skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think part of this is certainly the mystique of the cowboy cop trope [0]. They'll do anything to get their man, even if the man in the next room thinks they've gone to far. and they get results. And your rogue cop has to be bigger and badder than Harry Callahan and whomever came after.

And then a little of art imitating life, "real people are doing water boarding, the audience needs to see something worse than that"

[0] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CowboyCop
This is a tangent, but I've always wondered... is it silly of me to be hesitant to use Android for the fact that Google owns it? I'd trust a jailbroken iPhone to do my bidding (and not be sneaky) more than an Android phone, but perhaps I'm being a bit crazy.

Still, it's hard to shake the feeling of an all-seeing eye watching everything I do when I use Android. I installed it in VirtualBox and there were at least five different options I had to turn off just to ask it to please not transmit my data to Google's servers: Auto-backup, location info, usage statistics, crash reports, and a couple others I'm forgetting right now.

Google has a vested interest in knowing as much about you as possible. Apple may have the same interest -- like I said, I'd trust a jailbroken iPhone rather than a vanilla one -- but they make their money by selling you hardware and apps.
Shh! Stop giving them ideas. Before long, being amidst an Occupy Wall Street type protest will result in your laptop shutting down.
I used to think that, and I certainly want to believe it. Then I went to teach "Calculus for Business and Economics" at a US university.

There was one lad had had an "I can it it!" attitude. He was convinced that with hard work he would be able to get through the course. With that attitude I was happy to put in extra hours to help him get the grades he needed.

Many extra hours.

Many, many extra hours.

But it didn't seem to matter what I did, he just couldn't get the hang of what fractions were all about. He could memorize and follow the rules, he mastered the processes, and he worked diligently on all the exercises I could create or find. But underneath, there was no real spark of understanding.

I recently read some unpublished research that suggests that some aspects of mathematical/arithmetical/numerical ability shares something with language. It's been well documented that if you haven't acquired a natural language by the age of 4 or 5 then your long-term abilities will be severely hampered. It's now being suggested in some circles that the same thing might be true with base-line abilities with number.

So I no longer take it as a matter of faith that anyone can do anything, so long as they set their mind to it, but that certainly doesn't stop me from encouraging people to try, and helping when ever I can.

Edit to match quotation marks.
Author here - Hi! :)

Sneakers is a high-performance background-job processing framework based on RabbitMQ.

It uses a hybrid process-thread model where many processes are spawned (like Unicorn) and many threads are used per process (like Puma), so all your cores max out and you have best of both worlds.

It's being used in production for I/O intensive jobs as well as CPU intensive jobs.

On a recent 2012 MBP it reaches 7000req/s for a silly microbenchmark while Sidekiq keeps at the hundreds (600-700req/s).
FreeMat: Rapid Engineering, Scientific Prototyping and data processing
If Driverless Cars Really Are the Future, the Govt Might Have to Pay for Them
Curso de Gestão de Pavimentos no Técnico
First book burnings in Canada, now in North Carolina. I expect new witch hunts in the New World.
Number 3 on the leader board[3] and yet banned from posting

I'd say that this is actually a good thing. It proves that the moderators don't favor oldtimers and/or high-karma users: If you break the rules you get banned. No matter who you are.
I don't see a reason why playing violin would be impossible given a couple hundred or thousand hours of deliberate practice.

Jumping higher than the WR is a straw man, since that goes for anything - there can only be one #1. However, people can increase their vertical leap substantially if they train things like olympic lifting and plyometric. See The Vertical Jump Development Bible for example programs on how 12-50 year olds can increase their vertical leap on the order of 20 inches.
I've had a pebble for about 6 months, never actually had the battery fully die. Once the low battery warning shows up you have at least a day of life left in it. It also seems to get a full charge in < 2 hours and a 30 minute charge seems to last about 3-4 days.
There are at least two assholes involved in this story. If there were only one there would be no story.

I think exposing what people say in the open (not private but also not quite public) isn't exactly something someone who works at google should be complaining about. If "stuff you do online can come back to haunt you" shocks you then you probably shouldn't be working at google (except perhaps as a contractor with no benefits, right?)
Snatcher: A Cyberpunk Adventure
Back to the Roots - Fred Fish Memorial Archive
I think the article gets the causality backwards in saying that shows like this "are re-educating and changing attitudes towards this act." Major-network televisions shows are reactive. They're the product of focus groups and market surveys. They are much more likely to reflect trends in culture than to create those trends. They opportunistically take advantage of social trends that already exist.

