skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is an interesting article. What it seems to be getting at is that there is an elaborate dance of power between individuals and the state. This dance of power exists everywhere and in all ages. It isn't clear to me that was is different in kind in Stalinist Russia, though, so part of this article seems to me to be a half-full vs half-empty glass problem.

Moreover the present is always being rewritten by government and the media. This is something that's been apparent to a lot of people for some time. Not only did Noam Chomsky write extensively on this subject but Hilaire Belloc wrote more or less the same thing about newspapers in 1918 in "The Free Press".[1]

One of the key things Belloc pointed to was the necessity of non-corporate, decentralized, topical, and outright propagandist press to counteract the effects of corporate newspapers. I think he'd be very pleased to see the current blogosphere. So the author's points about the necessity of decentralized technology actually go quite a bit further than the points he makes.

On the other hand though, it seems to me that what this shows is that there is no bright line between dystopia and normal life. By some measures, of course, we are already in a surveillance state dystopia. So I am not sure the question is meaningful.

The major problem that makes the dystopian elements of the present hard to dislodge however are the twin facts that:

1. American culture is very much focused on impersonal institutions of scale (central government, big corporations), and individualism, and this isolates individuals, denying them support break free from the impersonal institutional bonds that we have created in substitute for the bonds of family, neighborhood, and community (which were stronger when I was growing up and are stronger where I am living right now, Indonesia).

2. We place our primary protections of the individual not in social ties (common everywhere else) but in documents which purport to restrain the central government (namely the Bill of Rights).

My view is that until we can start focusing on building stronger communities, decentralizing government and bringing the power closer to the people, and decentralizing the economy (disfavoring large businesses in favor of small ones) the dystopia will in fact deepen.

[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18018
You might be right about reduced infrastructure costs, but remember that Revenue is incoming cash before costs like infrastructure and other overhead.
This risk can be mitigated by:

a) Creating multiple DVDs each time you back up (if your dataset is small enough and stable enough that DVDs are an option, doing two burns seems like an acceptable burden to me).

b) Storing parity files[0] on the DVDs to allow you to actually recover from bit rot and disk damage.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive
That's not a remotely fair comparison, as Bitcoin is capable of processing a grand total of 7 transactions per second, globally.

That's not a typo. Seven. For the whole damned BTC network.

That quantity of transactions would easily be handled by a single, small server.
I would beg to differ. It is not efficient from standpoint of labor allocation. Not experienced people are rarely efficient at completing complex tasks. On the other hand once problem captures imagination of the significant portion of population amount of progress made goes way up.
How to Build a Maze
If the algorithm gets aroused, return positive, otherwise return negative. Bam, patent.
That was predictable given the site. The business world fundamentally seeks predictability over everything else, and only cares about individuals' rights if they effect short-term efficiency.
Nope, they all are part of the ISO. I cited two of them, and the first, discoverability, is a consequence of self-descriptiveness and learnability. Don't know how you get the idea I throw them in as buzzword when they are part of the quote...
Not even that. If the problem didn't eventuate for 17 years, then it was hardly an insipient problem. A lot changed for the internal structure of these organizations over 17 years, particularly due to 9/11.
NSA regularly makes data requests to the major telecoms and to the major internet service providers. If they didn't need to, they wouldn't make the request. Obviously they still do because they need to.

Not only does FB have seed funding for the gov't, they have shown themselves to be much more inclined to provide access to their data, when compared with Google and others. FB would therefore be an excellent partner to circumvent the international telecoms through a single msg service.

Just because you can't think of how the money flows, doesn't mean it doesn't or that it hasn't. The CIA supported the Guggenheim foundation, and the Iowa Writers Workshop. They could easily provide institutional support for FB stock, thereby essentially saying to FB - get this company, and we'll have your back on the markets.

So the question is, not whether I've thought this through, since this is what I'm doing to justify the insane valuation, but whether you are willing to think it through, or instead dismiss it outright, until the time come when the evidence shows you to be wrong. As we learned with Snowden et al.
Congratulations to all. I hope this means we'll see a bit more pg around here too!
If they store everything then we encrypt everything, etc.

In theory, but in practice most people can't be bothered. What I was thinking of above was not so much personal surveillance like the NSA tracking how often you called your mother, but more the mass impersonal stuff that yields an enormous amount of utility in the aggregate and that's totally public.

For example, consider people walking around with mesh networking devices. Even if you don't identify any of them personally, you could still extract a vast amount of intelligence from watching the pattern of anonymous dots swarming on a map. Or a sufficiently dense number of surveillance cameras plugged into a machine learning system would facilitate all kinds of surveillance, even if the cameras were private and the contents had to be subpoenaed.

