skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your cameras might not be part of the pool of cameras monitored by civilian volunteers, but there are a great many other cameras that are. My family visited the local station for a tour when they were having a sort of community day. Our young boys wanted to see what a police station was like.

Part of the tour included a visit to their video surveillance room. There were at least a dozen LCDs each with 4 camera feeds displayed, and two volunteers watching the cameras. The majority of the cameras were security cameras installed by business owners and home owners, and they shared the feed (and often pan/tilt control) with the police.

There might not be automated scanning yet, but everything they did was recorded. Automating this in a central location (county, or state) would be relatively trivial within the next few years.

To say the police own the cameras is incorrect, but it is absolutely true to say the police HAVE ACCESS TO the cameras, and often DO CONTROL them.
Svn vs Git vs Mercurial
An Infinity Pool-Equipped Spy Blimp Will Be the World's Largest Aircraft
http://ridewithgps.com - now supporting four full time employees with competitive salaries for Portland. Looking to be 6-5 by end of year. All bootstrapped, all subscription revenue. Lucked out that a hobby project in our niche could be profitable (the demographic for cyclist is pretty amazing, 40+ years old, lots disposable income, used to spending a bunch on their hobby)
> How much do you know about this particular company?

I know what was posted. What was posted gave me no reason to believe it's any different than 99.9% of companies. Even if it were, that would be inadequate to reverse my opinion of the stupidity of this strategy.

> In my experience it is far easier for someone to follow a script in E-mail than on the phone.

And equally easy to spot. My business is also lost at that point.

> it's used in a way suitable for the medium.

It should be plainly obvious that I disagree with that assessment.

> Trying to have a real-time conversation in email

Is not what I was talking about. Quite the contrary. The non-real-time nature of email is exactly what makes it superior to voice communication.

"Fast" and "real-time" are not the same thing.
Writing The Snowden Files: 'The paragraph began to self-delete'
All the time - I'm part of a community that has been on IRC for almost 15 years, and IRC is also great for various developer tools/topics of interest
Hello,

I have a client, spend some hours per week on IRC. Yes, there's great support, extremely skilled developers in various areas can be reached online.

I use weechat (text-based) or Textual (OSX GUI).
Wow, good for you, I'm impressed. A quick Google search indicates that's a very competitive space (probably an understatement). What is your approach to marketing?

As a landlord you're trying to reach, I'm curious how you're getting the word out. As a developer, I'm curious what you've found most effective.
I was personally tempted to buy BTC from Mt Gox when they were worth around 90 dollars but decided against it. Shortly thereafter, they were breached and now this.

When the currency stabilizes, I'll consider getting some.
What a great set of talks - from the introduction giving an overview of the founding of YC, through the homejoy founder talking about their horrible mistakes and failures on the way to an epiphany, these talks have a lot of really fascinating, practical and useful advice. Thanks!

I loved the bit in jl's talk where she announces this conference, and it is reported in the press as 'Paul Graham announces...' :)

I'd definitely recommend watching all of these talks, and avoiding the toxic and inexplicable troll threads on HN on the original story. Perhaps those result from people not watching the talks before commenting? Anyway, here is a direct link to the video for anyone who has not seen these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDaqt9NzDUc
How much of this and the NSA are due to the "gee whiz" effect as I call it? These organizations have cool new technology so they want to use it for no other reason than that.

It's like the HTML blink tag it was annoying and pretty much useless but just because it existed people used it.
I do use IRC at work daily. I had to learn Qt/QML for my new job and since school I've always thought that IRC was the best place/platform to learn a new technology. And once again in this case it has proven clearly invaluable. A lot of the QT devs are on IRC daily and help newcomers. Also just hearing about bugs, new patches, ideas and discussion help greatly to increase my knowledge of the platform. I'm pretty sure it would have taken me a lot more time without IRC to be up and ready at the start of this job.
Awesome. Yeah, I think I'm going to do just that today.

I've got an ipad, which I love for a lot of things, but even with the various pens/stylii, the writing experience is pretty bad, for me.
This might be a fun challenge for experienced rubyists, but I do not think this is a good way to learn Ruby.

I only looked at Ruby Basics, but here's my feedback:

The challenge is to solve: 'true and 0 && !nil and 3 > 2', but this is not a real-life application.

The words 'and' and 'or' should not be used for boolean comparisons, they are intended to be used to join two separate clauses such as "render 'template' and return" in rails.

Comparing a number and bang-nil is not good code. This could actually come to be if you were doing something like: "object.value && !object.value". However, you wouldn't ever want to hardcode "0 && !nil". If you were really checking for nil, you should use "!object.nil?"

