skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>* He's treading on thin ice here. It's one thing to whistleblow the NSA illegally/unconstitutionally spying on Americans in America, but he risks losing popular support when he goes on to expose the NSA spying on foreigners overseas. I think a majority of US citizens recognize that's the NSA's job*

If they recognize its doing industrial espionage and accept it, that's disgusting. Until now it was only "we just do it for the bad guys", not "to fuck France and Sweden businesses over".

>and are aware the same is being done to the US (esp by China), and hence are more ambivalent, if not supportive, of that role, even if it annoys our allies.

The "we're just as much a victim" oft repeated line is BS.

For one, it's not only China. It's EU and other "allies" they're taking advantage of. Second, China mostly BUILDS stuff for US companies. Doesn't compete directly with them in most tech areas (Lenovo was bought from IBM, wasn't created based on stolen IP).

And no, France or Germany or even Russia don't have 1/10 the spying resources to spy on the US, nor the diplomatic and economic might to take advantage of such spying even if they could do it. Much less smaller countries. Anyone who thinks Italy or Portugal or Hungary etc have the same kind of access to industrial espionage on the US (or would do it, if they could, despite the 100 pound gorilla being ready to pound on them if they were caught) is delluded.

Heck, there are European countries that in past decades had government policy being dictated by the US -- or even had dictatorships established.
What If Your Autonomous Car Keeps Routing You Past Krispy Kreme?
I understand that there are arguments against industrial espionage. I am wondering what would make anyone believe that the majority of US citizens oppose industrial espionage. Polling on foreign policy issues of much more significance --- for instance, military incursions --- does not lead me to think that most people in the US have your "rationalist" take on this subject.
I read the hypothesis as relating the appearance of the cookie. That is the proportionate ratio of visible chocolate to dough on the surface of the cookie as it relates to the maximizing the visual appeal of the cookie on product packaging.

So we are talking about "perceived" cookie quality based on visible surface area of chocolate.

Now in this case, what I think is happening here is that we are observing a simple case of the golden ratio. Humans, consistently and subconsciously see distributions of ~38% to be harmonious (sometimes crudely approximated as the rule of thirds).

Therefore it stands to reason that this "golden mean" ratio of visible chocolate creates the most visibly appealing image.

With the cooperation of a chocolate chip packaging manufacturer or online retailer we could test this. Simply conduct some extensive A/B testing of chip packaging that varies only by ratio of visible chocolate. And see if the golden mean comes out best.

However, I suspect this testing has already been done.

As for the best tasting ratios of all ingredients (including chocolate) in a chocolate chip cookie, fortunately, significant research in this area has recently been published. You may have seen this link from the food lab: http://sweets.seriouseats.com/2013/12/the-food-lab-the-best-...
Show HN: Thrice Rejected by Apple for Enabling Porn, Vanish is not a porn app
It's a simple way to share pictures and see who's looking back.

How can you make your pictures look better? Put a blur on it (think Portlandia)! And when your friends want to see what's behind the blur, you'll instantly be notified. Not creepy at all.

Let's call it something nice, like digital eye-contact.

We built Vanish at Xylo Media as a fun exercise in developing an HTML5 mobile framework. And, more importantly, because the world badly needs another photo-sharing app.

We're excited to see what the internets do with this. Once again, don't use it for porn or to #FreeTheNipple, we have like a ton of moderators. All the moderators.

Download it now at www.vanish.fm or directly from iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vanish-fm/id793488785

Feedback appreciated, trolling expected.
We had the Internet when this report on the matter was released:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...
But would they have the same viewpoint of Industrial Espionage committed against the USA by a foreign government?

The parent mentions it generally (it seems to me) and that it is not something that a government should be part of. The stealing of secrets by one company or another is vastly different than a concerted effort by a government (USA/France/China) to do such things.
I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, and help build parts of Wikipedia :) I do definitely use it every day, almost...
How #euromaidan spread around the world. Five days on Twitter
Also, your hypothetical program is not static. It can communicate with thousands of other humans in real time. To half the user base it is Samantha, to the other half, it is Sam. If someone asks Samantha a personal question it doesn't know how to answer, it may try to pose a similar question to the other users as Sam. The larger the user base, the faster and more effective this can become.

It won't be as fast as a real human, but with some clever stalling techniques, it might be able to pull it of realistically.

