skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No concerned citizen can allow themselves to be "terrified" by this story, if only because terror is the death of rational, effective action. We must be able to look at this situation, empathize with both sides, and determine how things could have gone better. (Empathizing with law enforcement is particularly difficult for me, but I've come to realize that it is a crucial part of the puzzle.)

It is normal for law-enforcement to chase down a false lead. Most leads are dead-ends, from my lay understanding of detective work. In retrospect, Mayfield was a dead-end, but the key question is: when should the FBI have realized this? The actions that they took would have been justified, I think, if their suspicions had turned out to be valid. (all except the 2 week incarceration - and even that would have been clearly justified if Mayfield had been charged.)

In any event, this is one of those cases which highlights a growing problem in the US legal system, which is the redefinition of "punishment" to exclude pre-trial incarceration and harassment. Law-enforcement has attained an ever growing list of exceptions and ad hoc powers that override a man's right to a fair trial before being punished. City police can "detain" you for up to 72 hours, for no reason. The FBI (apparently) can "detain" you for at least 2 weeks, again without charges. I believe that these rights to ad hoc, extra-judicial incarceration need to be rescinded, by an act of Congress, as these rights enable systematically arbitrary and abusive behavior on the part of law-enforcement at both the local and federal level. I believe they make the general population, whether they know it or not, unsafe from predatory police behavior.
Django-compressor needs help
etcd is a great example of a non trivial app using raft.

https://github.com/coreos/etcd
interesting piece
Or worse: system "got" 7 gigs, still in progress, refresh page, 7 gigs disappear.
Creator of Facebook Ads matching P2P microloans at Zidisha final week (YC W2014)
This is same in Turkey.
Economic Impact of the Human Genome Project (2011)
maybe thats where the site got their return.
It's not about banning or allowing, it's about counting the true costs and benefits of the trade, not the immediate effects. And you don't need philosopher kings to do this, just basic math and science. This particular article may not make a good case for the harm of HFT, but that doesn't mean there isn't any. And yes, there are serious researchers that are pointing out hidden costs for things like facebook, hamburgers, and french fries. Those things may have demonstrable value, but that doesn't mean the value outweighs the cost or that they are correctly priced. For example, some studies put the true price of a hamburger at around $30 based on the burden put on healthcare and the environment, which are ultimately paid by other people. With perfect information, those costs should be factored into the trade, but they aren't. So, while HFT might have some small benefit to market liquidity as claimed by other comments, I can easily believe there are hidden costs that would outweigh such small benefits. I don't have any evidence to provide in this specific case, but I would support research to investigate whether we are overcounting the benefits or undercounting the costs.
But isn't the innocent and natural bias toward sympathy with familiar subjects an ultimate cause of classism?
Loathsome pop-psych, loathsome relationship pattern ... and redeemed by turning it on its head. Well played. Had me hate-reading in the middle and happy by the end.
Does anyone have a link for a netinstall image hosted via BT? The one on the debian page is broken.

https://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/
Nobody is perfect and institutions are no exception. However, I'd have to see more than a single datapoint to indite an entire system. Those who are anti-surveillance will no doubt exhibit confirmation bias when reading this article, which is ironic.
I would be more outraged about the fact that some people brought their childrent to an autopsy :)
> There isn't a name for the political system we find ourselves in at the moment. It works like this: you free to act as you wish as long as you respect a series of red lines that are never clearly formulated. All these red lines pertain to making changes of substance in the dominant political and economic system.

I may seem fairly jaded in saying this but you have described, quite literally, every society in the world, and every society in history. Of course, in the West we like to pretend we have broken this pattern but we never did.
Vertcoin Surges, Bitcoin Dips
Steve Jobs Archive Japan TV Special
Archive Japanese TV special - includes Steve Jobs interview footage - Uploaded in Mar 2012
shotz - record yourself watching a snapchat and send the reaction
This has been true since Dec. See: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/download-copy-of-your-...
This is stupid. They are making speakers that can't withstand some cases of within-the-bounds PCM signal.

If we had a normal society anywhere on earth they would be sued to the ground there.
Here's a source for that stat from a Q3'12 AMEX earnings call transcript:

"As you know, our current ultimate redemption rate is 93%, a very high assumption for any consumer loyalty program."

[1] http://seekingalpha.com/article/931161-american-express-mana...
They were changed to __glibc_unused0 etc not _unused0 to further reduce chance of conflicts.
Excellent means that they went from a tiny sliver of evidence to someone who raised pretty much every red flag there is.

And the excellent response was ... investigate harder. They did not drag him into a jail and torture a confession out of him, Japanese style. They did not torture him and his wife for anything they could get, Russian style. They did not disappear his entire family and business partners, Columbian style.

