skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had to go back to the article to find the exact passage you were referring to. "Puzzled, Gomez resorted to a resource she taps only rarely: the help of friends at federal agencies, friends for whom she has done favors and who in return are willing to let her check her information against government databases. 'Their databases turn up what we call ‘trace details’ that you can’t get with the databases available to ordinary citizens,' Gomez says: phone numbers, addresses, company and individual names that have in some way been associated."

Depending on the status of the underlying civil recovery action that prompted someone to hire the bounty hunter, there may have been legal grounds for her to have that "access," especially if what she was doing was saying, "Here are some dots that I think connect in this way, can you tell me, yes or no, if this makes any sense?" But, yes, depending on the exact rules involved of what agency, and what the bounty hunter is pursuing in what case, and what was asked and answered, this could be illegal. Or not. It's not entirely sure if anything illegal was done in what was reported in that paragraph. The term "illegal search" has a much more specific meaning in legal language.
There are ebay sellers who do exactly this.
I think this analysis is flawed. Let's dive into one statistic.

8 states had no Hispanic students take the exam: Alaska, Idaho, Kansas,
Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming.

Sounds pretty damning. These states are completely ignoring an entire demographic!

First, Wyoming should not be on the list. They had zero students take AP CS.

For the other states, here are the total number of students that took AP CS in
2013.

Alaska 21
Idaho 47
Kansas 47
Mississippi 1
Montana 11
Nebraska 46
North Dakota 2

It's obvious that North Dakota and Mississippi should also have been left off
the list as they had less than five students take the exam. We're now down to
five states. Let's look at the Hispanic population size in these states[1]

Alaska 6.1%
Idaho 11.0%
Kansas 11.0%
Montana 3.1%
Nebraska 9.7%

With these percentages, we can calculate the expected number of Hispanic
students for each state.

Alaska 1.28
Idaho 5.17
Kansas 5.17
Montana 0.341
Nebraska 4.462

So we can take take Montana and Alaska off the list. I could go further and get
the actual demographic breakdown per city for each included high school, but I
think the point is clear: AP CS enrollment for many states is too small to draw
accurate conclusions.

The real question we should be asking: Why are so few schools offering AP CS?

[1] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/index.html
If you're lucky enough to have an Fn key on your keyboard. Is there an equivalent for those of us who are bereft?
Ask HN: What do you use for modeling
I've noticed myself over the last year adopting technologies that are easily version-ed and transported to other mediums. For example I've fallen in love with markdown+pandoc for doing almost all of my written work.

I run into issues frequently where I need to do some sort of modeling (read UML-ish) and I keep falling back on to Sparx Enterprise Architect (based on familiarity). I've not found any alternative that is open and transportable.

The killer feature in Sparx EA for me is inter-linking artifacts and re-use of entities (like using the same actors across several artifacts for use cases).

I know there are a slew of tools to do these things. I'm curious to know what people use and their rationale.
If we combine the 1% Rule with Sturgeon's Law that 90% of everything is crap, then surely it follows that of all the people on the internet only 0.1% are actually producing stuff worth looking at, and maybe only 0.08% are producing stuff worth looking at that isn't about kittens, assuming that this internet kitty-o-meter that I just googled is accurate - http://stevetilley.tumblr.com/post/9504481725/what-percentag...
Short writing exercise closes gender gap in university-level physics [2010]
Which country, and why?
I'm looking for an extra pair of hands for a month or two on some development projects - Ruby and Nodejs. Feel free to email me at nolite@rcpt.at
Modern day coffee shops are not really the same though.

Apparently there was a parallel to the whole "people sitting on their laptops" issue way back in those days. Originally, there were long benches and people would be forced to sit together and drink and chat, but there was a pressure for the more snobby patrons to sit alone or apart and later individual tables were added.
They have always been hard to come by because not everyone wants to spend 10 years banging their heads against the wall of memory management errors unnecessarily.
Facebook allows people to follow others (one-way association) without being a confirmed friend (two-way).
I haven't done anything, my version works under Mac OS X.
I hear you, I have a bunch of old Transactor magazines from the '80s (hardcore Commodore programming magazine) that I'd like to give to a deserving home.