In reality, if someone pulled a program like this off, it wouldn't just be Sam and Samantha. It would be thousands of different personalities, trying to build a realistic social network between its own personalities and between its human users. It would be like a mirror held up to society itself.
New guy to MVP: your 3-step strategy to become a key player on any new team
I like that very much. It accurately describes my use case for bropages. And - getting back to some cultural neutrality - you can explain its meaning just fine without referring to the recent usage context in "the" Internet.
I'm not sure what makes the OP think that you can run a conclusive experiment with a $20 ad budget… you're not going to get any conclusive numbers out of that. With click-through-rate and install-rate both typically in the low single digits, you're likely to get, if you're lucky, a handful of install for a thousand impression. In order to have a sample size big enough to make conclusive statements like this, you'd need at least 500 installs - ie. an ad budget of $1,000 for each network.

Disclaimer: I work at Chartboost, now the largest mobile gaming ad network.
France is actively and aggressively involved in industrial espionage against US companies. Be careful any time you try to draw a moral line between EU countries and the US. It's not popular to acknowledge it, but we're far, far more alike than different.
Theneeds.com here.

I can't say I use it daily, but surely more than 1/week. My interests are tech and quite specific, and HN is better from that point of view, but for general news I use Theneeds. I'm also a person that doesn't post/like/share too much (neither on HN, Theneeds, Twitter, Facebook...).

My co-founders however use it daily. It's their primary source of news & things to share. Sometimes, we also use it to stream the "hot" music at home ;) Moreover, we recently added to the team a couple of "enthusiastic"... pretty cool (and satisfactory) imho!
I'm not from the us, but i do have these powers form my sister and my parents (and they do for me). We can for each other decide what medical procedures should and shouldn't be done. In a extreme case that hopefully does not happen soon we may even decide life sustaining measures to be stopped. Where I'm from one can simply give such powers to another person.
It doesn't seem to be worth arguing with you so I'll just shut up now.
This is a good way to show everyone that you have a limited amount of time and resources and that a company can't deliver everything in a reasonable amount of time. We do something similar with our product management process but instead of customers buying features we have internal stakeholders purchase them.

We'll take some percentage of a release and set feature "prices" based on a swag of effort. Then we allocate a percentage of release time as "dollars" to the stakeholders. We just keep track of it manually since it's all internal but we've found the process works nicely for feature prioritization.
> I'm pretty sure a Retina display could run with the current Macbook air CPU given that they share the same integrated GPU

They don't share the same integrated GPU; the MBA is a HD5000; the 13" Retina is a HD5100, the 15" Retina is a HD5200.

The major practical difference between the HD5000 and HD5100 is clock speed; while they have a similar theoretical cap, at full speed the HD5000 uses 22W (more than the TDP of the chip it lives in!), so in practice generally operates at far lower speeds.

They could probably get away with a HD5000 powered Retina thing, but screen power consumption would still be a factor. IGZO should deal with this sooner or later, though.
Yep! I built http://smitecamp.com/ and I use it every day to discuss different Gods, approaches etc.

Once I finish my new counterpick feature (user based) I'll use it even more to see what the Hivemind thinks about God counterpicks.
> SQL

I'm working on an arel-esque fluent SQL generator now: https://github.com/lann/squirrel

I'll release it once I'm a little more confident in the interface. Currently you can do things like this:

rows, err :=
Select("col").
From("tab").
Where("x = ?", 1).
RunWith(db).Query()
This looks like an awesome library. I like how he does this:

type Person struct {
FirstName string `db:"first_name"`
LastName string `db:"last_name"`
Email string
}

to map columns to structs.
Security != let's fuck everybody the world over like a big bully, and compete unfairly, stealing their resources and secrets, while spouting BS about "free trade" and "open markets".

Of course if you keep everybody down, or even if you kill everybody else, then you are "secure".
Perhaps they actually did lose some manufacturing process secrets, how are we in a position to tell?
Better idea: output the output of ohai and then handle the display in JS.
The trick is getting hospitals to not ignore PoA:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/12/roger-gorley-arrest...
All freedoms are inherently subjective: freedom from slavery is a restriction on owning other people. This is why this discussion is so hard: the people who have to choose a license are the people who have to give up freedoms for others to be more free. One argument is that the second groups of people (end users) happens to superset the first group of people (developers) and is fundamentally larger. To maximize freedom thereby would have the developers "take the hit" (although again: developers are users, too). This is, in fact, precisely what I spent so much time a few months ago discussing: I encourage you to read what I wrote then, such that I need not repeat myself endlessly here. To be very clear: I directly address your entire concern about relative and subjective freedom in that precious discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209724

As for your comments on the short vs. long term issues related to "#_advances_open_sourced", I think that is an interesting discussion to have at another time, as it is off-topic today: Stallman, as I have argued, does not care about attempts to maximize "value" in the way you have defined it, whether in the short or long term; instead, he has defined "value" as "freedom", and I imagine (or at least hope) that a future where mankind is living without all the fancy toys we have, but where the things we have we actually own ourselves, with nothing between us and modifying those things in the way we please would be a "win". All attempts to maximize the thing you care about are, to him, probably nothing more than a distraction. Again: that's not to discredit the things you care about; it is only to say that the goals themselves are mere opinions that people have, and that to understand others requires thinking in their terms.
I'd agree, all except the last line.