This is clear if you look at how television lags society as a whole when it comes to other social trends. By the time CBS aired a show with two major gay characters (Will & Grace in 1998), more than a third of Americans already supported gay marriage. This year, "Modern Family" will feature a gay marriage proposal, now that 55% of Americans support marriage equality. Going back further, the networks didn't air an interracial kiss until Star Trek in 1968, a year after the Supreme Court (itself an extremely reactive institution), struck down bans on interracial marriage. As of 2010, more than 1 in 6 new marriages was interracial, but you'd hardly perceive that watching network TV, where interracial relationships are still highly unusual. The Brady Bunch, which ran from 1969-1974, pioneered portraying a blended family on TV, with two previously-divorced parents, but by 1969 divorce was already mainstream and divorce rates were comparable to what they are today (they peaked ~1980). In 1960, when TV was still idealizing stay-at-home mom June Cleaver on Leave it to Beaver, a third of the labor force was women.

Given the track-record of television when it comes to other social trends, I think it's incorrect to say that television is "changing attitudes" towards torture. More likely is that it's reflecting attitudes in society more condoning of torture than they have been in the past.
TCX is reasonably open and extensible for any new geegaws that come along, I think.

http://developer.garmin.com/schemas/tcx/v2/
Yup, after hearing good things about DO on here lately, I was hoping to give them a try.

This kind of fracas, though - in which ONE person is able to fabricate a story and exercise tyrannical control via proxy - dissuades me heavily from that. Maybe if I were to use DO, one of my competitors could trump up some charges and persuade them to drop my "droplet"? Do I want to deal with that possibility?

Hell, I feel nervous just posting this here, now! Who knows what they'll do to me in the future based on this text! (/me copies this post, logs out, creates new user id.)

This leads me to think that in terms of "digital society," we are still behind Hannurabi's Law and even Sharia Law. We are in the Wild West and power in the form of oligarchy is the rule. I hope more of us geeks read up on their philosophy. [1]

[1]http://www.philclassics.libsyn.com/

Welcome to the bottom of the pile, DO. It could have been magic.
Kleptography's Star Trek Style Kitsch
I wasn't making any comparisons. But since you brought it up, I'd rather have a $50- open source router than a $300 one. Just me.

Ironically, Belkin has a decent line of routers that are already flashable. I bought a dual band one new through their eBay store a couple years ago for $35. Threw Tomato (firmware of choice since it was released) on it and have been happy ever since: very fast, never locks up and supports dnsmasq.
More than 10 hours ago
Same for medical equipment. The Windows XP EOL is a major problem because all of this kit has been "certified" to run with XP, and re-certification is costly.

There might be a market for a $50-100, two-port firewall/DMZ solution built on one of these ARM chips:

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?co...
http://www.ti.com/product/am3357

I have yet to find such a solution for sale.
I almost fell for a phishing scheme, what can I do?
It's surprising that wordpress.com leaves this petty post up. OP is likely violating their ToS too...
You can start now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Commission_to_Inve...

Follow the links out from there.
>the problem is compounded because the victims have Uni degrees and non-regional accents, so they're clearly bo-boes throwing their weight about and drive out the `disadvantaged'.

So the only solution to "bad government" (lack of enforcement) is more "bad government" (we-don't-like-you laws.) Sorry, I don't agree.

I used to work in local government doing ordinance enforcement and I would have pilloried any inspector who performed as you describe.

It was my experience however that people would move into certain areas because they were extremely cheap and then complain about the pre-existing problems. My favorite were people who moved into new condo building adjacent to commuter train tracks and then complained about frequency and noise of the trains.
Regarding your edit, did you notice it's happening on Google Play too and has nothing to do with Apple or Google?

Bad ads serving malware are a problem on desktop just as much as on mobile.
In contrast, I would disagree that the most important thing is that we need more experiments.

If you have more than others, give them some.
In this case they're claiming that Congress required them to restrict the use.
Prevent Google Glass from Auto-Uploading Photos to Google Servers
Intel kills off McAfee brand name, replaces it with Intel Security
Which is why Wikipedia is better and more reliable than newspapers. In order of hiding reality: Conspiracy videos that take 50 minutes to get to any vague kind of point at all, Infographics, Newspapers, Wikipedia.
Malicious ads on ad networks are hardly a recent phenomenon.
Looked into this project before. My conclusion is: the way emscripten works is not suitable for TeX Live project because it is impossible to pre-load such a huge collection of files.
Information wants to be free. Eventually, everyone who wants to know will know how to build a CNC machine like this, without any interlocks.

If we've given up on growing up as a species, and now believe that humanity's only hope of survival is to limit the spread of information, then we're well and truly doomed. And, sadly, it's probably for the best. After all, who wants to live in a dystopian, nerfed society full of imprisoned intellects? Who wants a bunch of angry apes who're all one bad day from unleashing Armageddon loping around with warp engines and antimatter bombs and black hole generators?

