skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The future is mountains of plastic.

One of the good things about wood is you don't have to worry about it sticking around for 1000+ years. The problem with plastics is most of it can't be recycled. Not the way we think of recycling.

Aluminum cans are melted down and turned back into aluminum cans. Polymers are ground up and injection molded into lower grade polymers. Once too many polymer chains get broken the grade is too low to be usable.
So you prevent MAC address tracking by using an identifier-free link layer protocol [3] (this doesn't exist in practice, only researchers made a demo showing its possible).

Or you could just randomize your MAC occasionally. If you're not even connected to a network (which is the situation we're discussing), just scanning, there's no reason for keeping a static MAC.
The online communities I've seen work best generally:

⚫ Are selective. Actual or de-facto barriers to casual participation exist.

⚫ Are focused around a specific interest. Usually topical, occasionally by geography.

⚫ Are based around discussion from people interested in receiving as well as transmitting. The traditional exceptions to these are trolls and spammers, but I had a brief experience on mailing list that was heavily subscribed by people in the entertainment industry some years back. It was horrible. For, several reasons: people in love with the sound of their own voice, top-post/forward style messages (3 lines on top of 3000 wasn't uncommon), and ultimately far too many participants for the forum. Even though it wasn't spam / trolling / SEO, it was about the worst and most useless forum I'd ever seen.

Having well-established formatting and quoting styles matters. That's one of the things I enjoy about reddit, especially as compared with G+: the richer markdown, and inclusion of blockquote syntax, helps hugely. One idiot on G+ (who I finally blocked, for various reasons) had the habit of using an inline quote/response format, but his marking syntax (python-style quote tagging, I think), was all but impossible to follow. Dealing with his BS and difficult-to-follow style really weren't worth it. Oh, and it'd be nice if HN had a proper blockquote markdown as well ...

Also from G+: I noticed that without a proper "plaza", what you tended to end up with were, effectively, cocktail parties: hosts (users) who has a sufficient level of followers that they'd kick off conversations, as well as a good seed, and policing of guests to keep everything in line. Discussion nucleated around posts and specific users. Not communities, not topics, not pages.

Communities were and are effectively dead outside a very few exceptions, largely due to the inability to filter out crap. And even with the cocktail-party mode, there was a very narrow goldilocks zone: too few followers and discussions wouldn't get off the ground, too many and it rapidly got inane (effectively somewhere between a college kegger and a street brawl), and hosts who were either uninspiring or absentee would (respectively) garner similarly inane commentary and/or have largely directionless commentary.

I find the dynamics of discussions fascinating.

Hrm. I'll take a look at your project, but that website gives a horrible first impression. Try to make your text text. Not some kind of art statement.

Update: Yeah, I'm sorry but that site's just too painful to read. Show this to your Web team:
http://www.contrastrebellion.com/
If you dig into the details[1], there are 4 major cities where the average is at or above $100k, and at least one where it is close.

[1] http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programme...
Because nothing says "reliable store of value" like PR such as "Who wouldn't want to ride the first (possible) wave?", amirite?
10 or 20 years ago that electronic lock likely would have used a microcontroller too. The difference is that 10 or 20 years ago it was quite possibly the same person who designed the circuit that wrote the firmware. Back then the firmware might have been 512 bytes of machine code that required deep knowledge of the hardware. These days the firmware quite possibly includes Linux...
It seems like a good intro, but one of these days I would really like to see a monad explanation that doesn't use Maybe.
This is beautiful. Love your 'Nest'!

Looking back to 5-10 years ago you would have had a really hard time building this in a week let alone 1 day.
America's Coming Geek Gap
POV Footage Of Falcons Hunting Is Better Than Most Action Movies
I'm not sure why this is down-voted. Connotations differ in different cultures; I merely point out that "Nimrod" does not have a universally positive connotation.

If this is connotation is intentional, perhaps as humor, please just tell me I'm not getting the joke.
Make it free and you'll have a million applicants.

That's disruptive.
I hear ya, but it's the easiest way to gauge interest before putting too much time into a completed product.
The fact that people over 30 find Facebook cool is much of the reason why younger people don't find it cool.
??? My 30 dollar third-world built brazilian crappy on-off thermostat has manual fan on and off. It can be programmed to turn on automatically when over/under a given temperature and also to not run for more than a predefined ammount of minutes.

As I understand it any temperature control designed for big refrigerators or freezers has this features. Some even allow you to pre-configure fan cycles (i.e. on for x minutes, off for y, repeat) and turn the cycle on or off depending on temperature or compressor state.
I've been using photobucket (for a couple of years) and Imgur (past month or so) for quick shares. Imgur does offer some editing capabilities. Neither allows you to limit access best that I know, though I could be wrong on that. Most of the need I've got is for hosting images related to blog posts.