The reason I find it distasteful isn't because I myself am offended, but because I know it's going to needlessly offend others. Whether I agree with them being offended or not, I know that it could be easily avoided with little to no cost. That's what makes it distasteful.
I don't need it directly, but the people who use it, use it to do things that I need/want.
Well, back in 50's Americans were not outraged for seggregation either. Yet today they are.

Public opinion changes, different eras have different limits, etc.
I think he was humorously noting that I erroneously said IOPS per second, akin to saying ATM machine, CD disc, etc.
Hard for me to get project to the usable state before I'd change to another so shamefully this poll didn't apply.
Actually, they did port it to IBM PC and TRS-80 Color Computer.
They sponsor politicians to Washington.
Thanks; my own reading comprehension failed me. I hate when I fall victim to Muphry's Law. [1]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law
And Germany is highly critical of France's industrial espionage. And Korea is highly critical of Israel's industrial espionage. Wherever you look, if you're seeing a highly advanced economy, there's a web of industrial espionage connecting it to every other economy.
a big white page is not really the best introduction ever (or am i missing the point/humor?)
Most people I have met see copyright infringement as a victimless crime only when it is being done by "little people" and only when there is no profit involved. When a large company is profiting from copyright or patent infringement, people generally think that company is in the wrong and the the artist/author/inventor should be paid.
On the topic of userland freedom, I think the GPL may be the biggest missed opportunity in userland freedom that we've ever seen.

If the GPL had a "user viewable, editable, compilable" bomb, but not a "free as in beer" clause; then it is plausible that we would see a drastic increase in user-editable paid commercial software.

Userland freedom and anti-capitalism don't have to be at odds.
First, what you forget is that roads are not the only means of transportation. Such a road company would not be able to raise prices indefinitely because customers would either switch to air travel, river transport, or, I don't know, hyperloops, or stop using the road completely. Now what it could do is find the equilibrium price at which customers are still willing to use the road and not switch to a competitor. That might seem like a problem, because the prices would still be higher, but then you have to think back to the time when this project was conceived.

Imagine you are an investor who wants to build that important tunnel. If there is a demand, obviously you wouldn't be the only one. So each of you, investors, would come up with offers for the potential customers for this road. The one who offers the best conditions - for instance, fixed low price for the next 10 years - gets the most customers and proceeds on building that tunnel. If that investor later decides to cheat and raises prices then he would have to deal with law firms of his customers, which would potentially be costly.

So here you see how this potentially difficult situation can be resolved without the need for any government whatsoever.
Americans weren't outraged in part because the most highly publicized disclosures from that spying illuminated misdeeds by Airbus.
The implicit assumption in your question here is that the government is entitled to do whatever it wants except when people can organise to the extent that a formal censure, through voting or other means, can be devised. A state subject to popular veto rather than a popular mandate. This view gives far too much leeway for governmental over-reach, and goes against the spirit of documents like the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. The State is given a mandate by, for and of the People, and it should execute that mandate without overreach. A system where the government can do whatever they want subject only to rare popular veto (recall votes, impeachments, revolutions) is unstable and undemocratic, given the level of voter disenfranchisement we see today.

Before you ask for proof of a popular veto against the NSA's activities, you should first support your assumption that these activities support the popular mandate in any way. I would submit that such a proof is impossible, given the total secrecy of these programs and lack of accountability. If people don't know what the government is doing in their name, even in broad terms (that don't harm operational secrecy), how can the government's actions be justified or permissible?
Ask HN: Best big companies to work for?
In the event that someone wants to take a break from the typical startup life (e.g. after a burnout or because of shifted priorities in life) and work for a big company, what would HN recommend for a senior software engineer (late 20s) with a very solid background developed while working like a horse in startups for the past few years (and MS in computer engineering)?
These points (in random order) might be important:

- Very very competitive salary and "deterministic" benefits (401k with good employer contributions, RSUs, cash bonuses, etc.)

- Challenging working environment where neat technical problems are still solved despite not being a startup, possibly with modern tools and technologies (e.g. not a "we use CVS as our SCM" shop)

- no more than 40-45 hours a week expected as per company culture

- Stable job (no serious failure possibility in the next 3 years or so for the company)

- Possibility of working from home (even just once or twice a week to break the routine)

- Main headquarters in SF bay area (where I'm located)

I'm of course expecting Google, Facebook, etc. But I'm curious to see what else might be there.
No I don't think they would be ok with the inverse but that is why this is espionage... It's dirty business. Also I wouldn't assume people have an internally consistent view of these things. It will likely boil down to "it's ok because it might benefit me, but screw the others for trying the same thing"
It was working, until I submitted it here. Maybe too many people Trying Julia.
To clarify, I'm not defending it, just calling it like I see it. Outside the HN/SV bubble, most people are ambivalent about the US stealing foreign industrial secrets. It's simply very low on their priority list of things to care about. Hell, many Americans are fine with the "I've got nothing to hide so nothing to fear" and still don't even truly care about being spied on themselves by the NSA, much less foreign multinationals.

