skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Stalin was an utterly evil fuck head.

...as many important historians have said
You could also check out Crudzilla (crudzilla.com), it has a middleware that simply allows you to specify your SQL and forget about everything else. Includes a bunch of other goodies that'll make web development a pleasure :)

Full disclosure: Founder.
The argument does not work in reverse. If they had more guns, there would probably be more suicides. End of story.

I am not suggesting that no guns == no suicides, because that would be ridiculous. I am refuting the suggestion that having a gun does not increase your risk of dying by suicide. I submit that having a gun nearby does increase your risk of dying by suicide with ample supporting evidence listed above. I am happy to read studies to the contrary, but it seems pretty clear to me at this point.
Alas, it won't even turn on without its case (http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/23/5234574/apple-mac-pro-rev...). It needs it to guide air through the cooling tower style design. Presumably, someone could make a transparent case as an accessory.
The TSA does not aggravate it, because the vast, vast majority of bus crashes are not caused by terrorism, or indeed, by a crime of any kind. In contrast, a very significant percentage of airline fatalities over the past few decades were caused by violent crimes or acts of terror.
Saying that it's 'shockingly un-apple-like' that the outer case can be removed, shows that the reviewer is handling his first Mac Pro. I still remember the glee I felt, every time I opened my G5 Mac Pro.

My lust for this machine is only growing. It looks like a cross between Darth Vader and R2D2. Love it.
Smartphones Are Killing Camera Companies Again
the story isn't quite as monolithic as that though, in the 19th century America, lawsuits came about as people claimed that pollution from factories caused personal damage and the state courts repeatedly ruled that industrial progress (and the resulting economic growth) were protected interests and put the kaibosh on them - e.g. Lexington & Ohio Rail Road v. Applegate. So having a 'responsive' government can be a problem, depending on exactly whom the government is 'responding' to.
What's the specific issue? I find it solves loads of issues before where you could mix bytes and unicode by accident. Not only are they more explicit, I find the fact that `b'\0'[0] == 0` - way better when working with actual bytes.
There's an old quote from Larry Niven, I think, to the extent that, "If an old, white-haired scientist tells you something is possible, he's probably right; if he tells you something is not, he's probably wrong."

On the other hand, if a thousand old, white-haired scientists tell you something, it may be either right or wrong, but it's probably the way you should place your bets.
Coinbase launches app to let physical retailers accept payment in Bitcoin
There was a dynamic graph somewhere showing the number Python 3 and Python 2 packages on PyPi against time, no amount of googling can find it, does anyone know what I'm referring to? I'd love that link.
> By far the hardest aspect of cryptography engineering is getting people to use your software in the place.

I think perhaps a neglected aspect of the problem is how to turn difficult social / political problems (eg. nobody uses PGP and people think you're a weirdo if you try to persuade them to) into tractable technical problems (the kind cryptographers mostly talk about). I sometimes think it would be preferable to start from a point where everybody had public and private keys and knew how to use them, but the crypto was no better then ROT13, than the current situation where the crypto is pretty good but getting people to use it is nearly impossible.

I also think the emotive "bad crypto puts lives at risk" argument only really makes sense if you're talking about crypto for the military or a small number of political activists, who will in any case benefit if their encrypted transmissions are buried among everybody else's. Those people need to be more careful than the rest of us with our more quotidian privacy concerns. I would rather have more bad (but tractable) crypto than great crypto that is used by nobody.

Hopefully somebody will persuade me I am wrong about this so I can stop feeling like a crypto heretic.
Chromebook sales outperform MacBooks in commercial sector as iPad loses ground
> I wonder how can he be violating any law with respect to distribution of copyrighted content when he is not distributing anything

Anton Vickerman didn't host anything either. His site (surfthechannel) was also just a collection of links.

And, sure enough, he was held not to have committed any copyright-related offence.

So they got him on conspiracy to defraud [the record companies] instead. He's now serving a four year prison term after a private prosecution by FACT, a copyright industry trade organisation - an extraordinary move, initiated after the CPS (state prosecutors) refused to prosecute him. (Note: this is in the UK, not the US).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Vickerman

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/private-justice-h...
"Terrorist" does not currently have a well-accepted objective definition. To me a terrorist is a guerrilla fighter who lacks popular support where they are fighting and specifically attacks soft targets for political (rather than military/tactical) goals. Regardless, the casualness with which "collateral" deaths of civilians has been handled for several of the US's recent military activities may be of a different nature but not necessarily on a higher moral standing. This is probably most true of the US's participation in the Yemeni civil war over the last several years, but there is much else worthy of approbation. The theory of arming surveillance drones was always that it would enable attacks on extremely high value targets of opportunity using precision guided munitions that would limit collateral damage. In practice it has resulted in an unprecedented expansion in the extent of the currently active battlefield and a weapon system which appears to be on the same moral level as the car bomb in the degree to which it causes deaths of innocent civilians.
I think you responded to my comment that I somehow managed to delete, but re-posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6990738

I agree with you. I don't think Cryptocat or how the implementation is handled is perfect by any means, but people have been complaining about that for a long time, and we still don't have good alternatives. What I'm saying is that if somebody makes something that is technically sound and is as attractive for regular users, in Syria and elsewhere, then this whole debate becomes relatively moot.