And yes, having played a bit in social space, photo is the killer app. Google knows this as well.
Strongly agree that this is ludicrously hostile to devs. This statement here:

"This is how developers keep themselves employed: by regularly clusterfucking your code."

Ummm, no. This is what happens when feature requirements are poorly communicated over a long period of time, combined with implementing every half baked or ill advised feature asked for by the marketing team. You know, stuff like "automated SEO using artificial intelligence".

I have worked on Magento, and agree that it is painful and convoluted, but it's a bit hard to believe that every single dev that has contributed to it was either stupid and/or malicious. Hopefully, moving to a community driven approach on 2.0 will actually clean up some of the technical debt and make the product more reliable, although it's more likely that it's just going to result in future feature adds coming from more numerous stakeholders with conflicting visions.

Hopefully the Magento management can manage all that input and stay focused. What they absolutely need to ignore is misguided and obviously clueless (or even malicious) feedback like this article.
What backend do you code for the api?
Do people write rich server-side web apps in Plain Ol' Python?

Perhaps not, but plenty of us write them using a lightweight framework like Flask rather than heavyweights like Django, and even in a relatively mature field like ORMs, there are downsides to using them that sometimes outweigh the advantages.

For a tiny app, sure, maybe it's not so bad to just use jQuery.

I've got ~100,000 lines (before minimising etc.) and ~5 years of successful maintenance "just using jQuery" for one web app that I can quickly check from here that is still going strong. I think most of us would agree that's not a tiny single page application.
I think one of missteps of AI is that enough people haven't been working directly on strong AI.
- I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.
- Yes, sir.
- Are you listening?
- Yes, I am.
- Plastics.
They are

http://lifehacker.com/how-retail-stores-track-you-using-your...

They use it to track your movements in the store. I forget the name of the most popular provider.
Yes. Most social commentary like the parent article here is essentially worthless. A point to start discussion, but on it's own almost completely void of meaning.

Correct, throw it out.
Pres. Obama Remarks on Intelligence Programs [video]
User Selection Manifesto
Especially since he is almost always technically correct--the best kind of correct.

What OpenBSD foundation really needs is a tactful and charismatic person to act as firewall and pf between Theo and the people with overflowing bank accounts, who are more accustomed to dealing with obsequious salesdroids than a person who is not only ten times smarter than their entire golf group put together, but also so aware of it that he cannot hide how much of a waste of time it is for him to suck up to any one of them, no matter how much he could use the cash.

Do you think Apple would have gone anywhere if Wozniak was the one talking to all the investors?
why? is there any revelation that they have the compute power to do that? Or it's just because now it's know that they'd really like to do it?
It could have something to do with the reason you wanted to start a project in the first place.

If you start a project just to play with some new shinny framework/tech then it is likely that once the novelty wears off nothing of interest would remain.

If however you start a project because you are excited about some product vision that doesn't already exist or not in the form you've envision then the drive to bring that idea/vision to fruition can be a powerful motivator.

I wrote a blog post on this matter some time back:
http://colabopad.blogspot.com/2009/12/on-joys-of-creativity-...
>When they got to close to us and didn't stop despite loud verbal warnings we fired warning shots, they knew that meant stay away or get shot.

The other way of stating this is that you made a direct threat to kill them if they didn't do what you wanted.

Outside of a warzone, making such threats is usually illegal.
This is a good attitude. All of us have failings. Most of us fail at being geniuses. Theo fails at being diplomatic.
Supernodes could not always listen. The actual traffic was always direct P2P unless a direct connection could not be established due to e.g. NATs or firewalls, in which case supernodes would be used as relays. Research into NAT traversal and P2P connectivity a few years ago indicated that about 85% of peers could be connected to directly, so most traffic was not via supernodes.

Even now the majority of non-mobile traffic seems to be direct P2P. I know because I checked using packet sniffers. In fact, even supernode traffic is P2P. Checking my router logs, I can see a number of connections made to Skype even when I'm not using it, which I presume is my machine being used as a supernode.
Captain Obvious title. Hiring exclusively for anything doesn't make sense.

Imagine hiring exclusively for Attitude, Commitment to release or Aptitude.
Did you filter retired people? Adjust for the disabled? It doesn't sound like you did any of these things (if you did, you should mention it).

Did you adjust for students? Doesn't it seem odd to you that in the BLS data the 'less than 5000' group is second only to the '70000 or more' group in the amount spent on education? And that more of them have college until you reach the 40000+ groups.

Then you draw conclusions from your faulty data.

Also, where are your references for this. You put footnote numbers in the article, but didn't include the actual references.

This is what I came up with in 5 minutes. What are your qualifications?

