skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There already are a pair of data-driven journalists at the WSJ whose day-to-day sounds more like a data scientist than a typical journalist. They are Tom McGinty and Rob Barry.

They gave a great talk recently, which I wrote about (shameless plug below), summarizing how they investigated the Asiana airline crash in SF recently and what their day looks like. They're brilliant:

http://datawonder.co/blog/2014/01/15/data-skeptics-wsj-meetu...
Yeah, there's pretty decent open source consumer-friendly(ish) PGP/GPG software available. The difficulty tends to be convincing all your friends to use it (which OP took as a given).
I'm unsure that I understand the whole Soylent thing. Is it for lazy people or is it for people who simply don't enjoy food? I know it's not about solving some sort of food supply problem, as we've not seen tons if it being distributed for free to the hungry. And it can't be about eating healthy, because eating healthy is easy and doesn't require buying chemicals from shady manufacturers. So what's it all about?
ICANN may aprove '.sucks'
Great point, the Streisand Effect would definitely be working for you.

Here is a somewhat related ad campaign, encouraging people with jury duty to refuse to convict people for crimes without victims: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/metro-billboard-ad...

They tried to get this guy for jury tampering: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/nyregion/indictment-agains...

Those campaigns managed to ruffle some feathers, and got lots of media attention because of it. I imagine that this propose whistle-blower campaign would raise even more.
As the article is more about the developer and his story rather than the game itself, the premise of the game isn't quite captured in the article.

Specifically, the tension comes from the fact that you are in some fictional former soviet state, which just opened up a border security crossing again. You've been posted to man it, and now live with your family in a government housing estate. You have a finite amount of time to process people through the security gate each 'day' and you're paid based on how many people you get through, with fines for incorrect processing (which of course gets harder and more convoluted as the game goes on).

At the end of each day, your income and expenses (for rent, food, electricity, medicine for your son/wife/elderly parents as needed) are shown. The tension comes from rushing to process enough people to ensure you don't have to go without food, or turn off electricity, or not medicate your family. However, if you make too many mistakes by rushing, you get fined too much and you don't get to care for your family.

It's really far more gripping than you'd expect because the whole art style, audio and interactions (both between days via a daily newspaper, and with the people as they enter through your booth/events that unfold during that) really help paint a picture of a desolate former soviet wasteland of poverty and misery. Couple that with the distilled essence of 'putting food on the table for your family so they don't starve' being the motivating factor, and it can be quite high-tension to try to not have your family inevitably starve and freeze to death with crippling illness.

For $5 (if you grab it during a steam sale), it's worth the experience for sure. I'd have been happy paying the standard $10 for the unique experience it offers.
If your coworker is brown bagging it, what do you care what is in their bag? I ate lunch with coworkers today and one of them had eggplant. I hate eggplant with a passion... but what do I care what she ate?
What I'm interested in is the mechanics behind how they know were to send a user based on their channel (beta/stable/alpha). We wanted to do something like this, but we couldn't figure out how to route users to the right app server either using AWS ELBs or nginx proxying ... admittedly we didn't really spend a lot of time thinking about it though.
>You think it was because of campaign donations? Or all the coal mining/fracking jobs in key states like Pennsylvania?

But that is called pandering. Do I think that they were concerned with any of the coal jobs? No, I think they were concerned with public perception at the time they were visible to said public.

Politicians have Schrodinger-Syndrome: They only appear to be working/accountable when you're staring at them through the lens of a national camera. All other times, they are fervently working on interests which are not yours.
That's just how early R&D is when you have a physical product. I can't count how much crazy crap I've seen rushed from China to make a deadline or meet early turn outs. Sometimes engineering time and early adopter happiness are worth a lot more than the one off cost of some air freight. Its not like (at least I hope not how) that's how their supply chain will be working in the long term.
Anti human? You mean like prosthetic limbs? You mean like artifical organs to replace failed natural ones? Wow, I thought the "humanist" mindset parodied in the recent deus ex game was a complete invention. Apparently it really exists.

Thanks for the most absurd thing I've read all year this side of 4chan.
> The point is not that homeschooling provides a lower quality education than public schools (though I would argue that, on average, it does) - the point is that homeschooling is being done by unqualified people using unverified, quickly-considered techniques

Sometimes.

Othertimes, its being done by highly qualified professional educators who are intimately familiar with their students and who spend a lot of energy on researching educational methods specific to their student(s), with far greater focus than when they are having 150 students passed by them each day on a conveyer belt.

Would I like to guarantee that no child is subjected to the former? Certainly. Would I accept the cost of preventing children from benefitting from the latter to do it? No.

> while public schooling is at least largely done by people who got teaching certifications and their methods get public scrutiny.