I'm afraid that these challenges will teach bad code techniques to newbies who don't know the difference. But again, as someone with more familiarity with Ruby, I think these types of challenges are fun, but if that is the goal there is no need for the tutorial beforehand.
"badly outnumbered". Should this be a contest? Where are hard facts on discrimination of women in our field?
That's a great question; those who only participate at the periphery can hardly expect significant influence.
On using multiple apps for the same task, the author is completely right. However, it's also the reason for why I don't like Metro on the desktop, as I often need to look at more than 2 windows at the same time. For desktops, the split-screen concept in Metro is a huge step backwards, whereas for tablets it's a step forward.

But here's why I hate the iPad and hope Windows RT never wins in the marketplace, as it shares the same problem with iOS - it's defective by design. Personally I can't use or recommend to other people platforms on top of which Firefox or other alternative browsers cannot run.

And btw, both Surface and Surface 2 are Windows RT devices. Only Surface Pro isn't. And the reason for why Windows 8 for x86 was spared for the moment is because it replaces Windows 7, so because of market forces, but I hate the direction in which Microsoft is moving.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57432435-92/why-mozilla-bel...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57431475-92/google-agrees-w...
CSS 2.1 defines a specific order in which user-supplied style sheets' declarations must be honored [1]. This ordering makes a lot of sense to me: author normal overrides user normal, but user !important overrides author !important. Can extensions easily replicate this behavior if the spec-compliant code is purged from the selector matching engine?

[1]: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/cascade.html#cascading-order
There are plenty of extensions to satisfy this use-case. The only question is: how can I trust one?
> I don't think it would be appropriate to name-drop the company given the topic

Next response:

> I work at Booking.com

Wat? Sorry, things like this really stick out to me, and I thought it was odd. I have no opinion you choosing to, or not to, reveal your employer.
> If you have to preprocess it with another program first, then you might as well use another format anyways.

What?? By that logic, you might as well hand-write x86 assembly, since C requires a "preprocessing" step (some might call that compilation).

Using "JSON5" as a human-writable format for storage and then compiling it to real JSON before going over the wire seems like the best of both worlds to me. The wire format benefits are preserved, the format is validated as a side effect of compilation, and you get to write in a well-defined language with comments and bareword-identifiers. Your objection is that you don't want to run a compiler, so you'd rather send JSON5 over the wire?
ISTR that OneNote already did that a decade ago in Windows XP Tablet Edition ;-)

Syncs with an audio recording as well....
I think that interpretation is too strict. The standard is fairly clear on what the result of undefined behaviour might be, defining it as:

``behavior, upon use of a nonportable or erroneous program construct or of erroneous data, for which this International Standard imposes no requirements.

``NOTE Possible undefined behavior ranges from ignoring the situation completely with unpredictable results, to behaving during translation or program execution in a documented manner characteristic of the environment (with or without the issuance of a diagnostic message), to terminating a translation or execution (with the issuance of a diagnostic message).'' (italics mine)

This sounds like a long way from "meaningless" in my book. To my reading, the purpose of undefined behaviour appears to be to avoid unduly constraining implementations by not mandating behaviour that could be inefficient, costly or impossible to provide.

You (or anybody else!) may disagree on how far this inch given could or should be taken. But I think the fact the standard explicitly suggests that undefined behaviour could do something reasonable is evidence that programs producing undefined behaviour do not necessarily have to be considered meaningless.

(As a concrete example I have worked on one system where NULL was a pointer to address 0, and where address 0 was readable. Not only that, but in fact address 0 actually contained useful information, and some system macros used it. It was some kind of process information block and so there was a whole family of macros that looked like "#define getpid() (((uint32_t * )0)[0])", "#define getppid() (((uint32_t * )0)[1])", that sort of thing. I'd say this is rather odd, but the standard would appear to allow it. (However, perhaps needless to say, gcc was not the system compiler.))

(See also, the approved manner for using objc_msgSend, since time immemorial.)
> A good point, though not something we've heard repeated in UX sessions so far.

That's because people don't read any more, they look at pictures. The NBC website (http://nbcnews.com/) knows this -- they recently abandoned their traditional print-oriented layout in favor of one that consists of captioned pictures, and the bigger the picture, the better.

> For me the cinemagraphs ease the journey through the three thousand word piece ...

The same purpose can be served using either still images or images that can be made to stop moving. Otherwise the article repeats the annoying behavior of modern online advertising, which is animated specifically to draw the visitor's attention away from legitimate content.