While waiting for the next few hundred people to be blown up, they ... investigated quietly. When the whole thing fell apart, they sent in a team of trained assassins to, well, actually there were no assassins or torture chambers, just a couple weeks in Club Fed as a material wotness. You know, like all the other witnesses locked up for a few days when they are trying to sort out who is the deranged killer and who can be safely released.
You don't understand. Not everything is written in C. There's a backend system for reporting OATS that starts at 5 PM. If you need to make a non-trivial change you better not deploy it during market hours. Most of these systems are written in Java by guys who aren't at the firm anymore and didn't care when they were. You say cutting edge (which I would strenuously debate). But it's not magic -- in fact it's actually quite mundane when you get down to the nuts and bolts.
If DELL is right that would mean even if I craft a sound file with a very high amplitude, play it with another software, it should not damage the speakers.

I would have thought windows could limitate the amplitude of the sound sent to the hardware, maybe VLC is somehow bypassing this.

Seems like an odd issue though.
I'm in the industry, nobody calls it an "algobot". It sounds ridiculous and doesn't really express much.

I'm guessing someone was winding up the reporter, as from reading the article it seems obvious the person is in over their head.

Reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) story of how a bunch of teenagers made fun of a 20/20 reporter by describing a made up word "mosh pit", and then it caught on.
That kind of amplitude abuse is the equivalent of pounding very hard on the keyboard for long periods of time - it will break sooner than it would normally have, and can rightfully be considered abuse. However, voiding the warranty simply because of VLC installed is, again, the equivalent of voiding the keyboard warranty simply because you are a bodybuilder.

Ok enough metaphors.
I think the Amazon example was being used as an example of the "directional cone", not preloading.
I don't see this as a question of confirmation bias but rather a more deeper problem in investigative law enforcement, namely the need to see things as part of a narrative relating to the sort of investigation. This isn't confirmation bias as usually understood, but goes one step before, namely in filtering out the details one can tell a story about.

In the end what criminal investigators do is they find details and piece together a narrative from those. One huge problem with massive surveillance is the ability to piece together whatever narrative the investigator wants to put together based on a much larger field of information to mine.
Next logic step: playing DUBSTEP voids your speaker warranty
It's perfectly acceptable to not understand the low level details of seriously used systems. Isn't that what teams are for? You can trust the engineers developing infrastructure so that you don't have to worry about it. Sure, understanding the high level concepts can't hurt, but it isn't going to make a front-end developer any more productive.
A similar thing happened to JWZ when he worked at Netscape; he started a private, off site mailing list where employees would say whatever they wanted. The company found out about it and shut it down (http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html)
Can't agree more (focusing on microsec vs nights/weekends). It's not an excuse to say they need to train/test their algos, they have entirely separate machines for that. For any other tech company live rollouts are a fact of life. I'd suspect the reason is historical and based on a single person's practical workday, if you extend it to 24/7 then naturally you'd have to have several shifts. Same reason why they are closed on holidays, to give people a break. So I'd suspect it's to benefit the people involved and not the machines which I'm certain can be adapted.
Show HN: My weekend project – Manual Viable Product
The article claims they deduced he was an international spy. But the article is a political hatchet job. It is entirely likely that "we put a lot of effort into investigating how he could have traveled" was ninja translated to "we knew he was flying under false papers".

His awareness was not used as evidence of guilt, silly. Not even that idiotic article said that. It was used as evidence that he was a flight risk.
Distributed exchange architecture is an interesting alternative:

https://ripple.com/blog/ripples-distributed-exchange-and-the...

When there's no central location towards which orders need to race to get time stamped, the whole low latency arms race seems unnecessary.

There's also no central place to co-locate servers.

Some of the existing traditional (centralized) exchanges are making 20-30%+ of their revenues from co-location and data fees. So they have little incentive to change. They cater to HFT because it's a big driver of their bottom line...
When they decide to forgo paying dividends, that money is usually put to other uses by investing it (case Amazon) or stockpiled in cash (case Apple).

In both cases the value of your 0.0001% slice has increased, and even though you won't get an instant transfer of that value, you will see it in the appreciation in the market price of your slice.
Totally agree. Being a parent with a sick child is one of the most emotionally draining and heartbreaking things in the world. The last thing you need is your CEO using you as an example for why your colleagues have to endure benefit cuts in the face of record profits. Pretty disgusting. I would never work for an Armstrong-led company.
Not speaking of Dell's behavior but VLC should maybe add a warning to the settings when the user goes over 100% if it damages the speakers.
Shouldn't instead Dell make the speakers not be able to get physically damanged by software?
sounds like buggy speaker hardware or firmware. How about don't use Dell laptops to play audio?
There Are 1000x More Ways to Knot a Tie Than We Thought
When you give police power, they will use that power.
It's not like we're talking about astrology vs astronomy. We're talking about science and engineering. Why can't we be teaching both? In fact, shouldn't we be teaching both? Together? In service of each other? I think so.
Claim: Every time the algorithm makes a mistake, some blocks are demoted.