Yeah, and restaurants are at least subject to inspections for compliance with requirements of facilities and methods, whereas home cooking is done by unqualified people using unverified, quickly considered techniques.

But what I cook at home is consistently better than McDonald's, still.

Industrial mass production -- whether its of food, or education, or anything else -- is rarely of the highest attainable quality.
Todd, thanks for sharing your personal experiences. Really nice writeup and interesting details. All the best!
You can hope it doesn't catch on at your work, or that it doesn't enable your co-workers to be anti-social, but to wish for its failure as a product seems overboard and selfish.

There are millions of people that work with very limited breaks that would appreciate a cheap and relatively healthy alternative to fast food or crap from a cafeteria.
When I was his age and trying to show off, I probably would've said the same kind of thing, if I were in the right mood. I don't know or care whether Zuckerberg has any integrity (I don't use his service), but do people grow up and change.
I will revise the article accordingly. Thanks for the heads up.
Open Faced Reuben Appetizer For St. Patrick's Day with Video Recipe
Obtaining Location Updates in Android
either way, humans weren't made to eat a largely corn based diet nor were animals. Most of the food in grocery stores is just corn remade. It's extremely unhealthy food.

You can taste the difference in a cow that's been fed a corn diet and a cow thats been grass fed. Problem is if you see those cattle lots they have so many head of beef(far to many for the acreage) it's just dirt. Then it's dipped in a bath of ecoli killing shit, and squished up with a bajillion other cows.. it's disgusting. I'll stick to raising my own food.

If you want to invest in anything, buy land.
That's beside the point. Yes, if you don't want to deal with Access then you can go and find a job at a smaller, more agile company.

However, there are always going to be a lot of people who do work in vast, stuck-in-their-ways corporations - banks, energy companies and other MNCs.

An Access replacement would be aimed at these people, not a specific individual who could just 'find a job at a more agile company'. As a result, it could be very successful.
Papers' site: http://papersplea.se/
What does the animal world teach us about management?
San Francisco Is Getting A Drone Delivery Service For Pharmacies
Uh, isn't that one of their primary objectives?
You know PHP has problems when this is how Facebook writes polymorphic functions
My wife and I eat really cheaply. I generally eat three meals a day, usually tofu or some sort of fish like tuna or salmon. My wife eats similarly. It's not quite $5 a day, but we get by on about $200 a month with occasional spikes due to replenishing a store such as spices, flour, etc.
The 4-digit PIN is pretty ridiculous, but just a quick look at their SSL Ciphers and their HTTP headers shows they're less than what would be considered best industry practice. Bitcoin-handling sites should exceed industry standards when it comes to security. They also mention when explaining how their vault works that they first receive Bitcoins and then take the computer offline. The computer with the private keys should never be online in the first place.
Why are you saying this is an outdated idea? For the many millennia that money has existed, it has been a store of value AND a transactional commodity. Only in the past 100 years (more like 40, really) has this changed so drastically.

Are we, as a society, so special that we can change what money has been for all of humanity throughout all of time?
Ask HN: Can an online marketplace self-regulate?
Sarah sells a dress for ₡500 (₡=in-app currency) then buys a handbag for ₡400.

Ann, has proof of posting, but Sarah says there was no handbag inside the parcel.

This is Sarah's second transaction and Ann's third, they both have positive feedback from previous deals on the platform.

Sarah has an up and coming gossip blog and Ann is a mod on r/fashion.

1. What tools does the community need to best settle disputes?

2. What's out there that's been proven to work?

3. Can you see the above scenario resolving positively without the platform's involvement, how?

Hi, been lurking and learning for a while and am now faced with this scenario, many, many thanks for all the help you can give.
Oops, I meant to write "the first Wikipedian-in-Residence at a university".
Food, truth, and beauty, eh?

One of these is not like the other...

I just don't see what makes this an ideological or philosophical question. No one's questioning what it means to be human. How boringly dramatic...
It doesn't seem so crazy to me. Those aren't the people who created Soylent, just potential customers explaining what they want from the product.

Were you expecting a magical revelation from the gods of nutrition?
PHPMyAdmin and HeidiSQL are administrative tools for managing your database. MS Access was an application development environment and database combined. Access was full of GUI's and "wizards" (the interfaces where you answer some questions, click next, answer some more questions, repeat until finished).

The result was a tool that power users (users who are very good with a computer, but not a full fledged programmer) could use to build some pretty amazing stuff.

It has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but one of the amazing things about Access was the way it could figure out what you wanted to do through a wizard. Provided your tables and relationships were set up correctly, you could do some powerful stuff. For example, if you have two tables with a 1:many relationship, you can display a form with a sub-form where the data is linked. Navigating between records in the parent form would automatically load data in the sub-form.