I emphasize my comment may not matter in the long now -- people are simply going to stop reading, and articles like the one under discussion will disappear entirely, replaced by captioned moving pictures.
JSMin is not the right tool for this. I'm sure it conforms to the JavaScript (ECMAScript) spec but probably not the JSON spec. Here's a trivial JavaScript function to convert JSON5 to regular JSON with no comments and quoted identifiers and all that good stuff:

function JSON5_to_JSON(str) {
return JSON5.parse(str).stringify();
}

This is exactly what is suggested in the Usage section of the linked article.
I think it's fair to note that you might not be completely representative of the average Windows user. Glad to hear that you're happy with how the disk manager looks, though :-)
Really like that, cool idea. Come launch it in London? We paid £135 (EACH) for that service the last time I rented a flat here.
Killing itself for $20 EPS.
Argument from authority is a formal fallacy, but in terms of practical reasoning it's a valuable tool. If you find that someone has been reliable in their claims in the past, you would be a fool to not give some weight to future claims. Of course, that has to be modulated by your priors for each claim. But it is perfectly reasonable to form a weak belief on a respected person's say-so.
That's interesting, and makes me want to read more about Apple and Steve. Cook seems to still be a big unknown in a lot of ways. My biggest question about the future of Apple is whether they'll be the first with the next revolutionary device. The iPod, iPhone, and iPad didn't have any fundamentally new technology, but instead put together existing technology in a way that redefined how we used and thought of the whole class of devices. Nobody made a music player that was simple to use and just worked before the iPod. Nobody made a truly finger-friendly touch-screen device before the iPhone. Nobody made a tablet that was really practical until the iPad. I don't own or use any of either of them regularly, but I can appreciate the effect they've had on the market.

There will be more revolutionary devices in the future. Will they be created in Cook's Apple? If they are created, is Cook the man to bring the right device to the market at the right time? That's what'll be interesting to see.
Assuming that there are no security bugs in handling the incoming data, it's apparently as secure as communication with Tor hidden services. Each chat user self-hosts a hidden service, with messages between users being sent via a symmetric pair of circuits mutually identified using a random nonce.
I'm sold, I buy one.
As a soccer fan, this makes me happy! When do you expect to finish? I would love to use this as a back-end API for a couple of app ideas I have. By the way the data side of the business is pretty tough to break into. What are your thoughts on that?
Thanks giulianob. Added it to my ticket list to check :)

That is probably not very good since IE usage is disproportionately high among my customer base (side note, I'm going to check my conversion stats by browser now...)
>What's your proof that such prejudices exist

This guys has a point. Yea women where is the proof that you are prejudiced against except centuries of discrimination? The last western country to give women right to vote was in 1960s. Almost 50 years ago. The fact that you make 80 cents to every dollar a man makes is not a proof of any prejudice but a proof that women are genetically pre-disposed to making less money than men. Also, feminism is bad.

\sarcasm

>I assume most who think events like this are destructive -- would answer that fairness and equality relate to negative freedom: the freedom from someone restraining you from pursuing your goals i.e. we would all be more equal if the only thing which stood between us and our goals were our own skill (or lack thereof).

Because this argument assumes a level playing field for everybody including no intrinsic factors like lack of role models, lack of representation and lack of societal support.

Here's another advice for you, what you are thinking are well-reasoned arguments are all the same arguments that come up time and again in Sociology 101 to being stated in every argument on gender and race related issues on Hacker News. So, go do some research make some new (but probably) misinformed arguments about how we live in a post-gender society instead rehashing the same bigoted crap all the time.
Far too sarcastic for something that is almost entirely raw, unsupported speculation. Further, it is conflicted -- it disbelieves some statements by Gox, while fully believing others (e.g. "they were in cold storage").

The one element that seems believable are questions about the malleability attack. I do not understand how Gox or any exchange or service wouldn't have an up to the minute, blockchain verified knowledge of exactly what their positions are. Maybe they only did such accounting weekly, or even monthly...but at some point over the supposed multi-year exploit they would have seen that account balances > address holdings.
Yes it's an independent project, but a pretty neat way of co-opting the hidden service protocol for instant messaging.
I wasn't expecting a follow-up question to be a question about the company I was working at in particular. I mainly replied to give some (admittedly amateur) general advice on seeking asylum v.s. pursuing a work visa.

Since he did ask what projects we have at the company that I happen to work at I thought it was simpler just to mention where I work.

We have a lot of promotion & hiring material online, and it's way easier just to mention where I work and have the OP check that out than for me to write up some some long-winded description of what the company does, all the while trying not to mention what company I'm talking about.

It's not like there's that many companies in Amsterdam that run online hotel booking websites. So any interested reader could infer what company I was talking about anyway if I were to describe what sort of projects we work on.
Shameless plug: I've written a program that combines a terminal (for the Freedom board's debugging serial output) with one-click uploading of newly build code. It's called Freemon, is GTK+ and GPLv3, and is available here: https://github.com/unwind/freemon. It's really handy when doing "bare-metal" development on the Freedom board.
Ahh, the old "let's compare to the worst to make it look OK".

i.e., You know, America's health-care is just FINE, compared to Ethiopia's.