As I've said numerous times, you're certainly not going to see any constraints on government until people bite the bullet and define what constraints should be on private entities for the gathering and storage of data.
> With the growth they had last year and current growth, their revenue should exponentially rise over 2014 and 2015.

You're assuming:

A) Their growth stays the same as it is now.

B) Users on year-long free trials will convert to paying users.

These are crazy assumptions absent years worth of data.

Not saying WhatsApp doesn't have something good going, but in what world have either of the above things ever been predictable in this short of time?

Especially to validate the claim "revenue should exponentially rise"...?
243121 <3
HTML and JavaScript usage
2476319
Htc One att Review
Hi everybody this is amine here, so i began my review with htc one att new smartphone for the year 2013. this is the HTC One this is right here in the United States working with AT&T's Ltd network and it is in silver collar also a black color and this phone has 32 GB's of internal storage, AT&T also offers a 64 gigabyte model that you can purchase online only so with that being said let me go ahead and start the review and see if deserves a spot in your pocket
Show HN: DIY: Host Your Statically Generated Blog In The Cloud (eBook)
This is an eBook I am writing currently on Leanpub. This is a step-by-step
guide on creating a static blog with Pelican and deploying it online - currently
only Github. I am planning to include AWS and possibly other services in
future updates.

I am selling this for a minimum price of $9.50. If you use the link below,
you can buy it for $7.00 until the end of next week.

Ideally, I would give it away for free but I am not making any money yet from
my startup or successful in finding an employment.

http://leanpub.com/diyhostblog/c/diyhostblog
Is that the greenfire campus or whatever in Ballard?
> I think super accurate mass surveillance is inevitable. It goes with expanding technological capabilities, both government and civilian. I think the real question needs to be focused at how it's applied, whether it's used solely for good or evil.

It is not inevitable. Also all technologies are used by people meaning they are used for good and evil.

I say it is not inevitable for a couple reasons. First, in order to be super-accurate, you have to be able to make inferences based on existing data to a very high probability of correctness. Unfortunately, these inferences are based on hidden assumptions and can't be tested. Therefore you have no way of knowing how accurate the mass surveillance actually is. Worse, the more massive the surveillance becomes, the more of an inkblot you have to work with. As Heisenberg said, "Data does not imply theory."[1] And the more data you have the easier it is to delude yourself into thinking all the conclusions are perfectly accurate because of confirmation bias etc.

So you have solid epistemological reasons that the technology can never become super-accurate.

Additionally deployment isn't inevitable. What's really going on here is that companies are trying to sell products to the government, and Congress is allocating lots of money to buy them. Funding decisions are political and they are not inevitable.

So in my view, this technology creates more problems than it solves (on a good day even), and represents a way for wealthy individuals to get money transferred to them.

[1] Heisenberg, Werner. "Physics and Philosophy"
Just name the hotfixes by day (140222). It monotically increases, and if you do multiple hotfixes in one day, suffix a/b/c etc. Generally you're unlikely to get up to b or c, and there's no clue to how many previous versions there's been.
There are actually two Aldis and in the US we have Aldis and Trader Joe's. TJ's is based in Pasadena and has the reputation for having products that are slightly healthier and higher quality than the average store, while being the same price or cheaper because everything is TJ brand instead of name brand. Of course they are also famous for "Two Buck Chuck" the $2 wine they sell, which varies widely in quality. It's definitely not high end like Whole Foods though, just maybe slightly better than Safeway or Kroger like the OP suggested was a good market niche.
Hah, on the page 85 that 'P' character got a bit out of hand. :)

It's weird that every paragraph starts with either the 'K' or 'P' characters. Not sure if that could be possible with real languages.
You can use the free version. It's full featured but has intermittent alerts asking you to upgrade[0].

[0] Recent vim convert.
Very good idea. Timestamps do not reveal how many hotfixes are made and are chronological by default. To be sure, there could of course be a central instance providing the stamps and ensuring that no two fixes get the same ... (when several fixes could be made in parallel)
The next complain will be that the cryptocurrencies are so memory intensive that the RAM production is a non-negligible contributor to global CO2 emissions.

What's the defense against someone with a lot of money that can buy an ASIC farm or a memory farm or a whatever farm that is needed for the computation? How much money should the chip builders charge for that? How many energy can be used in the production of the critical item?

Essentially, if 50 BCT cost ~$25000, to create them you must just burn ~$25000 of petrol, i.e. 250 barrels. If you burn only 200 barrels, someone will find a faster method burning 201 that is still profitable. (You can choice to burn them during mining, or during the chips fabrication, or during the chip design, or any combination of them.)
40 million pixels is roughly 40 ~1 megapixel (1280x720) images. It's not that many, especially when it's likely something like this: http://pascallin.ecs.soton.ac.uk/challenges/VOC/images/voc20...
You mean like a large number of people with no qualification and experience went looking for the Boston bombing suspect?