Proof: This claim is obvious from the algorithm. Every time it makes a mistake, the chosen block will be demoted.

Proof by inspection, my favourite.
From "developed" countries? No. From countries with subsidized handsets, maybe. But Europe is certainly "developed," and that's where Windows Phone is making its biggest inroads:

http://www.zdnet.com/windows-phone-takes-more-of-europes-sma...
Sounds like his remarks are grounds for a HIPAA violation lawsuit. I would certainty be traumatized if company leadership referenced my health conditions as grounds for a new HR policy.
I wrote Spreadsheet.io that is similar to Google Refine (and Fusion Tables) and performs various data type analysis for visualization, etc. There's also a native Excel add-in that enables a Javascript API bridge to an existing sheet. Working on a release.. it's been a side project.
A powerful and stable keyboard customizer for OS X.
What kind of person uses crappy laptop speakers for media consumption?
Flappybird.js
For starters, I'd say CS is better described as a branch of applied mathematics rather than a science like chemistry or physics, if one wants to associate it with any academic category at all.

Moreover, "coding" isn't really "applied computer science" in the way, e.g. electrical engineering is "applied physics of electromagnetism." In fact, one doesn't need to know or understand even the first thing about CS in order to be an extremely effective programmer. The same isn't true about most engineering:physics/mathematics analogues.
Even HP has the same policy which I found to my dismay three years back.
Show HN: Sugar – a web framework for Elixir, built on top of Plug
PlanGrid (YC W12) is looking for senior Android engineers
Want to own a product that’s transforming the construction industry?

Our users are building some of the most amazing construction projects in the world, and our android app is used everyday in the field.

As a senior android engineer, you will tackle some very difficult and interesting challenges. Things like:

- Marking up construction drawings with sophisticated annotations

- Pushing the capabilities of tablets with demanding data requirements

- Making very powerful tools that are easy and intuitive enough for construction professionals to pick up and use

PlanGrid is a small team of construction engineers, software engineers, and ex-rocket scientists, building intuitive, beautiful tablet apps for construction. We’re reinventing the way builders access information and are looking for an amazing engineer that wants to take the lead role on an app used by over 200,000 construction professionals.

We've been around for two years and we're growing fast. Unlike a lot of early stage startups, we measure our growth in revenue, not users, and it's been exponential since the day we launched. We’re a team of 8 women and 9 men that loves to build great tools for for the people that build the world. We care deeply for our customers and work hard everyday to make their lives easier and more productive.

We’re located in the Mission district in San Francisco (5 blocks from BART).

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-Unlimited vacation

-Health/dental/vision insurance with zero contributions
-Whatever gear you want (most engineers have a retina MBPs and Apple Thunderbolt displays)

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-Free transit pass

-Construction site tours of cool SF projects using PlanGrid (past tours: Github’s new HQ, Square’s new HQ, 101 Van Ness)
-Tahoe trips

-Annual company workcation (last year: 3 weeks on the beach in cancun)

Interested? Send your info to: jobs@plangrid.com
A Google employee's critique of the Ars Technica Android unforkable article
I have seen what people are developing. Besides, cars do not need to have micro electronics.

http://reprap.org/wiki/MetalicaRap

http://medtechinsider.com/archives/24967

http://www.nthdegreetech.com/printed-semiconductors.php

That said, there will always be some things for which economies of scale win out against customisation, and I suspect that many electronics components are in that bracket. Luckily we have things like FPGAs, so you don't need to keep a huge stock of specialised chips to make a wide variety of devices.
The VLC creators claim the player cannot be used to damage speakers.

That and hard clipping is obvious and sounds awful, so it should be apparent you're doing something wrong.
That's exactly what we do in LedgerSMB. More to the point, the db user credentials are application login credentials so the application has the db permissions of the user. No password? The app can't access any data.

Now this has some significant tradeoffs. It is very much a good decision for an ERP app. However for customer portals we are looking at a different approach, namely:

1. A portal user account in the db with very restricted permissions (and no direct access to tables)

2. A portal back-end user account in the db with limited access to tables and which owns most of the security definer functions the portal uses. I see no reason why we might need dynamic SQL in such functions, so no avenues for SQL injection unless you can exploit a trigger or something. For fine-grained permissions, the functions could do additional permission checks based on an auth token.