If Nadim is as unwilling to cooperate as you're implying (which I don't think is totally true, but I will grant you that the underlying constructions for the group chat component were switched out recklessly and ignorantly), then surely complaining about it in blog posts will be very ineffective.
Why can't you replace the SSD?
Got #BigData plans for 2014? You need #HypeReduce
I took a look at that discussion. It looks to me like he might be comparing the mpz interface in GMP against a lower level interface. Of course GMP has the latter too, and it's likely much faster than the one he is writing.

It sounds like he switches to single word arithmetic when he can. We do that in flint, and it is faster. But it's more like a factor of two, which makes me very suspicious of the benchmarking there.

There was a Scheme implementation which once beat GMP for very large integer multiplication, and Magma was also once faster. But those days are long gone. GMP beats what a compiler can do by a factor of 4-12 depending on the compiler version and their high level algorithms are insanely technical. I simply don't believe someone can beat 20 years of GMP development in a few days with a Haskell compiler.
Yes, a provider can follow the DMCA safe harbor procedures to facilitate the filing of DMCA takedown notices, and comply with those promptly. The details are outlined here: http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi

Basically, a provider needs to provide contact information for a designated agent for DMCA takedown notices. Had Luke done so, and complied with legal DMCA takedown requests (as well as counter-notifications), he could have continued operating his service; however, that may have become considerably more work than he wanted to put into running the service.
That would be good news. (Although I'm pretty sure almost every 23 year-old here has Facebook.)
Samsung working on new Chromebook with 12″ display
> Frankly, it's just not worth that effort at this time. Python 2.6 is the default environment, there's solid package support for it, and it just plain works. We'll make that dive when Python 3 becomes the default for CentOS (scheduled for 8 or 9, IIRC), and probably not before.

Which is well and good; there's no point fighting with your operating system. Python3 was always going to be a slow migration; perhaps it's going even slower than planned, but that's not the disaster the OP portrays (in fact it sounds like you'd have just as much trouble migrating to python 2.7 as python 3, so there's no python3-specific problem here). Python3 is now at a place where distributions are adopting it as default; non-bleeding-edge folks will follow their distribution's lead.
2013: A Linux Christmas
Okay, seriously, isn't it only cared by non-technicians?
It would be useful to get the opinion of the Crypto Cabal on what is good safe software that is accessible to the general public and deserves to be promoted and well marketed?

Any suggestions?
That was opened five years ago, bizarre.
The concern with Huawei is that a security apparatus would be inserting backdoors/Trojans into every device. The NASA's targeted attacks of a few hundred (thousand?) devices is entirely unrelated.
"A kid learning a lot in school does not in any way either magical or practical imply the world will provide a good job upon graduation."

No, but if you come out of college without being functionally literate, like 69% of US college graduates, then you're pretty much guaranteed not to get a good job. C.f nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF
This was not brought up but is relevant when a lot of discussion on this article is revolving around the business-developer relationship.

>Selling people mediocre products they don't need and probably can't afford, that is actually difficult.

This is exactly why developers (at least this one) have a pending distaste for business people. This should never, ever, be done. The difficulty of selling 'mediocre products' that are not in 'need' and to people who cannot 'afford' is awful and disgusting. It implies tricking the buyer for your own gain.

If you have a mediocre product do not misrepresent when you sell it. If you are trying to fck people out of their money, fck you.

The difficult case is what if you invest your livelihood in a product that turns out to be shitty. You are left with either tricking people in to buying it or facing the alternative -- debt, foreclosure etc.. This could include putting a family (wife or husband or partner and children out on the street). This sucks for all involved. Customers wish you had a good product, you wish you did too.

This decision comes down to responsibility. You built that product. You were in charge or you bought in to the company. Take the loss, be honest about the product (note sales is still involved just not sales that misrepresents).

To be clear, sales is great. If sales is the method of opening people's mind enough to see what you genuinely believe are the best parts of your product. If its to lie and convince them to lie and buy a product that is 'medicore' and they cannot 'afford' (implicitly that this purchase will hurt them in other ways) then fck sales. This 'lying sales' is what the statement indicated and what I, and I think other developers, do not like.
Show HN: Scheduling app for a non-profit café
Much of the information I described is listed on the very page on Wikipedia linked above. If you dig a bit further on Wikipedia you can find the stats on a state-by-state basis. I believe at one point there was a breakdown by race on Wikipedia at one time but I'm unable to find it now.