As a side note... reading the commentary on this story is both intriguing and disheartening. The "hacker" mentality that apologizes for, and is comforted by, this sort of manufacturer-imposed limitation on an owned product, this denial of the right to tinker, is a very different mentality than was common when I earned my stripes. Have legally-imposed culture changes like the DMCA really corrupted our community so much? Have constant, overblown reminders of the threat of terrorism rendered us so fearful of each other? Could an individual raised in a community with this mentality ever produce open, populist-enabling technologies, PGP and P2P and DeCSS and modchips? IP itself? Are we still hackers, or are we all just consumers, now?
Show HN: I’m giving away a FREE growth guide today
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> Prove me wrong. You can’t. They destroyed the records.

I love it.

Personally I believe these records showed that the Union had assistance from their extra-terrestrial masters and held the documentation of a coverup after the Civil War.

Prove me wrong. You can’t. They destroyed the records.
IOS 7 Messages spring effect in JavaScript  60fps
"Any television series in a modern setting in which characters that are portrayed as "good guys" use torture to achieve their goals is despicable propaganda."

I'm stunned by how torture has became common in TV shows, at least since "24". But is it propaganda? to me, it was more a way to please the audience.
This is just insane. For a start exactly can you give free money to everyone, where exactly does it come from? The only source of money is other people. So you'd be taking away money from one group of people and giving it to others. You are discouraging the ones who get money from working because they get free money instead. You are discouraging those from whom you took the money because what's the point in working if someone is going to take away your money and give it to those who don't.

I don't just consider this unworkable, I consider it basically evil.
It's astounding to me that they are allowing him to retain his position. If for no other reason than the message it sends. How disturbing.
I think there's two, pretty obvious, ways to look at any marketplace, as the consumer or the producer. Yes, consumers complain about the x,y and z aspect of everything and anything in every marketplace.

But as a creator of software, you can't deny the figures. Compared to all other marketplaces, both business to consumer and business to business, far more revenue flows through Apple's, that's clear to see.

You have to be affected by this as a producer. Although, there's clearly heavy competition and marketing is tough and expensive, there's a lot of money that can technically be made.

I suspect the total Android marketplace revenues are accelerating quite hard also, but this underlines another thing I'm beginning to see with marketplaces, B2C can work, B2B seems much, much harder.

I've seen in two B2B marketplaces, Atlassian's [0] and the Google Apps Marketplace [1] that the majority of customers of the core products stick to that core product and avoid third-party products from the respective marketplaces (that's a gut feeling for GAM, there are some figures for Atlassian I saw end of last year confirming that). I seem to remember Atlassian saying about $10M had been paid out to devs up to last October.

Yes, I know that businesses have far higher thresholds to trust third-party additions, but I can't help feeling that if you're creating a product whose main channel will be a marketplace, to favour B2C over B2B. I'm always saying to think about B2B sales more, the margins are way better, generally, but this is the first exception I've found.

The AWS marketplace [2] is something of a hybrid of the two modes. Anyone have much experience of it? I've never used it myself.

[0] https://marketplace.atlassian.com/home/confluence

[1] https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/

[2] https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace
An argument can be made that this merely masks the problem : it is certainly possible for a Haskell function to crash (and therefore not return anything), no matter it's declared type :

reallyfun xs = reallyfun xs ++ [ 1 ]

Note that this will OOM, not just run infinitely long. There are plenty of ways you can cause this sorts of issues. So you can't trust Haskell functions to always return their declared type either.

The million-dollar-question : should your program be ready for this ? (in the case of a database : ideally, yes it should, and it's in fact possible to do just that)

That's the problem with abstractions, like the "always-correct-or-null" pointers of java : they're leaky. A type system, unless reduced to pointlessness, can't really be enforced fully. Haskell ignores failure modes, like memory and stack allocation, jumping to other parts of the program, reading the program, ... all of which can in fact fail.

Thinking about this gives one new appreciation for try ... except: (catching an unspecified exception). It's not necessarily worse than a pure function. Good luck defending that position to mathematicians though.
The four must-have skills for today's leaders
If you're wary of Google, just don't create an account on the phone.

I've recently de-Googled a number of Android phones, and the cleaned-up experience is wonderful. Long battery life and plenty of apps from F-Droid or Amazon.

Browser-sync is nicely handled by Firefox Sync, which you can self-host.

Ideally it'll be a rooted phone and you can also delete all the com.google.*.apk files, too, so none of their apps run in the background ( uselessly spinning and burning CPU cycles in case you suddenly decide to create an account ).
Help a failed startup team pay off debt?
Apple reports $1 billion app sales in Dec, $10 billion for 2013
You need a proper framework to overlay onto the data as well, so you can better understand or interpret what it could be saying. If more people had a core understanding of economics, then we'd all realize that costs are greatly inflated due to certain systems that exist and self-perpetuate - those systems can be influenced to incentivize different behaviours and patterns though.
Sounds like the way Paul Erdős spent his entire life...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s#Personality
I'd expect people to buy (more) imported products rather than (the same amount of more expensive) domestic products.