This should effectively prevent SQL Injection from being particularly useful in this context.
The very first things came into my mind when I saw the title were MS ergonomic mouse and keyboard, then xbox the second.
The funny thing is that this CEO is, I'm guessing, against a single payer system too. If a single payer system was in place these "distressed babies" costs wouldn't have even impacted AOL at all.
VLC is incapable of increasing the actual power past 100%, all that is being done is the waveform is being modified to be louder within the allowed constraints. If this wrecks the speaker, any other non-VLCed sound could just as easily, and the speakers are therefore underpowered for the laptops internal amplifier. Class action sounds in order.
dpkg? Sure you mean apt-get / aptitude, unless you want to play with some non straightforward way of installing packages.
far too many people do, and many annoyingly listen to music through the crappy speakers on their phone, usually in public.
This is my exact definition of entrepreneur. Someone who can solve many simultaneous and interdependent problems all of which take "n(i)" attempts where "n(i)" is "much larger than what most people imagine".
I disagree with the last point. Understanding the low level details of a system definitely makes a developer more productive.

When I am working on an iOS app and I get stuck on a bug, I can open a disassembler and immediately figure out the cause of the bug. The same goes for a ruby developer who wonders why their queries are taking forever or a front end developer who doesn't know why their interface is dropping frames.

Any serious engineer should be able to fix these problems on the spot if tasked with it.
In addition to the work in progress, you could use security barrier views.
Indeed. That's why he was also protected by the FBI internal reviews that freed him, the prosecutors who know just how silly a bad fingerprint match will look in court, the compulsory defense lawyer and defense investigation budget, the judge with whom the admissibility of evidence is negotiated before trial, the trial judge, the more or less fairly selected jurors, the observers and free press in the trial courtroom, the appellate.

Please, please, stop wallowing in this idiotic paranoia or persecution fantasy or whatever it is. This guy looked suspicious as hell during a period of raving government paranoia, in a case involving a public safety emergency, and got interviewed for two weeks.

Yes, that is scary and obnoxious for him, but what more do you want? Investigate mad bombers slowly, carefully, like a stolen car case? Invest $500 billion to raise the false positive rate to one in 10 billion?
You keep a stock of base materials and things like chips that you can't fabricate onsite.

Is the same as keeping stock for a normal shop, you keep track of what is being used and order more when it gets low.
> Learning to code is merely teaching people to spell.

This is true, however you can't dive into the nuances of Shakespeare without knowing what words are and how to spell them.

One thing to keep in mind when arguing theoretical vs mechanical education is children can't think like adults. In fact, children aren't even capable of abstract thought until they hit the 11 to 13 year old range [1] (and only the bright ones are able to think that way that young). So starting a deep dive with Computer Science with 7th and 8th graders is a fools errand.

But it is a worth while endeavour to show them the mechanical side of coding. They will eat that up. Once they have a handle on mechanical tasks, then you can start introducing the theoretical. More kids will pick up the concepts that way.

Walk before you run my friend.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive_...
As the main developer of VLC, we know about this story since a long time, and this is just Dell putting crap components on their machine and blaming others. Any discussion was impossible with them. So let me explain a bit...

In this case, VLC just uses the Windows APIs (DirectSound), and sends signed integers of 16bits (s16) to the Windows Kernel.

VLC allows amplification of the INPUT above the sound that was decoded. This is just like replay gain, broken codecs, badly recorded files or post-amplification and can lead to saturation.

But this is exactly the same if you put your mp3 file through Audacity and increase it and play with WMP, or if you put a DirectShow filter that amplifies the volume after your codec output.
For example, for a long time, VLC ac3 and mp3 codecs were too low (-6dB) compared to the reference output.

At worse, this will reduce the dynamics and saturate a lot, but this is not going to break your hardware.

VLC does not (and cannot) modify the OUTPUT volume to destroy the speakers. VLC is a Software using the OFFICIAL platforms APIs.

The issue here is that Dell sound cards output power (that can be approached by a factor of the quadratic of the amplitude) that Dell speakers cannot handle. Simply said, the sound card outputs at max 10W, and the speakers only can take 6W in, and neither their BIOS or drivers block this.

And as VLC is present on a lot of machines, it's simple to blame VLC. "Correlation does not mean causation" is something that seems too complex for cheap Dell support...

Maybe Dell should advise against playing Metal music and should only allow Céline Dion music, because Metal saturates more...

EDIT: more details...

PS: they even provide a BIOS update for the fix... So, of course, VLC was the issue... http://www.dell.com/support/troubleshooting/us/en/04/KCS/Kcs...
It would probably either cost more or the speakers would have a lower peak volume.

I don't think it is a wild compromise to make some assumptions about the sounds people will play through the speakers (and it's not like a spec relating the max energy/time is going to help most shoppers).