[Edit: just to emphasize how odd the BLS data is without adjustments, it says that the AVERAGE person in the 'less than 5000' income group spends almost $1500 on education... more than double any other income group except the '70k or above' group)
I also see the value in other people, but in addition I see the value in nations and rooted associations and loyalties. The value of the latter must be taken seriously. Jonathan Haidt has excellent research on how a substantial fraction of people appear to be congenitally blind to these concerns.

> the economy is a lot better now than 100 years ago when there were far fewer people

The era of strongest wage growth and increase in living standards coincided with the period between the 1924 immigration restriction act and the 1965 immigration act, resuming immigration. In that interval net migration was roughly zero. It's tough to argue the USA was badly suffering for want of more foreigners in that time.
Is it really surprising that the guy with access to all internet traffic has knowledge about internet traffic?
>>>Magento is the Drupal of the eCommerce world - relatively prominent, but almost universally reviled by developers and not all that easy to use for users. It's the worst of many worlds.

This a thousand times.

I've used both and as a developer it was incredibly painful to customize either for any specific feature or function. The first time I upgraded Magento, it completely broke the client's site. A nice Sunday afternoon was spent hacking together plugins to fix what the update broke.

Both are horrible to work with and I shudder anytime someone suggests it to me for their ecommerce platform. You'd be better just hiring a .Net developer and have them build you something from scratch.
Obama to announce overhaul to controversial NSA program
The general form of Patrick's point is that the BLS employment statistics don't always map to our common-sense understanding of terms like "engineering" or "software" jobs. So if you want to really understand what's going on, you have to dig into the definitions and how the data is gathered.

An example that received some discussion on HN last year was the employment numbers for the movie industry. Since many (most?) people who work on movies are technically independent contractors working under contract, they are not "employees" and therefore not included in some measures of film industry "employment".
There is something very wrong with the logic of this article.

The author claims that people rational people only value money because it allows them to consume.

But that graph shows income vs consumption in a given time period. But whatever is left over, will be consumed in the future, which people also value (and if they didn't, it would be irrational to save any money in the first place!)

They key error is in the phrase

>I propose that utility is a monotonic function of spending - this means that people prefer to increase the amount of goods and services they consume. A green piece of paper doesn’t make me very happy, but the burrito I trade it for does.

This is in itself true, but again, money allows you to consume in the future, if you don't spend it.

A more relevant graph would be income vs post tax/welfare income. But that is a different matter.
Presidential Policy Directive: Signals Intelligence Activities
init scripts were originally designed to be "dumb" scripts that only performed one simple task. other scripts could then be written around them reliably, without wondering what the script might be doing in the background other than loading some options and running a program.

with modern service management, a lot of extra "intelligence" has been added to how programs are executed and managed. this leads to levels of complexity and uncertainty that eventually lead administrators to hacking the hell out of the system to be able to use it reliably, usually disabling advanced features so they can control such features themselves.

on top of that, automation of service restart is a solved problem since... decades ago? it's trivial to have a service restart if it's killed. unfortunately, once such a function is added to your init system, people use it all over the place and don't consider the consequences of services restarting automatically. eventually they get bitten by an unforeseen problem and build in limits to the service restart, etc etc. system automation is a lot harder than most people think.
It's a good thing the military and NASA (or other space agencies) didn't hire solely on experience with rocketry. Sure, von Braun and the other Germans had experience, but most of the American / Soviet engineers and scientists did not.
That's a really odd choice. I'm curious how that will turn out since adoption for Cappuccino is really low.
Nice, but I'd rather not be tied to a 3rd party service like Spark Cloud. Indeed thats my problem with Nest. It would be great if it would just connect to my private VPS or something.
Thanks for the feedback! We'll improve that. :)
CodeCombat is a Y Combinator-backed startup, a code education game
Most people don't want to work because everyone enjoys a day off? Right...

I don't know very many people who would not want to work and a lot of those (including me) don't have to work, ever, but still they work 10+ hours/day, most days of the year.
I am not personally interested in Go but I care about CSP. I will defently check out some of these CSP things and maybe try to recreate them in Clojure core.async.
Pyongyang is the capital city of North Korea. Almost the entire city is for show, and for reward. For example, if you are a member of the Party, and are favored for some reason, thy may move you to Pyongyang. That is no small thing; families were starving to death in the rural areas, whereas so far as I know they had it better in Pyongyang.

But, it is a 'show' city. It is the only place where foreigners are allowed, for example. School children do not go to school to learn. They go to school and drill endlessly in song, dance, marching, playing musical instruments, and so on. Then they put on shows for visiting dignitaries, government officials, and tourists. Woe be to the child that makes a mistake. Where 'woe' could include prison camp for them and their family.