It would probably be worthwhile to give people part money and part vouchers for certain eligible (i.e. domestic but some international treaties might not allow this discrimination of imported goods) products, in order to keep the purchases of domestic goods at a high level.
If my parents are average, most people buying Android phones aren't downloading any apps, free or not. Plus android apps tend to be free and have ads, which, I assume, aren't being counted in revenue listings.
This recapitulates many arguments made by Georgetown law's David Luban in the excellent 2005 essay "Liberalism Torture and the Ticking Bomb" which we should all go read right now :)

http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...
Notes from the open source battlefield
permit to do something != doing it

However, I agree that's a LOT of people. Even if only half are holding at any given time, it's 1% of the population... Scary.
Same here. I've been very pleased with their service but DO is way out of line here. Shutting down content based on a single complaint, without a court order or any kind of injunction -- and then saying that the customer has to get a court order from a NY court to keep it open? Exactly the opposite of what I expect from a VPS.
Sometimes the subject does have the sought-after information, and the interrogator knows the subject has it, and people will die if that information is not extracted. Sometimes asking nicely doesn't work, and neither does saying "Tell me! or I'll say 'Tell me!' again!"

Another inconvenient fact is sometimes it does work, and is an alternative to actual harm.

ETA: I'm surprised at how many here adhere to the notion "you can't ever know if the subject knows". We justifiably incarcerate people in peacetime, and kill people in war, on less information. As another poster noted: if the subject possesses a computer clearly connected with the issue, admits it's his, admits he knows the password, refuses to give the password, reveals the password under enhanced interrogation (with no physical harm done), and the password decrypts life-saving information, far better that than letting innocents die (or killing him putatively after the fact) because "torture isn't nice". Unwavering equalization of torture with crime (and invariant punishment thereof) is just as absurd as invariably criminalizing use of deadly force in defense of self or others. I get that sometimes/often/usually it doesn't work, but this broad insistence it is always criminal is absurd.
A record 554 patents for Nike in 2013
No, it's a right, not an obligation. I chose to set my 'daily rate' at 0.
I have a feeling if Kevin Igoe truly has the best interests of the group in mind, he would.

On the other hand, if his mission is to sabotage their work I think that's much less likely to happen, particularly with Lars' support. I wonder if the resulting increased scrutiny will cripple the working group.
By intentionally not making eye contact with them ten meters before they bump into you. Done. You don't need new laws for that.
Here's an idea: why don't we stop giving free money to the government instead?

If I didn't had to work half of the year and give ~40% of my income to a corrupt government I could have more money/time to invest and improve other people's lives directly, and a party wouldn't be able to manipulate the poor with welfare programs and stay in power indefinitely. The elite largely manages to avoid taxes anyway... the current system just slaves the workers in the name of good intentions, and is incompetent/corrupt at spending the money.

EDIT: For those who don't know, Brazil already runs a program like that since 2003. The government spends in that program about half of the budget estimated for public hospitals, roads, water and sanitation. It didn't changed the situation of the poor, public services are still crap (the only the poor have access to), there's no infrastructure to generate jobs where these poor people live. The end result is that we now have a portion of the population dependent on the federal government, and that's used to manipulate elections.
> You keep saying they are enforcing 'the law,' when in fact they are just enforcing their own TOS, which is perfectly within their rights.

Relevant links:

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

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

There are laws regarding defamation, I don't think DO can just opt in to enforce them. They can write anything in their TOS, wether or not it's legally enforceable is another question.
Doesn't Google have a problem in China, which is probably 300 million users? Most people are not downloading apps from their app store?

http://bgr.com/2013/10/03/android-china-app-store-analysis/

The real problem for both platforms, however, is that most apps aren't making enough money to support a company.

The real problem for both platforms is disc
That episode of TNG was a work of art. I think it's a bit unpleasant to watch, and it's supposed to be. It should be. But knowing about this stuff is part of being a real adult. That sort of evil is still out there.

By contrast, what's the purpose of Fringe's torture? Am I actually supposed to find this entertaining? Honest, if leading, question.
LLVM 3.4 Release
Not sure what information you want. Do you think it's ever reasonable for a VPS provider to suspend an account without telling the customer why the account was suspended?

Doesn't the fact that they agreed to handle it differently in the future indicate that they even believe they handled it inappropriately?
Really ? How would you even encode Maybe or Option in Java, if you can't use null anywhere ?

The problem is that Maybe doesn't work without Algebraic Data Types.
Did you see that? Developer productivity in North America just increased for one day. Its back down now.

Honestly, while HN was down, I didn't feel the need to hunt down other news. In fact, I got a good start on the Coursera crypto course, as well as got some real work done.