So Snowden attacking the NSA over this issue is, at best, likely to be met with much less popular support, and at worst, could backfire on him.
Except that the NSA's involvement in industrial espionage was revealed in the 90s and 00s. We are not talking about the prevailing attitude three generations ago, we are talking about the current generation.
If more people were "rational" then they wouldn't being insane about drug usage, like most of America is. Politicians would respond in kind. Even within the silly two party system, things would improve.

But to get there, there'd need to be less than what, 30%? of voters being extremely anti-drug?
I built ViEmu and I use it very often, not every day right now, but I come back to using it every day when I'm working on something using VS/Xcode/SQLServer/Word.
I've never been asked a single question on if or where I went to high school in my entire career.
It's not "somehow electing the right person", it's a full change in society. If most people didn't care about drug usage, then this wouldn't be happening.
In many cases this isn't possible. For example if you're making software to manage a hair salon then you're not going to be using it.

Outside of software for developers and IT I suspect the majority of companies don't use their own software, which is counter to what most people here believe.
I work on a TV platform. I watch TV every day. If I weren't working on it, I am not sure I'd pay and use it.
You could use http://www.sumologic.com/

Have it send a report when an IP is seen > x times in your logs.
The very first link is where "The angel of the LORD" said to go back into slavery. So you blame that on men.

Hmm, what does Genesis 16:10 say, the verse that immediately follows that command? Do you read all your books in such a way that each sentence cannot be linked to the previous or following sentences?

Attempting to restrain or set boundaries (i.e. laws and rules) around man's sinful habits does not mean God was advocating for sin -- in the same way that a parent attempting to set some ground rules around their child's drug habit does not mean they are advocating the drug habit.
I am building https://reesd.com. When it is ready I will use it since I initially started it for myself. It will be used for backup and file store, as-is but also for the other services I plan to offer (Docker image hosting, scp-triggered rebuild, http://packages.assertive.io, and more).
In Defense of Yahoo Tech
Here's one possible example. At the top of this thread, there's a statement about how Go templates don't support inheritance-- embedding one template within another as Django and Jinja do[1]. I personally consider this a requirement, because the old school way of having headers and footers in separate templates is radically inferior.

Go doesn't offer a clear simple way to do this in their builtin template library. But it turns out, it really is possible to do it, as described in this thread on Stack Exchange[2]. I bookmarked that so that I can boil it down into some simple-to-reuse code if I ever bite the bullet and start using Go for the presentation layer on a major website. What they're doing there is a cool technique, but it's not simple to use out of the box.

1. https://sites.google.com/site/usfcomputerscience/django-temp...

2. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11467731/is-it-possible-t...
OEM/ODM contract manufacturers do most of the heavy lifting of figuring how to make things cheap. Most of the time they cut corners creatively and save everyone money and it works out, but sometimes the low-volume shops go too far and break functionality.
The hard part is defining what "just enough to meet the 90 day goal" is.

The rovers were things that had to be built to survive a flight to Mars, go though the atmosphere, land by bouncing on some airbags, and then go drive around in a very hostile environment - which needs a pretty sturdy robot.

Over-engineering the robot itself is also a form of insurance. Launching a rocket is hard. Landing a lander with airbags is tricky and very unpredictable. The time from finishing to build a robot and it landing on Mars is a really long time. Funding to pay for all this comes once or twice in a generation. Given all those possible points of failure in things that have nothing to do with the rover itself, why not engineer the rovers to be as resilient as possible to try and make up for some of the possible risks that could happen elsewhere in the project?

Put another way - if you're building a race car and the body costs $1000, why not spend $20 (as opposed to $5) on the engine to make sure that of all the things that could break, the engine won't be it.
Why does anthropomorphizing our machines always seem to lead to sadness?
That does not mean it is right -- at the very least it is extremely hypocritical for the US, which is aggressively pursuing stronger copyright/patent/trade secrets in various trade agreements.
firstcutpro.com - video annotation and project management for video teams

we aren't in the industry so don't use it ourselves at all but we think this is better as we can actually try to move the industry forward with best practices from other industries versus sticking to old ways and status quos that might not be the best way, it was just the way people have always done it.

of course we make quite a bit of features/functionality directly from user feedback.