It's a product that you really should use a little if you're really interested in a project. Despite its warts, Access was a really incredible and ambitious product.
No mention of the actual organizers? Geeklist didn't organize this The Collective did.
Likely later provides interesting data.

Not the OP and only guessing, but I made a similar site 10+ years ago and initially incorporated questions about gender and age so I could show how opinions varied by age group, etc.

I ended up winding that back and the site became simpler but far less interesting as a result.
Show HN: JSON 2 HTML Converter using Python-Flask
JSON 2 HTML Converter using Python-Flask
After you setup the provisioning profiles correctly, get the build schemes right, etc etc. Oh and don't forget to send Apple your tax id!

I would highly recommend using Android Studio + Gradle over Eclipse. IntelliJ is a significantly better tool for writing and refactoring code than XCode. Some of the tight integrations between XCode and the phone are superior (especially around profiling), but overall I think IntelliJ is a much stronger tool. Even something as simple as doing layout is vastly better on Android. There is no choice between 'in code or in Interface Builder'. XML + the viewer in Android Studio is the best of both worlds.

I also think Relative Layouts accomplish 99% of what auto layout accomplishes in a much friendlier manner.
Radius.NET: Simple to use RADIUS client
I remember when people made fun of the word "cyber-warfare", now it's everywhere.
> Capitalism is beautiful

No, I think it's more we are so selfish. Which has always been the case in history. But now we are better educated and more informed so should be pushing for a more compassionate, logical and less racist society over the current owning stuff society.

It is a philosophy that might be possible for at least part of the population.

Bill Gates is doing it. He's helping the worlds real poor. We need part of the population to start to realise people in the 3rd world are as human as the people down the road even if they seem different.

And for a lot less cost than a fancy funeral one could actually save lives. A family could get to keep their father or mother or child.
"Could have been a godsend" -> "It's not a godsend" -> "It's not something from god" -> "It's not good" -> "It's bad" -> "It's immoral"
Prosthetic limbs and organs attempt to replace their natural equivalents. Why you would think I have a problem with that, I have no idea.

So far I haven't seen amputees opting for tentacles instead of legs, or people deliberately amputating healthy limbs so they can run faster with blades. That would gross me out.
I think it became a hit as a natural consequence of being so good. He had to do almost no work on promotion, iirc. But I think he was a fairly popular gamedev (or at least not-unknown) before he made Papers, Please.

One thing to realize is that game reviewers like Yahtzee and especially TotalBiscuit always have their eyes open for new games that have new gameplay. That is, games with game mechanics that have never been thought of before. So if anyone here happens to make one, and it's fun, then you'll probably be able to get picked up by TB. And since he has >1M YouTube subscribers, that's quite a lot of publicity.

(Papers, Please was picked up by TB. It's how I heard of it.)
He is referring to the issue where data-mining creates a lot of meaningless correlations. http://xkcd.com/882/ aka many correlations are located that arise purely from chance rather than design

A single study is generally close to worthless.
It could also just mean that you should expect 'focusing weirdness' when you adapt to the rift, for the first few days. It could be harmless.

Humans are masters at adaptation. I guess we should just wait and see.
I typically don't eat breakfast because I either don't have time, have run out of eggs/cereal/milk, or don't feel like eating one of the three typical breakfast foods. If I could supplement/substitute breakfast it would be really nice.

Sometimes I eat fast food or some microwaveable thing because I am either exhausted when I come home, don't have food in the fridge, and I don't want to prepare anything or go to the super market. If I had a healthy and cheap alternative to a borrito, burger, or teriyaki chicken that would be awesome.

I'm not going to go 100% on Soylent and I don't think many of the people buying into it are, it's a meal alternative and another option for those 20-40% of meals that I simply am not going to cook for whatever reason.
Entitlement?

Google sold geeks the world over on a different kind of company. A "Don't Be Evil" company. A company we could trust with our personal email. That supported the open source community. But it was a big bait and switch. I never got over the betrayal. That's what I mean by social contract.

Google today is very different.

Sure, we got gmail for "free". Google made a TON of money off that "free" offer BTW. And like many others, I built a dependency on this email system. Countless services and people know me on that email address. I'd LOVE to get rid of it because I no longer trust Google, but it's challenging as hell. That's why dependency on the wrong company is, dare I say it, evil.

A quote from the "Don't be evil" entry on Wikipedia:

"Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, said he "wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out", adding that the slogan was "also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent."

While there are a lot of great things about Google, there are a lot of shitty things too. Back in the day it was important to make the ads unobtrusive. To separate out ads from organic results. Now on a commercial product SERP you have to page down to get to the first organic result! I mean, the list of issues goes on and on.

You ask:

"What were the terms of this contract? What did the users offer in return?"