On the non-programming front, I have a ton of old issues of Climbing magazine from the '90s that are completely awesome but I have no one to give them to.

I guess I could place a "giving away for free" ad on Craigslist but it would be cool to have a more dedicated site for this kind of thing.
Ask HN: What do you wear to job interviews?
In a perfect world, it shouldn't matter what you were to an on-site job interview - but appearances are part of the impression you leave with a company as they try to decide whether you're a good fit for their culture. I'm curious how others approach the issue of what to wear to a job interview. If the company culture is casual, do you dress to match their code, or do you take a more-formal approach to this aspect of the screening process? Is it something you even worry about? Or do you let your technical capabilities and past accomplishments stand for themselves?
Note we're in the ballpark of eBay fees. FOBO charges 15%, a 2% premium over eBay's total fees, which they aren't very upfront about (10% for eBay, 3% for PayPal).
4 cases against 4 people involved in one actual attempt by a cab driver to send $8500 home to Somalia. So allowing a figure as high as 1.8 percent is really, really generous.
You can do those things that are easy to do statically at development/testing time and those thing that are easy to do dynamically in runtime.

Some things like overloading based on return values don't work dynamically, but you could either choose to not have them or resolve them in development time. I would like to see languages where dynamic vs. static is continuum and programmers can determine how much they need want case by case basis.
Her height has to do with people's assumption that bounty hunting is primarily a physical, violent activity: going and wrestling a dude into submission and then slapping handcuffs on him and dragging him to the police station.

The reason they mention that a very small woman is very successful at it is to point out that success is not predicated in being able to win fights with fugitives.
At some point one might argue that it becomes worth asking if it's better to have a monarch who fears revolution or an elected body that fears not being re-elected.

We have plenty of 'monarchs who fear revolution' today. A monarch is simply a hereditary autocrat, and there are tons of autocrats in the from of dictators today. It's no guarantee of even a mildly reasonable quality of life - indeed, scanning through a list of countries sorted by a quality of life index didn't show any autocratic countries in the top 50: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-of-life_Index

Edit: there is one - Qatar in spot #41

The way I see it, the basic problem of government is "how do we get honest and competent people into power?"

Unfortunately, most of the people who desire power aren't the kind of honest people we'd like in power. The ideal system would be less about how to get the honest in power, and more about how to control for corruption.
I remember this issue vividly. I was 14. :)

I couldn't grok what smalltalk was. :(
Wouldn't vandalism be included in the 9%?
Also not clear what kind of searches those are. It sounds like it could have been public records of ongoing court cases.

I suppose the question to ask is who reviews these types of talks (no doubt many agents talk to PIs etc.) to make sure nothing illegal is happening.
The obsession with race in the US is really fascinating as foreigner.

Are there a lot of other countries where this kind of data is compiled? I feel like I've never seen anything like it in France, but maybe I wasn't paying attention.
actually slate.app links to a config: https://github.com/jigish/dotfiles/blob/master/slate

edit: actually, spectacle doesn't do what slate does. doesn't spectacle basically give you some specific ways to tile no way to go beyond that?
Versions is easily my favourite Subversion client for Mac.
http://versionsapp.com
"This capability was put in place after 9/11 for a good reason," said a senior administration official who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive deliberations.

"We can't tell you exactly what those reasons are, but trust us, they're really important."
Payment gateway is down on your busiest day? Just keep processing...
Data Science in Python Tutorial
Curious stuff.

Looking at the sheets [0] for Maryland, where I live...

2007 Black - Pass Rate: 11.40%, Enrollment: 114, Percentage of Enrollment: 14.10%

2008 Black - Pass Rate: 36.48%, Enrollment: 74, Percentage of Enrollment: 8.26%

2009 Black - Pass Rate: 21.66%, Enrollment: 120, Percentage of Enrollment: 11.56%

2010 Black - Pass Rate: 17.89%, Enrollment: 190, Percentage of Enrollment: 14.05%

Things have evened out a bit since, but I'd love to know what if anything was going on there? Changing teachers? Smaller class sizes?