The FBI's own crime statistics can be rather enlightening if one were to drill down into the numbers instead of looking at the nation as a whole.

The problems with gun control studies are the same as with climate change studies, there are always accusations of bias on both sides. I suggest everyone read studies that purport to show the truth as presented by both sides and decide for yourselves.
Personally, I prefer function. I can understand that others have a different preference; what I find surprising is the number of people who seem to care so much about this. Nevertheless, it is very evident that you are not alone.
Top New Year’s Resolutions for 2014
How China's pollution problem defers from that of US's or UK's, say 100 years back?
They've started using a proprietary SATA connector.
People are attacking this graph for the difference in scales, but the US population didn't increase by that much in 9 years (2003 to 2012): only about 10%. It's a shame that people are missing the forest for the trees here. If there were a 10-15% rise in student debt, that would be reasonable in the context of US population growth. But it's 200%.

Yes, the axes have been chosen in such a way to exaggerate the (still valid) point. This isn't any different from a visual model of the solar system that downplays the (vast) differences between the planets, relative to their sizes. Is it "misleading"? Only if it's presented and interpreted as a scale model. In this graph, the axes are clearly labelled, informing the reader of what's going on.

Thiel is right that there's a problem. The Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, tuition) that is killing the middle class is fundamentally extortive at this point, and extortionists are known for rapidly ratcheting up their demands. What's happening is that, as the middle-class breaks down, people are panic-buying the credentials and connections that might keep them alive in this game of musical chairs.

I don't support Thiel's solution (as an aside, he's an investor in Knewton, one of the most pro-establishment ed-techs out there) but he sees the problem with a clarity that few do.
The inability to use string manipulation functions on bytestrings without converting them to unicode and back for each operation.
What I meant was that he was characterizing all feminist activists as wanting or doing X (X being unsupported, anyways), which seems to me to be an unfair generalization and an easy to knock down, stereotypical villain.

I should have clarified in the original post, apologies.
This is an app I developed to handle the volunteers for a local café. They're considering between this and http://volgistics.com and their reservations are mainly that my software is untested. So, check it out and poke around a bit.
I am not a fan of aggressive, litigious companies. And the morality of physical vs intellectual property is a whole another issue that warrants more discussion.

However, all that baggage aside, you kinda did create this website so people can share copyright infringing files. Did you really expect people to only share personal, non-copyrighted music? Come on.

Anyways. You should be proud of the work you've done though. It's not easy to follow through with an idea.
as an expert witness who served in several of these cases I would say you are very lucky. No fine even!

You have a screenshot of your app with a big-time RIAA artist, big time fail. Even helping people on your forum streaming a link like http://innocent.org/madonna.mp3 can bring down all your efforts. Lawyers will eat you for it. See the landmark work on the new inducement doctrine: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster....

For my courtroom CV, google: "borderline incompetent" :-)
There's no such thing as "legit content". Licensing is not a characteristic of the content, it's a relationship between the content and the person distributing it.

So give a crude example, the content on Netflix is "legit", in the sense that they have the right to distribute it, but that doesn't make it legal for you to record and retransmit the same content.

If you don't know if you can distribute it, you should assume you can't, because that's the default position in the law. You need to have some kind of license to override it.
High-definition video from space is available for purchase. Finally.
This is what it’s like to be at war with your body.
If you have buffer, you'll see the "add to buffer" on HN itself. Since what you built is so similar to buffer and given Buffer's popularity, was wondering if there's some more info beyond a buffer like app. My comment is somewhat snarky, but I assume if it's on HN, there's a good reason for it to be there.

Not saying you shouldn't build things that already exist, just that generally when someone builds something that already exists there are other reasons for building it. Having had the whole code reuse thing bashed into my head, I typically have to have a good reason for reinventing the wheel.
The biggest thing that drives me nuts about py3 is just that its repl doesn't evaluate generators. I'm sure they had their reasons, but I use python as my go-to calculator, and when simple operations with maps/ranges give me a representation of a generator ("<map object at ...", whatever), then it's just less useful to me. I could be alone in that use case though...
Hm. So you're saying that the distinction betwen "intellectual arguments" and "psuedo-intellectual arguments" is the experience and/or training of the arguer? Isn't it possible for an experienced, trained philosopher to make psuedo-intellectal arguments? Isn't it possible for an inexperienced, untrained person to make a valid argument?