Ummm...Google has a gazillion dollars. I think the users offered plenty in return for believing in Google.
--
I remember the excitement of RSS. And how wonderful Reader was. The "gift" of Google's "free" Reader has turned into a massive NEGATIVE for the open source community and those who loved RSS. With "friends" like these bearing "gifts", who needs enemies? This has been discussed ad infinitum, so I'll leave it at that.

But it's in this context that I think you'd be nuts to trust Google with a Dropbox clone.

RE: infrastructure, fair enough.

Final note, knowing quite a few Googlers and Xooglers, the engineers are better individually than what the company has turned into. Since the IPO, things have never been the same.
Microsoft is using node.js now? Maybe that's why Windows 8 was so awful.
I think that will likely depend on how effective the government and media is at "othering" the targets of the governments aggression. An important part of any related propaganda would be ensuring that the bulk of Americans do not feel like they have any relationship with the victims, even though they both live in the same country.
I don't know. Feel free to psychoanalyze me. Normally I wouldn't care, as long as what was in the bag was some kind of actual recognizable food.
The problem isn't necessarily who has the power or how many people are in control of it (the President isn't a monarch, and congress holds most of the power generally). The larger problem is the size of the power and the weakness of the current checks against it.

The way the system works today politicians bribe the public with their own tax dollars and in so doing get to hold onto power and the perks thereof. But even if we make it more direct the problem of people funneling the government trough into their own mouths, to the detriment of society, will still exist and, if anything, be even worse. And that's aside from the explosion of bureaucracy and regulation which has happened and continues to happen which is also a big part of the mess we're in.

Edit: Also I should mention that a lot of the aspects of the system works today which seem like defects (gridlock, slowness, etc.) are there by design. The system is designed so that gridlock is typical and to have a lot of friction on big changes. That ensures that the power of the government isn't subject to random vicissitudes, fads, or slight changes in the balance of power. It takes consistent majorities in public opinion over periods of time to translate into action, or very large majorities to translate into action quickly.
Like San Francisco?
Fat kid takes on drywall
I read the license/contract. It is enforceable much like the GPL if the data is copyright. It is significantly weakened if the data is not copyright and you're in a place with no concept of "database rights" (e.g. the USA.)

The lawyers who wrote the ODBL understand this issue: check out how they define the word 'use' in section 1.

IANAL, yadda yadda.
Can I get 2TB for $20 or am I forced to get the next tier up? (10TB @$100)
No one is demanding a trial phase with the product, as such is not an option. The only option is the product, and there is $2mil worth of demand for the product (likely higher since that number was reported).

Why are you trying to cut them down? "We'll see if there's an actual demand"? There is an actual demand. $2 million in demand. That's undeniable.
Sounds like they need to hire someone to take care of that then.

Disclaimer: Sysadmin/Devops
Mintspare Will Pay Bitcoin For Your Old Electronics
I'm with you on the skepticism thing. When we read, at least when we read anything important, we aren't simply ingesting bits of information. We're usually reading something that was carefully crafted to have a logical flow, where what is presented early supports or leads to what is said later. To understand the structure of a written piece is not easy. For "dense" works (e.g., some philosophy) it might take reading and re-reading several times, jumping forward and backward, to fully figure out what is being said, whether it makes sense, whether it's to be taken as reliable or not. Even that might not be enough. The idea of speedreading for the "main points" is ridiculous. Even less dense works have a logical flow, they aren't just a list of bits of information. If you're going to read critically (i.e, with good comprehension), which is generally the proper way to read, speedreading is useless.
Essential Security for Linux Servers
To take this to the extreme: you could shut down an innocent business that hosts on DigitalOcean by posting a threatening or defamatory comment on their blog, then making an abuse report. This puts them in the position of hosting such speech, and permits DO to cancel the service without recourse as a TOS violation. That's what you're OK with if you're OK with that being a term of the agreement. You point out that there's no first amendment issue here, but there's a lesson to be taken from the bill of rights anyway -- that sometimes protecting the rights of everyone means also protecting the rights of specific individuals you disagree with.

There may be small risk of this scenario happening, but if you are comparing to another host that doesn't make service contingent upon policing of content you host, then any risk is infinitely larger than necessary. In general, minimizing the ways my business could be wiped out by some service provider helps me sleep better at night. If a user uses a service I provide to host something defamatory, I want there to be a court order before the web host goes flipping power switches on my racks, as it's likely I'll have been contacted by someone before it gets to that point.
It was just a thought.

I mean, just speaking in terms of a business move, Google's track record ain't great with these types of services. There must be a better way than dumping them like that.

What I heard or read somewhere about Reader is that they couldn't find internal champions, and that's why it died. NOT because it was losing money.

Then again, Google+ is a better business for them than RSS.