skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly. The moment the taxpayer starts realising the real costs of absurd policies like '3 strikes', 'Zero tolerance' and other nonsense, is the moment that you start having genuine reform in the system.

When they realise that each and every trial has an exact cost to their wallet. That we shouldn't be incentivising prosecutors and police to get a so-called conviction (eg. plea-bargain), no matter what. Then we can start on true justice. Not just for the benefit of individuals, but for the benefit of society as a whole.
Pixel graphics in terminal
https://web.archive.org/web/20140507171628/http://google-nes...
When the customers call you, it is because they blame you. You never hear from the ones who don't blame you.
I hate San Francisco (and NYC and DC, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the non-SF SFBA cities).

What places do you like?
I have never visited Seattle. I've spent probably a few weeks total in Austin and a month or two in Boulder, and I like Austin, but it's damn hot. One of the reasons I quit my _last_ job is that I would have had to live in Denver, and I didn't want to. I don't think Denver/Boulder is bad, I just don't think it's great either. I wouldn't complain about living there, but given the choice, would pick other places.

I've spent a lot of time in NYC, so I know what I'm getting into. It's fun to watch all these people make assumptions about my opinions and what they're based on.
> we ended up with the MUNI (aka SFMTA). The problem is: as a monopoly, and a government-subsidised one to boot, they have absolutely no incentive to improve service.

Germany's trains are also monopolies, yet the U-Bahns I'm familiar with are reliable and relatively clean - at least compared to the BART I rode.
More importantly being soft on crime isn't exactly a popular platform for politicians. Pot legalization is kind of moving in that direction and regions across the country have made progress with that. But that is a just an exception.
GroupDocs Document Viewer for .NET Library – Version 2.0
We're pleased to announce a major update of the GroupDocs.Viewer for .NET library: version 2.0. This version of the document viewer has a lot of new features, improvements and bug fixes. You'll find a complete list of updates and the new library itself here. In this and the next article, I'd like to take a closer look at the updates that I think you'll be the most interested.
So out of curiosity, what would be the easiest way to securely accept file uploads? Taking into account all of the possible malicious attacks.
As 'rayiner points out repeatedly, there is plenty of precedent for people being forced to turn over information in their possession to comply with government investigations going back centuries.

This is much different than requiring that arbitrary third-parties to be compelled to take arbitrary action to assist in a government investigation. Where they are required, it is a power granted by statute with limited scope. (Phone companies are required to assist in wiretaps via things like Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act; I forget that was in effect before that. And they get to bill the government for it.)
Akamai. Moms love Akamai.
This was the metropolitan area, though. If you look at the chart, the top-left column states "Top 25 metropolitan areas, by population". After all, everywhere in Silicon Valley is expensive, not just SF proper. San Jose is not itself cheap.
My brother used to do utility plumbing — literally, laying sewers. I know they think this. It's not them that's the issue; it's short-sighted municipal governments, it's contracts, it's "Well, who's paying for it?", it's liability issues, it's these and countless other little inanities.

That said, it kinda blows my mind that someone on HN would actually think I was talking about the people laying the sewer line when I said, "Well, while we're here..." Were you straw-manning, or did you really just not think that one through?
Except he says specifically that working too much is not the problem:

I don’t go home late. I go home at five. It’s not work/life balance that’s the issue. I’m just not psyched for the ‘life’ part.
The 75,000 mentioned people who have moved to the bay area for tech have caused rent to rise by such a large amount, that even though we can afford to pay, it feels like a huge waste of our money

This is also primarily a political problem, as I wrote previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7382097 and as Kim-Mai Cutler cogently described here: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/ .

Seattle has somewhat similar problems (http://www.smartgrowthseattle.org/sally-bagshaw-yesterday-to...), but they're not nearly as bad.
would it be cool to share the site?

I have never heard of this happening
When I first read that, I assumed he was teaching the class. But after checking Wikipedia I found that he received his bachelor of science degree in 1960. Now I'm astonished.
I have to use a Mac for work and the fact that it cannot do focus-follow-mouse makes it extremely painful for me. Add to that the lack of track-point (although that can be solved by adding a keyboard, but not so convenient when travelling) and that makes it, as far as I am concerned, the most useless laptop ever produced.

Even MS Windows let's you switch to focus-follow-mouse and use a piece of hardware with a track point.
The Ultimate Guide to Small Business Email – Escape Inbox Overload
There should be clickable examples so users dont have to think of an example. Youtube, etc.
To be fair to your parent, I edited that in a few minutes ago because people read the previous sentence differently than I meant it. I didn't know people would assume I was burning the candle from both ends.
> "On a more evil side, this would also stop chord [sic] cutters. Pirating content is no longer 'free', and Netflix would cost significantly more than $10/month ($10/month + 'x'GB * $/GB)."

Maybe you've been living under a rock, but ISPs who are also cable television providers are very interested in caps, arguably to protect their cable television business.
[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/2155286/comcast-exec-says-ban...