I would think that the validity of the argument is what matters!
Well, you're saying that there's no point (intrinsically) in self-sacrifice. I'm saying there's no point (intrinsically) in self-promotion. So the value judgement is relative.
This is the lump of labour fallacy. It's largely regarded as fallacious now; there's a decent Wikipedia article on the topic if you're interested.
"Anti-everything activist writer in opposition to everything shocker"
The best general answer to this question is probably "Use Tails: https://tails.boum.org/ ." Especially for activists in Syria/regular users who have a genuine concern for their lives.

(Tails uses Pidgin with the OTR plugin.)
I made http://metrics11.com It helps you find profitable keywords for your website which you can use to increase search traffic to your website.
"send text posts limited to 140 characters"

That's just weird. Like putting horses reins on an early automobile, or putting a hopper in the front of the car to pour oats into.

"Bitcoin, in the sense of the digital currency, is not used at all"

I had to LOL at this. BTC is popular enough to try to piggyback completely unrelated things using the term as a lure. I've lived thru the "turbo" era, the "e-" and "i-" era and now we're entering the BTC era, where we can soon expect shampoos and hamburgers to be "BTC shampoo" and "BTC hamburgers" as a marketing gimmick.
Also, if you are a registered member there is always the buy one get one, buy two get two free and so on deal. So essentially you always get 50% of on O'Reilly which is great but when you know this all other deals become redundant... :p
Living In The Age of The Hoax
http://www.querydsl.com/ as well.
Pinterest is actually a fantastic resource for finding visual inspiration e.g. illustrations, graphic design, typography, product design, app design etc.

A lot of people think it's filled with mostly cupcakes and kitten pics (I used to think that too), but it's actually one of the best places to visit online if you're doing visual research.

If you're interested in the above design topics, here are some example boards to help you start browsing:

http://www.creativebloq.com/inspiration/pinterest-boards-812...
Yes. He says that instead of having a "Try it for free" button he should have posted the price and seen how many are interested in the product then.
https://heml.is/ should be on the way. I've been keeping on eye on it. It'll be interesting what the security community thinks of it after release.

There is also TextSecure (https://whispersystems.org/), but it requires text messaging.
Streaming Will Soon Be More Profitable Than Sales
Internet Marketing Solutions
Clearly you're right, in the sense that, as a simple statement of fact, the NSA revelations are surprising to a great many people, maybe most people who learn of them. But there is a sense in which, when people say "this is not surprising", it implies "to people who know some things about the subject". I guess this expression, used this way, might come off as elitist or haughty, but I think it's a pretty common usage. Another reason I'm surprised at all the surprise is that I never studied cryptography, computer science, or the history of spy agencies systematically. The Puzzle Palace was a popular book, widely read, and I learned about NSA involvement in academic cryptography research by accident while studying up on numerical algorithms for physics simulations.
Those things return generators now to avoid wasting memory (you don't need to create possibly humongous list and keep it in memory during the iteration). If you want a list, just do list(your expression). If you forgot about it then do: list(_) as the very next thing. Like this:

>>> map(lambda x: x*x, range(1,10))

<map object at 0x02DDDB90>

>>> list(_)

[1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81]

Wtp ?
Nadim's ego has lead him down a path where he believes that what he is doing is infallible and his critics do not deserve any level of praise--and it is reenforced by those who do not know any better than he does. You can see this in any project or startup, but in the case of Cryptocat, we have a situation where lives are potentially at risk and there is a likelihood that someone has already been compromised due to his actions.

The "cutesy" icons and flashy colours that Cryptocat displays are really nothing more than lipstick on a pig.
Nah, troll harder next time.
I hope this is the most mucle-y windows-running computer.
Do you mean the wall of shame/superpowers?

https://python3wos.appspot.com/
Dear Apple. Please include python 3 as /usr/bin/python3 in all future Releases. And Microsoft, if you're listening, it would be extremely sweet if you would install python by default as well...
Most gun safes are Faraday cages when closed and locked. This means that not all guns are locatable at any given time, and the majority of non-locatable guns would be entirely legitimate.

And as counterexample to your claims, I propose the smartphone. Every smartphone, intrinsic to its normal operation, is locatable with a high degree of precision to a single building, yet most smartphone thefts are not ever prosecuted, nor any attempt at recovery ever made. The carriers themselves have even resisted efforts to remotely deactivate those stolen phones, even though it would be trivial from a technical standpoint.

Clearly, GPS beacons do not prevent, deter, or reverse thefts. I have no reason to believe that cops would be any better at catching tracked-gun thieves than they are at catching smartphone thieves.
Some reading on placebo effect:

http://tedkaptchuk.com/selected-publications
I would hazard a guess that it is because the statement allows for easily adding a `print varname` in your code while debugging.
Write it as a list comprehension instead; it has identical syntax except for using square brackets instead of parentheses, and returns a list.
I prefer it as well. Being able to do things like throw

print(<SOMETHING I'M TRYING TO DEBUG>) or

into a lambda has been useful on multiple occasions.