Use Google Earth, and look around the city. Then go to some no-name China city and do the same. In Pyongyang the streets are very wide, yet entirely empty. It is thought that part of the emptiness is due to the famine - millions died - but it is also because it is a facade. Entire tall apartment buildings and factories are built - and left empty. Most of the tall buildings, so far as we can tell, are empty. People are employed to mill in and out to give the appearance of business, but Google earth tells the real story - this is a ghost town. I mean truly empty. You'll see a few trucks or cars, and a few people walking around, but otherwise...entirely empty. Meanwhile all of the fake stuff is recorded and transmitted in the weekly propaganda (news) shows. "Great Leader inspects department store and gives advice on how to improve sales". "Young Leader breaks ground on glorious new apartment building project". And so on. They spend millions on this while the people starve. Cannibalism was fairly reliably reported during the famine. A rat was a real treat, if you caught one, but you would be sent to prison camp if caught doing so.

It is an astonishingly bad place run by psychopaths mad on power.
From Paul Graham's "How to Disagree"[0]:

DH2. Responding to Tone.

The next level up we start to see responses to the writing, rather than the writer. The lowest form of these is to disagree with the author's tone. E.g.

I can't believe the author dismisses intelligent design in such a cavalier fashion.

Though better than attacking the author, this is still a weak form of disagreement. It matters much more whether the author is wrong or right than what his tone is. Especially since tone is so hard to judge. Someone who has a chip on their shoulder about some topic might be offended by a tone that to other readers seemed neutral.

So if the worst thing you can say about something is to criticize its tone, you're not saying much. Is the author flippant, but correct? Better that than grave and wrong. And if the author is incorrect somewhere, say where.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Well, I find it to be no worse than the "why aren't we in utopia" whine ;-)
How many people do you know who have really changed their online behaviour as a response to those revelations?

I'm really not even keeping tabs on that. What I do know is that I'm constantly hearing Snowden discussions in places I wouldn't ordinarily expect to, particularly in mainstream news and business coverage. More than the stories themselves, there's the incidental commentary, that that's definitely slanting toward the "ewww ... creepy" direction rather than "oh! That's so cool!" Look at the response to the Nest acquisition by Google -- a lot of that was negative, based on privacy.

Sharing fatigue (and feed fatigue) is another matter. I never really did the former -- what I post is stuff of intellectual interest (or occasionally things that tickle my funny bone). I've largely rejected social feeds as significant, and have been turning increasingly to RSS, having found some really useful tools: newsbeuter, rsstail, and multitail, all console/terminal utilities, along with Slick RSS (a Chrome extension):

http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1udv6i/further_...

The unbundling strategy sounds interesting. It's also somewhat the opposite direction Google's been going.
> Some inmates even had a term for using their radio to create a bubble of personal space: “I headphone myself,” one said.

I work in a large open plan office and do this exact same thing most of the day..
Two things I love about this: ops guys getting involved in the debate, and the fact that Spotify has somebody who's job is to be open-source ombudsman.
"STEM" is a conflation of several fields. STEM on the whole is doing well. EE, one small subfield of it, is doing badly.
Why do you have 8 thermostats? Is your house very very large? If true then is the personal cost to you of 8 Nest's really prohibitive?
Hover.css Tutorial and Introduction
Or that the NSA wanted to listen in, and this was just an excuse given so that a secure room would not be used. In fact, the whole thing could have just been an elaborate way to glean what's in the Snowden documents.
This misses the more simple explanation of Monads:

They're functions provided by the language core,
that cannot be implemented in the language itself,
because the language rules forbid it.

This should be the first thing any of these introductions explain. Afterwards they can spend however long they like explaining all the rules for which Monads are solutions and how they get around them, safe in the knowledge that the reader will at least know why monads exist and why people are going to all these efforts.
Since the lack of transparency is part of the harm, no, we can't quantify it. It's theoretical until it isn't.
Demo of SkynetIM and Splunk Analyzing #IoT #BigData
I think, technically, it makes not getting laid easier.
Interesting; Mississippi sells the Quran, but not the Bible.
Why Do Chip Buyers Turn To The Grey Market?
Worked well technically on i7/win7/laptop(32GB)/firefox. I didn't like the effect though: jittery, repetitive, distracting. A tripod would have gone a LONG way here as well as only using in focus images. as only using It was like channel surfing. I said, "ooh ahh" to myself, but didn't hold the channel there for long even though I love the concept.
I think the author made a mistake. The first case (but bottom left square of the table) is this scenario (Keep Torturing, No Hidden Volume):

If you don't have a hidden volume and the government decides to keep torturing you,
you're screwed. You have no way of stopping the torture even if you wanted to, and you
probably get killed. So your reward is -100. The government's reward is 10 because
although they may have wasted some time torturing you, they have your plans, can prove
your guilt, and arrest your accomplices.

I don't understand why the government's reward is 10. How do "they have your plans" if there is no hidden volume? Are the plans in the "outer" partition in this scenario?
I'm on ADSL with a low-end Core i5, 4GB RAM and integrated graphics, and didn't notice any slowdown at all.