This whole debate about who's supposed to pay for peering is smoke and mirrors. The truth is that cable companies have a conflict of interest between their two businesses, and they're attacking the internet side to protect their cable tv business. End of story.
You'd also need to assert every time you called a function to make sure you got what you expected. I know basically nothing about Go, but I found this that says that it doesn't even have assertions:

http://golang.org/doc/faq#assertions
Yep, i think that part was a clarification added after the bulletin was posted to HN.
You need to go through an exchange. Or if you use Mycelium on Android they have a service for finding local sellers.
A parody does not confuse the viewer as to the source of goods and services. In a parody, it is clear that the goods or services, or speech, are from a different source than the original.

If one makes a product as a "parody" and pretends to be the original source, while acting purposely foolishly, I don't think that would be defensible.

For instance, if you are opposed to people eating meat sold by Foster Farms, then making deliberately disgusting meat, and handing it to pedestrians in a city, while making fun of meat, does not constitute parody of Foster Farms. It damages the brand of the original.

A parody would be using Google's names and symbols in some transformative action that is clearly not sourced from Google.
Secret proceedings are very different. Not being able to tell somebody you need a lawyer is very different from not having court records published until later. It is disingenuous to imply they are the same.
It can still count as parody even if some people got genuinely confused. Consider that some people get fooled by articles from The Onion.
Agreed, both great pieces on the problems in SF at the moment, and I definitely didn't mean to discount those details as part of our reasoning for leaving. I love San Francisco and really all of Northern California, but we're getting out of dodge before things get really out of hand. I do hope to be able to return some day.
I was going to say that this is a regression to the US having debtors prisons, but then discovered in Wikipedia that the practices of the original article are already named as such. It also gives a list of policies for each state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors'_prison#Modern_debtors....
> Earthquakes big enough to damage houses are very rare

The 20th Century was "abnormally stable" in SF, and they've got a long history of fairly regular ones. http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_25793975/quake-cluster...

> and much of the value of the property is in the land, not the structure

In a normal "selling my house" situation, sure. In a "good portion of the city got leveled" situation, not necessarily.
First choice: HK or Singapore.

Within the Bay Area: Santa Clara, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Atherton, Woodside, Los Altos, Cupertino, and most of San Mateo County overall.

Otherwise: Seattle, Berlin, non-Berlin Germany, Portland (OR), Montreal, sort of Toronto, Amsterdam, .... Probably Texas, but I've never actually been there.

For some period of time 1-4y: Japan, Qatar, China, Indonesia, Las Vegas, Utah, Montana, ND/SD, etc.

In the Northeast, NH or VT.

Most of these don't really have enough diversity of tech companies to be viable for me, or a good enough ecosystem to start companies. (SV excepted; Seattle is borderline. HK/SIN don't do much in the kind of companies I like)
Normal users don't have the ability to give themselves an unlimited number of email aliases. You need to own your own server/domain to do that. Gmail has a nice feature, but it doesn't obscure your real email address and it is trivial to strip away the extra tag.

The issue here I think is that the average mail user needs some kind of filtering language to control their own inboxes.

There is no standardized way to do this, which is a shame. I would really like for their to be a standardized server-side mail filtering language for mail services, where you can take your rule set from one mail server to another.

Personally, I have my own mail server and it has it's own mail filter system and language, but I am not always on the command line with my mail client to modify those filters.

Outlook, Thunderturd/Seamonkey, and other clients have some client-side rules, but those rules don't work if my desktop is offline I am reading those messages on my phone.

I hope in the future well-regarding developers who don't have a private interest will take a look at email again and make the improvements needed to continue to support this standard communication format.

Egos and private-self interest is not what made the internet great, but there is little shortage of it these days amongst us. Where will the Tim Berners-Lees, Richard Stallmans, John Postels of the future come from? These people didn't get rich. We did.
I think mean means what you think median means. Known what I mean?
Matt Cutts: Google is rolling out our Panda 4.0 update starting today.
sick sad life.
I actually want a Google Bee. That sounds great.
I think you've nailed the true root cause. There isn't someone elected to be on the other side of the DA, like a public defender's office whose goal it is to get accused criminals exonerated. If one political party wants both seats, they'll both have to make each other's job hard.
His argument was that he could not find appropriate legal representation because of the gag order

If true this would be, by itself, a really really big deal. But the article doesn't seem to say that. It says he couldn't find a lawyer willing to take on his case, but he talked with "a dozen." Lawyers are the best people to ask for recommendations to other lawyers.
California law has put caps on the increase of assessed values, and a full re-assessment only happens when the property changes hands.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(1978...

So if you've owned a property since the 70s you're most likely paying less in taxes than someone who'd buy it from you today.
I'd say specifically this case doesn't seem very safe to me. For example you could have a rope attach to some rod on the boat, then you could use that rope to attach some climbing device. Of course, the rope has to be lowered slowly and the receptacle must be large so there isn't much to miss.

Not hard to imagine something better than jumping to a ladder on the side of the boat to be honest.
Patent reform: a modest proposal
What about Boston?
There are many possibilities between completely secret and completely public.

In the case of sex offence cases, it's common for the accused to get name suppression, so that only those present in court are aware of their identity. It's still a public trial, involving a jury of citizens.