0: http://home.cc.gatech.edu/ice-gt/uploads/556/DetailedStateIn...
The need for Responsible Disclosure policies - 16 yo hacker Joshua Rogers
OSS alternative to Divvy: ShiftIt https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt
Coincidence or synchronicity? I posted a link to the very same paper one day ago without knowing about the other submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7043915
Why does everyone remember that paper now :-)?.
If it has no impact then:

1) Why are we wasting money collecting and storing it?

2) Why are we wasting time looking at it?

This does not muddy the waters to anyone with critical-thinking skills. Why does this invasion of my privacy need to happen if it is unable to achieve its own stated goals?

Edit:

My point was that people should be asking these questions, and these aren't hard questions to ask. Even just asking "if this has no impact then why are we wasting money" should be an easy question to ask for fiscal conservatives. I really don't see many people going the route of thinking, "this is ineffective, therefore we should just keep doing it because the metadata doesn't matter."

I don't understand why people see me asking these questions and automatically assume that I'm attacking them and defending the NSA or something.
ByteCoat, positioning done easily in iOS
UIView's category for easy positioning of one or multiple views.
I would guess this is good news.

What I'd be interested in is how local this phenomenon is though. The major Canadian cities essentially seem to be isolated ecosystems, so what might apply in Vancouver would be next to meaningless in Ottawa.
The main issue with that, is that although there are lots of GC enabled languages to choose from, not all of them have mainstream AOT compilers available.

Shipping a VM with the product is not always possible/desireable.
Writer Pro @ http://writer.pro for distraction free writing and note taking.
Where are the instructions on how to implement this?
Where does it say what type of solution you must have to use this?
I've looked for 5 minutes and I gave up.
You would think that this page would at least provide a link to the documentation for developers.
Implementing the Hacker News ranking algorithm in SQL
No worries. Just throw them both in your .bashrc and you should be good to go.
I abide by the age-old advice of dressing just a notch more formal than the expected attire of your interviewers, e.g. for Google typical interviewer would be in jeans and t-shirt, so khakis and a polo.
Netflix: ISP performance up in December for all countries except US and Mexico
Branch looks like a good app. In some way it is kind of similar to Pinterest. Would be interesting to find out why they didn't gain enough traction? Could it be because they weren't targeting a niche audience compared to Pinterest targeting niche users at the initial stages.
Documentation reader I can't live without: http://kapeli.com/dash
File sharing app: https://droplr.com
I assume that is what hired muscle is for. She's the brains of the outfit. Did anyone else think 10 grand was kind of low for this particular job? They did mention she would get the reward money, but didn't say how much that was.
Didn't know C-t worked in Cocoa's. Thanks for pointing it out, always useful!
Also http://snapnote.io
where's the "enemies of my enemy" social network? that would actually be useful.
Glad you liked it, Chuck.

Some of my closest friends in college specialized in operating systems, and we (mostly them) worked on http://xomb.org , an exokernel in D. I'd hope that today we'd choose Rust instead.

Julia Evans has been writing _fantastic_ series about a kernel in Rust: http://jvns.ca/blog/categories/kernel/

As she says "This is typical of a lot of Rust code I’m writing – I need to write a lot of unsafe code."

I'll have to give this 'minimum set' idea some thought. I think that safety will be more useful for things like kernel modules than in the kernel itself, though I'm not sure why I think that, exactly. Hmmmmm...
Right! Weirdly enough, C-k kills a word in (at least) the Editorial writing app in iOS7 (only writing app where I have tried since upgrading my iPad)
For me, byte stopped being as interesting the late 80s, after Robert Tinney stopped doing their cover artwork and their stories almost always lead with "HOT NEW 386 FROM COMPAQ". There were a few gems after that, but those Robert Tinney covers were wonderful (and I've since bought a few prints from him.)
nice app list
When I start coding, GC enabled languages only existed in very expensive workstations in research places like Xerox PARC.