I'll leave it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22214511
SAP Business One Document Numbering Concept
Awesome, love this app!
They could be smart, like scones, enjoy hot tubs, practice riverdance and have a peg leg but that's not what the point of the exchange was.

The point was that nurses have more emotional strength than most people.
>It means, to keep an A, I have to be on the top of my game for every test, every assignment, and every class.

It's a situation without excellence - you maintain or you're a failure.
It says on that page what happens; they'll stop accepting builds with old SDKs, or if you haven't used the SDK before. It doesn't say at all that they will be closing their service, or not accepting builds at all. Just looks like they are deprecating their SDK.

Incorporating the SDK has always been optional.
You are right, I meant to write "HTML". Nevertheless I question the usefulness of this approach. Semantic XML vs. pragmatic JSON tells a similar story.

Semantic structures are never perfect, because they are not controlled by the recipient, but by the sender. I love the idea, but I think it will never come true. We will always have to mine the data ourselves.

I can see the value of providing semantic markup for screen readers or for some Google SERP extension, but I do not see how semantic class names provide any value at all.

Separation of concerns is a nice saying, but as other comments already mentioned, is just not possible to the full extend yet as CSS and browsers are to limited.

I think we should acknowledge these shortcomings and real world circumstance, do our best to work around them, but in the end just move on and be productive.
I'm under the impression that Google's machine learning is already filtering your personal G+ photos for nudity.
I think it's a sign of how good this choice is that I can't think of any serious changes which it will bring immediately (other than maybe freeing up more of pg's time to write essays and do office hours); the long-term changes are all positive.
It’s not enough to be a big dog in the U.S. anymore
We are in transition between a Nash equilibrium where information was scarce, to another where it will be hyper-abundant and there's a temporary window open to exploit the older paradigm, before it completely shifts to the newer.
The solution to the problems of privacy is economic. As the quantity of data in the world expands exponentially, so the cost of using it scales. There is at present an unproven hypothesis that more big data delivers proportionally more value. It'll soon become obvious that this is not the case. That realisation will be at the root of the next popped bubble. Meanwhile data will continue to expand, with eventually no actor having a hope of resourcing the capture, storage and analysis of it all.
As signal to noise ratio decreases, so the business model of any large data gathering entity will fail. The harder they come, the harder they fall.
I would love to have Bram Moolenaar's input on this project.
It appears to be, per https://gist.github.com/rmoriz/fb2b0a6a0ce10550ab73 (and my own testing on OS X 10.9.1).
I know very few people that constantly upgrade their PC builds. The ones I do, upgrade for the sake of upgrading, not because the hardware is no longer able to keep up. For example, a new minor version of a video card comes out, and they drop $1000 (AU prices.. sigh) on upgrading the card. They might do that 2 times per year.

Most of my friends that build new PCs will do so every 3-5 years but, like you said, very little is salvageable. Non-OS storage being the main reusable component.
Well by long time I mean several months. Happy coincidence I guess.
I don't think it matters that much. Does anyone think that Facebook acquired WhatsApp for their revenue?
Razer has been trying to focus on making stylish PCs for the gaming community. This seems like a natural extension to their product line. Just look at the Blade laptop; it's an incredibly thin (and cool) gaming PC meant to compete head-to-head against the MacBook Pro.

I think it looks great, but my concern would be that of others who have already commented. Modularity is great, however in an increasingly un-modular world I'd be worried about sinking money into the platform only to have Razer release a new, incompatible version in the not-too-distant future.
Whatsapp makes extremely little revenue right now - like it would take Facebook hundreds of years to recuperate what they paid [1]. Even if it doubles in user-base and grows by an order of magnitude (on top of that) through some magic Facebook monetization strategy, it would still take them decades.

But if we discount the fact that Facebook mostly paid their own "worthless" (mostly overhyped/overvalued) stock for this overvalued Whatsapp acquisition, then maybe with an order of magnitude profit, they could recover the money somewhere between 10-20 years.

For Facebook's sake, they better hope some other new disruptive technology doesn't come along in the next 10-20 years, because they won't be able to keep this sort of acquisition strategy for long.

I've noticed some articles call Facebook/Zuckerberg "smart" for noticing Whatsapp is disrupting them - if you can call noticing a disruption so late in the game that you now have to pay $19 billion to buy it, and with almost zero expectations of recovering the bulk of the money in the next decade.

What would be much smarter is using your own engineers to build that next disruption, or at least buy the ones appearing very early in the game. Zuckerberg could've bought tens of such apps in their early days a few years ago, and he'd still be much better off today. He could've owned Whatsapp, Kik, Viber, Line, and many others for much less.

