infinite number of unforseen attack vectors?

It is a misunderstanding that it is the communication infrastructure and technology under attack here. It is not.

It is the abstract idea of Freedom that is under attack, and so a technology based solution is not the answer. More than powerful technology, we need powerful new ideas about Freedom.

New technology implementations that fix existing attack vectors would still be most welcome, but not a cure all.
More accurate comment would be "google is not paid by those who kill people".
Also seems to completely neglect that digital camera sensors perform wildly differently in low light situations independent of the actual image resolution.
I can't seem to load up the steam hw surveys for the various different video cards, but it would be interesting to see how many users are running at or below the latest MBP specs.
Don't know anything about it. But it's good that there's a revival of interest in languages for scientific computing. When I was in uni all we had was Fortran :-/
I must say, I'm surprised by how many naysayers there are, considering Gabe thinks Linux is the future of gaming. There really is no technical reason why this can't happen, we just need to make it happen...
All the 2-factor entry boxes I've seen make the "trust" optional. If you want to be asked every time, just uncheck the box.
Stack overflow PM here.

The hot/active/week/month tabs were only removed for anonymous users. If you're logged in at all, you will still see them. I think my meta-post covers the reasons behind this (mostly simplification for drive-by users).

Also, we have put a lot of effort into simplifying our accounts management over the last year. We're about halfway there, but at the moment we aggregate site accounts under a global account. You'll have to take an affirmative action to "join" another site, but it's not the whole registration process - no separate username/email/password.

Bottom line is registration requires an email and password, and that gets you the key to all of our sites. You just have to "use" the key on the site when you interact the first time.

Also, I'll add that you could just go here: http://stackexchange.com/questions?tab=hot
Scientists Now Know When You'll Get The Flu Nine Weeks Before It Happens
The most commonly awarded grade at Harvard is an A
Why? Is Android so bad?
The effect of their demo was obviously faked through video editing, so I'm curious how the actual implementation will work.

Will they embed some kind of see-through display in the watch glass?

Or will this be some kind of VR/AR where a Google Glass type device superimposes info on your watchface?
I can't seem to find any information about the source of the music. I'm getting a lot of music that seems to be "generic", not even having artist names, but the Death Metal genre gave me a Cradle of Filth song and I know they are a real band with a real record label, which leads me to believe this is not being done with respect to copyright law.
Also, the pilots have at least a fire axe on hand, and possibly also a gun, which they can easily use on anyone who forces the cockpit door.

And, they will be highly motivated to so defend themselves and the cockpit.
That's not the point. The idea is to have different passwords for each site and each device. So in this many-words scheme (which will run afoul of a lot of websites' length restrictions on passwords by the way) I'd have to find a good way to encode the site's name or I'd have to tack on at least four specific words to the existing core sentence. That's not something I'll remember with dozens of sites and devices.
How did this:

> variation in difficulty between classes, professors, and peer-groups can easily dominate variation in difficulty imposed by the grading scale

Become this:

> 4.0 GPA CC < 2.0 GPA Harvard. This implies: 2.0 GPA CC < 2.0 GPA Harvard. Now we drop 2.0 GPA from both sides and we get CC < Harvard, or Harvard > CC. ... Harvard is so 1337, there's no way that Harvard < CC, right (in some cases)?

And why do you think I'm performing a cost/benefit analysis? I relayed an anecdote about a single class that had to do with course material, not finances or overall GPA comparisons.

> You're actually trying to disprove that "CC - expensive_tuition > Harvard - small_tuition in some cases"

No.

I'll admit that I made a slightly hyperbolic statement when I made a claim about kids in a class I never attended, but you belabor this point to such excess that I have no trouble calling it "nitpicking."

> Are you a betting man? What if one student had a bad day that day and got an 89?

Then my conclusion would not change in the slightest.

> Be careful making generalizations, man.

Right back at you. Slight hyperbole is one thing, straw men are another.
Commas?

Personally, I'm never a fan of punctuation first formatting styles - though I give some exception for dot (.) first method calls in fluent interfaces for C-family languages.

someInterface
.thatCan()
.chain()
.itsCalls();
This integration is definitely needed. Very like the Everything.me app though.
There were thousands of services attacked, there isn't room in the headline for all of them.
Flash sites? If the content didn't load in lynx it wasn't worth viewing.
That's funny because "Eternal September" was coined in 1994 (i.e. people were exclaiming "things were better then" in reference to the time before September 1993).

It reminds me of "I Used to Love H.E.R." a song released in 1994 about how great rap used to be. http://rapgenius.com/Common-i-used-to-love-her-lyrics
Yeah, though I don't use it, since I only found out about it after I had been using my own system for a while.
I know a guy who does not have a mobile phone.
Sometimes I am a bit envious of him.
> If marketers could control what colors children want to wear, they'd change them every year to spur sales. Fashion isn't that predictable or controllable.

But they do. And it is.

They just don't need to do it for children, because they grow out of their clothes so fast. So it's actually a case in point that the "preferred" colours for children are somewhat more stable.

But if you look at adult's clothing, colours change every year, and every season. Pink shirts for men drop in and out of fashion. Models change every few years from big to slim to long to low to skinny

(seriously would anyone buy skinny jeans if they still offered a decent selection of boot-cuts at general clothing stores? ;) I'm kidding, I bet there's people that actually like the model)

I don't have my bookmarks here (maybe someone else can provide a link?), but I once read there was some old French lady in the fashion industry that would actually just pick and decide the "in fashion" colours for the next season, some influential big brands would just follow her direction, cheaper brands would copy the style, and that was that then. I read about it because she passed away a few years ago, but I bet they found a replacement fashion colour oracle soon enough.
Bored banker here. I think it's a great name. It shows that even though a lot of people look at the finance world as high-energy and lucrative, in reality it's a bunch of overly-confident young guns looking at spreadsheets all day. I felt like the domain was calling my name..
Ask HN: What are the hottest areas in computer science today?
I have some spare time and am looking to learn/immerse myself in a new topic. Machine learning is something I am interested in but before I jump in I am looking to get a list of topics and areas in the field of comp sci that are used to solve todays toughest problems. They can be possibly least understood and on bleeding edge. Thanks in advance.
Yeah, I hated it as well. The black really destroys the whole page, maybe another color wouldn't disturb me that much.
No, I think the GP means angular resolution – i.e. pixels per unit of solid angle – which one might presume is the figure of merit here.