Somehow I have this memory, maybe false, that on those days the developers had better skills than most of the younger developers I met on the last five years.
The guy had a case against him. I thought it was common for law enforcement and bounty hunters to cooperate. It wouldn't be wise to assume otherwise.
This seems to show the system working. Everpix was a reasonable idea with good execution, but nobody could see how it would be eventually profitable. That it didn't get funded is evidence that we're not in a bubble.
Reddit user manages to retrieve stolen laptop using remote access
Many older BASIC implementations are interpreted, and it looks like Tiny BASIC was as well:

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

It's strange to look back and see just how popular virtual machines were at the time. BASIC typically used one, as did many other languages. Smalltalk is famous for using a virtual machine, for example. Microsoft's original Mac apps all ran bytecode in a virtual machine.

It seems crazy, because these computers were already tremendously slow, relatively speaking, and adding a virtual machine makes it much worse. However, it was ultimately a useful tradeoff because these machines were even more limited on RAM than they were on CPU power, and using a virtual machine with bytecode that allowed for an efficient instruction encoding could save a lot of space. It doesn't matter how fast your code runs if it doesn't fit in RAM, after all.
OK here's one. I press command-option esc to Force Quit an app. But how do I then close the Force Quit window (which stays on top of all other windows) without the mouse? Thanks to anyone who's figured this out.
Can Windows 9 save Windows?
Looks like they hire on contract basis first so maybe you should try and apply to see if it is a good fit: http://www.poststat.us/automattic-trial-data-employee-retent...
The reason why that specific group was chosen is that they represent non-voting citizens. There are 73 million Americans too young to vote. They are subject to laws and pay sales taxes, but have no representation in the government. The proposal isn't a "reward" for being a good breeder, but an attempt at rectifying that almost a quarter of the population has no electoral power. I believe that the age range was mostly chosen to ensure that these are parents of children who are not of voting age, but I think it would be easier to allocate one vote to each social security number and let parents proxy vote for their children. Honestly, I'm not sure that this is a good idea, I'm not sure that it's any worse than just denying representation to a segment of the population.

My other concern is your policy on referendum for war. I'm opposed to war and would vote no on pretty much any referendum. However, I also have cerebral palsy and am completely ineligible to serve. Do I not deserve a say in our foreign policy? Also, the US has gone through its past few wars without instituting a draft. My more bellicose relations would be able to vote for this war without any serious fear of being drafted.
Sure thing. And for anyone else interested, email nick @ docker . com or say hi to keeb on Freenode
Why would you consider me to be a bad person for crossing a picket line in general?
YC Startups Now Have A Combined Valuation Of $14.4B
I wish I had read the wisdom of this comment a couple months ago. I was having problems scaling on EC2 for my business, and ended up hacking together this setup - host static website on S3, and link to SSL-only domain for secure stuff. It's incredibly frustrating when Amazon does nothing to disseminate information about how to more effectively use their cloud infrastructure.
He actually says " I'm not advocating that you shouldn't put in tests. [ The reason we can get away with this ] is that we have a great community. "

I take this to mean that he feels that StackOverflow doesn't need tests. Not that tests are useless.
thank you; you just made my year!
Scat-Scroller: Spice up your web browsing experience with a taste of lively jazz
With the increasing housing price here (bay area), it's probably time for me to go back in Canada (I was originally from Canada), Anyone else had done it?
I would definitely not assume that the answer for a human society is the same as the answer for a collaborative software project.
What other community are you talking about? The only one that comes to mind is the My Little Pony one.
Bounty hunting has been around forever and is a very dynamic and effective part of the law enforcement system.
$90 million in maintenance per year for healthcare.gov
It may teach more about pandering to an audience. But that is super important too, sometimes.
This sort of data is compiled in quite a few environments in the UK (race surveys go out with all sorts of things) such that entities (especially government ones) can ensure that they are conforming to 'equal opportunities' legislation.