This law is terrible, no matter what you compare it to.
Okay, that's interesting. It seems that having two distinct words was an example of pointless complexity for the modern reader, and compressing them into one simplifies things for everyone. This reminds me of the fate of "literally", which has come to mean (a) literally, and (b) figuratively. Overall, a great simplification.

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/22/according_to_the_dictionary_...
But that's a different kind of concatenation, not the concatenation of m and n.
> R right now still wins in the number of algorithms implemented in it

Can you please list some important tools implemented in R but not in Python? I'd like to know how bit the gap is.
We launched https://coinkite.com in november, we are now profitable.
Author here. I think there is some subtlety around the technical point that may be getting lost.

Ittay Eyal and I were the ones who discovered an attack against Bitcoin called selfish mining, where we showed how a miner could earn more than his fair share. This attack did not require, but could benefit from, the attacker racing against honest participants on the peer-to-peer network.
Some members of the Bitcoin community claimed that the attacker would reliably lose these races because they start behind.

In the article, I point out that there is indeed a transaction race in this case, that people have demonstrated an ability to outrun transactions, and that this has ramifications for selfish mining. I do not claim that there is a technical impossibility -- quite the contrary! The tricks used to make that succeed are identical to what an aggressive selfish miner would use.

To be fair, malleability attacks require a modified client and some network positioning, so there is nevertheless a technical obstacle. Not one that is impossible to surmount, but one that requires some effort.

I did not know that Mt. Gox performed automatic reissues -- thank you for bringing that up. Would you happen to have a pointer that establishes this?

On the whole, I do not believe that malleability accounts for Gox's collapse at all. Even automatic reissues would put at most the hot wallet at risk. Studies of malleable transactions do not show anywhere near the volume required to account for Gox's collapse. And something I did not mention in the post is that the timing of the observed malleable transactions doesn't match the story from Mt. Gox at all. There is undoubtedly more to this story.
For years and years on different networks. For the past 7 or 8 years on Freenode.

Most, if not all, of the big open source projects have channels on Freenode. They are excellent places to connect with other developers (people). Not only are they just great places to get involved with other developers, they're also great places to talk to professionals using the technologies every day. You can learn best practices and industry standards by idling in the channels and watching questions get answered.

In terms of a "representative YC channel," there's not an official Hacker News or YC channel I'm aware of. However, there is #startups on Freenode that some have considered a sort of unofficial Hacker News IRC channel. We're a pretty active and lively bunch and the topics range from startups, funding, and entrepreneurship to programming, good beer, and current events. Just like all decent IRC channels, and you're welcome to come hang out any time.
This page: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?co... says "10000 @ US$1.03 each". Not too bad. Not a very hobbyist-friendly form factor, though.
Not really. With user stylesheet (Custom.css), it was a local file you could edit with your favorite editor, and changes were live when you saved the file. I tried multiple extensions, and for all of them you need to paste your CSS in a box, click on a button to save it and reload the page to see any effects, which is quite painful compared to just typing :w<cr> in Vim.
I use IRC all day every day. And with bitlbee [0] you can even use all your Jabber/AIM/Twitter... accounts via IRC.

[0] http://bitlbee.org/
You seem to think that anyone who disagrees with you is a fanboy who doesn't want to hear alternative viewpoints due to fear. It's amusing, because you yourself are the worst offender here on all three counts.
It's better because usability is 10000x better on the iOS. Android constantly asks how to complete simple actions. "oh, you want to view a website? what app should I use". Over. and. Over. and. Over. nonstop. all the time.

That's poor usability, plain and simple, and the same thing happens in hundreds of places in the Android UI

How about their permissions system? To get any level of control in android, you literally HAVE to root. No stock android gives you control over permissions. Either you accept ALL the permissions of an app, or you don't install the app.

I can control every aspect of that, as a user, on my iphone. I can say "hey, you can't read my contacts, but you can access network, just don't use push".

Android lost to iOS. it's not user friendly. Who gives a sh*t if it's "more customizable"? It does so at the expense of simple, intuitive UI design.

and just to be clear here, I have apps for both iOS and Android, I have an iPhone, and I have a galaxy note tablet. I've had several android phones over the years, and I've had multiple Apple devices.

Let me make it even more clear: The barrier to entrance for developing for an OS doesn't make it any better/worse than any other OS. If you're a developer and whining about the API's of your chosen OS, change careers. It's part of your job, if you don't like it, well, then your days must suck.
Thanks iamwithnail! :)

There's a company on the other side of the pond that seems to be making waves -- check out rentify.com.

I've never used them myself but their growth stats seem promising and they are vc backed. The founder, George S, is nice and we have spoken several times.
@bigmario
I used your extension and liked it. (I'm currently trying a different one). I don't think it's tacky to put up a donate button. I'm happy to throw a cup of coffee amount to free apps. There's even a few that I use often where I donate yearly during the holidays.
A Kickstarter to finish the Dysfunctional Systems series of visual novels