[1] - Analysis of Whatsapp's revenue and profit when it had half the user-base it has today:

http://www.quora.com/WhatsApp-Messenger/How-much-revenue-is-...
you can email me, it's not convenient to list here, popular vpn service will be blocked by gfw.
xingjiebu@yahoo.com
I dunno about that. If you adjust for the number of internet connected people in 1998, ICQ was then just as much of a big deal as WhatsApp is now.
An interesting thought experiment that should be informing more of the discussion is to take inevitability for granted.

If mass surveillance does exist, the concern becomes equality of access. Information asymmetry is now the problem. Fear of blackmail is moot when everyone already has access to the information. If we must have technology intruding on our privacy, I would personally prefer a world where everyone can intrude, instead of a select few.

Fully public, mass surveillance is logical extension and conclusion of if-you-have-nothing-to-hide rhetoric.
I disagree that the "practice" taught in CS classes gets out of date with industry. Consider that modern websites use a communication protocol first developed in the 1990s and run on operating systems largely inspired by one developed in the 1970s. Of course, some things do change quickly, like what database/programming language/web framework is "in" at this particular time. The underlying concepts, however, do not change as quickly, and those are the things that engineering schools tend to teach. I just graduated from engineering school and started working. The things I learned in engineering school come up all the time. I'm especially glad I took Operating Systems. Sure, you could get through college and get a CS degree without learning anything practical, but if you pick challenging and practical classes, you'll come out a much better engineer.

Also, about the "4 years is a high opportunity cost" thing. Given how it's much easier to find a high-paying software engineering job with a bachelor's degree than without, it's probably worth it. Besides, just because someone is in school doesn't mean they can't follow along with the latest industry trends, especially in CS where much of it is open source. It's not like the only learning you do in college is in your classes.

So my advice to matteotom is ... go to college. Take challenging classes that interest you (I highly recommend studying operating systems, compilers, and computer architecture). But also, don't neglect the opportunity to learn things outside of class (sounds like you won't really have much of a problem here). Do internships in the summers to get some industry experience (and a nice paycheck). And yes, of course, don't forget to make friends and have fun (I certainly wish I did more of that in college).
UVA is the #1 state school in the country. Admissions is pretty competitive.
Your right thats its a fuzzy calculation but I usually just consider that half of income goes to taxes one way or another...

~35% goes out to your standard/official taxes

then you pay ~8% of whatever you spend to cover sales tax

then you pay ~2% of whatever your home is worth for property taxes (renters don't see this as tax but its built into the monthly payment)

and then there are lots of other smaller things like the car registration fees, bridge tolls (that may be a more of a bay area thing).

Anyhow its not exact but the way I budget is that 50% of my income is for actual spending/saving and have found that that ends up being about right
Sure, the type checker forces you to think more when you are actually typing. It makes up for being easy and rapid to refactor, repurpose, and reuse--arguably making it competitive to prototype with.
7-digit ICQ number here, but since I'm seeing people post 6-digit ones, I'm guess I'm not that special :) Still have my 3-digit Slashdot UID though!
This looks ridiculous. There is no way this design could be practical. You would be paying so much money just to encapsulate the same exact hardware components you have now inside of a plastic enclosure with a custom connection (and a controller for these connections, I'm assuming) and maybe unnecessary lights, colors, displays, etc. It is a proprietary trap.

Is it cool? Sure. But definitely not practical, efficient in any way, and it offers nothing more than aesthetics
Different people have different motivations. There is no One True Way to educate any sizeable demographic. Pointing at an autodidact and saying "see how much she learns when she's left alone" (or whatever) doesn't tell you anything about how to educate those who are not autodidacts.
Oh get over yourself. Every one of the criticisms he levelled against latex is spot on, and you pick up on the fact that he mentions Word is easier to use (which, by a long, long way, it it).
maybe the best nudity detector API involves the following:

1. attempt to post the image to google+

2. if the post is there, there is no nudity;

if it failed to post, there is nudity
I started watching, and as soon as he started describing his train of thought, I realized how much bullshit it is. Oh, there's this repeating sequence that looks like English "oRoR", it must be the Arabic word for Juniper that's pronounced "aRaR".

This isn't science.
South Korea to develop Stuxnet-like cyberweapons
On Lisp and ANSI Common Lisp are still relevant in regard to their subject matter while the essays of Hackers and Painters can at times seem dated despite being more recent. That's not to say that Graham's essays haven't had more impact, it is possible they have.

But even the essays when presented in book form seem to hold a greater claim upon us than a dozen or so links in an email or blog post. Then again I don't deny my bookishness.
Introducing Iterables
The point is that GPUs need to be physically near CPUs and RAM. You can do all kinds of external PCI expansion, including Thunderbolt cables several meters long, but you'd never attach a GPU to that other end.
Am I the only one who thinks hn is fine on mobile? It's not perfect but the contents the same.