I appreciate the sentiment behind it and think that it makes sense, but every time I see one I can't help but be amused that such legislation is directly responsible for dozens of government departments sending out questionnaires about peoples' race [1] where they previously did not. :)

[1]: These are, of course, suitably anonymised after the fact. No worries there.
Change Point - Simple Innovation
I think you should implement Hindley-Milner in the language of your choice for a small toy λ-calculus.

Did this a little while ago (as a stepping stone to building an inference system for a more complicated calculus).

https://gist.github.com/jrslepak/6158954
Who does the photos for these? They are clearly just using unrelated images and fitting in a certain number of pictures per page.

Good stories do not need to be embellished with images of apartment windows or empty parking lots.
> I need to write a lot of unsafe code.

To contrast with application-level code, pcwalton has measured that less than 1% of Servo's code is contained within `unsafe` blocks.
Taxi drivers turn violent against Uber in Paris
Moving from Wordpress to Github Pages
Simple idea for a non-profit or maybe a startup
Silicon Valley - Another Hollywood
Original title: "Zero women, African Americans, or Hispanics take AP CS Exam in some states."
This is so awesome! You've taken a 15 minute process and condensed it to 15 seconds.
Holy guacamole! #lifechanged
> Why are so few schools offering AP CS?

My high school did not have qualified teachers. We had programming classes, but they didn't even cover AP CS A.
My New Startup is Losing $35,550/month
holy guacamole! #lifechanged
Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crud.

Morbius's Law: At Internet scale Sturgeon's law is six-sigma compliant: 99.99966% of everything is crud.

Your filtering / content surfacing algorithms had best take this into consideration.
I actually liked the amount of detail in explaining the syntax. For the most part, the code samples are very readable and understandable as they are (and I haven't written any Rust).

I think explaining a lot of the syntax would have made this more of a "how to Rust" article, rather than a "why to Rust" article. I really appreciated the "why to Rust" tone of this article, and it provides a great explanation of why the language is different from C / C++ and why I should care.
On the other hand, the vast majority of the population produces something that somebody else is interested in. It's just that not everybody contributes everywhere. Specialization is useful.
Trustpilot grabs Massive $25 Million Funding Round
Well, that's always possible.

On the other hand, kicking ideas into the mix and seeing what others do with them can strengthen that muscle.

At least for some people.
This is a great writeup.

I think comparing average revenue to average cost would be better served as a stacked area graph rather than superimposing them, since your method makes it look like average costs actually shrinks to a very small amount (when its just that the gap between the two figures is shrinking.)
Saurik makes most of the points that I would have if I had expounded on my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7051899

If naught else, I will say that:

- The use of Cmd so widely and consistently makes it easy to bind one's own shortcuts to Ctrl/Shift/Alt/... (every menu in almost every application I use contains only Cmd shortcuts).

- The ability to remap shortcuts to anything in a menu being built into the system for all apps systemwide (System Preferences -> Keyboard) is amazing and underappreciated, methinks.

- The almost completely consistent use of a single windowing toolkit (Cocoa) everywhere makes a whole bunch of controls incredibly consistent in feel, which includes all textboxes supporting OS X and Emacs cursor movement keys, irrespective of the application - the mind boggles. o_O

- Similarly, the systemwide use of Cocoa means that the endless tools that allow for keyboard rebinding and window movement that we see (Slate, BetterTouchTool, ...) not only can exist but work very reliably and with few corner cases with most-every application on the system, oftentimes through the Assisted Access APIs (another thing Apple do well on all their platforms, I'm quite reliably informed).

OTOH, on Linux I use Xmonad as my DE and I will admit to missing the amazing keyboard-based window control I get with the tiling window manager (I use Slate on OS X for a poor facsimile to the same effect).
I feel like a disclosure might be necessary here, this reads quite like a pitch for a company that the author might be an advisory to.

Otherwise, he really loves craigslist and it's competitors.
Retail Merchants Targeted by Memory-Parsing Malware
Command-W
All yours for a mere US$10k.
That's an accurate read.

- Stack Exchange employee