A FISA-type court /could/ operate in a way where a jury made up of members of the public were involved in making the decisions, while being bound by the normal rules of secrecy that require them to not talk about the case outside of the court.
Why "sort of Toronto"?
Team-Oriented JavaScript
Modi’s success and Google trends
This thread is hilarious. People insulting Steve for wanting to leave SF and yet every other article TODAY on the FRONT PAGE is "Why is SF public transit so shitty?" or "Why is SF so expensive?" Get out of here.
Courts can dismiss charges and say "stop wasting our time", though.
MUPPette Project – The Flying 3D Printer With no Build Size Limit
There is an interesting pattern here I think.

Before the general context and behavior of big companies was very serious. You know you had your GE, IBM, Ford, I don't know P&G, big serious companies that wear ties and white shirts. And you make a parody of them and becomes kind of obvious. Oh look "Big Brother Inside" logo for Intel. Ok clearly a parody.

However, I feel, there is this movement toward lightheartedness and humor in the new style of PR. Google is the prototypical company here. Bright childish colors. "Oh look the rainbow! Blue, green, red colorful beach balls in every office!". That was their initial image. "We are just big kids playing and building cool stuff". Or say, April 1st comes, and here is Google making fun of their products. Releasing something like "Google Fiber over Toilet Plumbing" (get it, get it, fiber, toilet, ..., make sure to tweet it!). Something like that. So that is all jolly good, except that by using lightheartedness and parody as a standard PR tool, now it is not easily differentiated from other parody out there. Maybe environmentalists make a site about Google's Fiber Toilet Plumbing. Now it is kind of harder to tell the difference.

Anyway, this is too much drivel. Not defending or taking sides, just pointing out what seems like an interesting pattern developing.
Thank for yet another gem of an article. As a mostly backend developer, I depend a lot on these types of posts to help me keep up with the current front-end best practices. Anything that is on igvita.com I pretty much absorb without questioning due to the consistently high quality (and correctness!) of the posts.
Viber does the same thing and also has all the texting features etc...

Not saying anything is wrong with your platform but, what's the reason for me to switch? Can I send voice messages to those that aren't using your app? Or do I need have all my contacts download your application before I can use it to communicate with them.
Well where is all the funding going to magically come from? It would require massive budgetary and bureaucratic overhaul to improve the system. Sure, prohibiting private funding might be a small part of an overhaul, but it would be nowhere near enough on its own.
If we go by the parent comment's "4x+" metric, and if we keep with the traditional personal finance advice of 33% maximum budget allocation to shelter with no other debt and that 33% covers PITI+M, that 33% expands to 1.32x of the budget. In other words, for compensating just shelter costs alone, you need a salary bump of 132%.

This doesn't account for the increased cost of living that should be compensated for, as well as any risk premium for moving in the first place. I don't see how people pencil out the numbers to convince themselves to move into either Silicon Valley or the Bay Area, and I'd honestly like to see how the numbers shake out if someone has made it work. Unless one is Fabrice Bellard-level quality, I don't anticipate most average arrivals to SV or BA ever getting a 200-250% salary increase to just stay in a Red Queen's Race personal-finance-wise.

The landowners of Bay Area are the new store owners of this new gold rush, profiting with much lower risk premiums from the majority of "prospectors"/programmers flocking to the new gold fields while the stories of "hits" keep luring in fresh meat each year.
It has the high density/high cost thing I dislike, and shitty weather. But has a lot of smart people, sane immigration policy, etc. (I would probably ignore a Toronto if it were in the US and otherwise the same, but Canada is a win for a lot of things.)

I guess Switzerland, Austria, Liechtenstein, Czech Republic, etc. go on the "potentially good" list, too.

The things I hate about SF are really threefold:
1) I've spent "enough" time here to be bored with it, at least outside work related things. It's genuinely not a world-class city (outside of tech, and food) -- LA, NY, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, etc have it beat)

2) Absurd costs due mostly to demand and somewhat due to government policies -- this has been well covered. It essentially means you must always be working in tech, unless you've had a huge exit, unless you moved here sufficiently long ago or accept a sufficiently low quality of life.

3) Aside from costs, crazy government and social policies. I can get that people disagree on political issues, but SF (and CA as a whole) are just badly governed -- they collect taxes like a high-services-returned socialist state, but provide services like a low-tax state. There are a bunch of structural reasons this is unlikely to change, so it's not really worth investing any effort in CA politics. I'd actually prefer living in a place which is at the current time more fucked (say, TX, TN, KY, Indonesia; whatever), but where there's enough of a desire to fix things that the trend is positive. Or where the people are actually pretty sane and reasonable overall (Seattle; many of the Northern European countries).
FBI Having Trouble Recruiting Techies Because They're All Stoners
Virtual Servers come with some TeraBytes per month. AWS and Google Compute Engine counts traffic by the GigaByte.

Most upstream providers at colocation facilities use 95th percentile pricing, that is you have a gigabit link, or a 10g link, and every 5 minutes they take a sample of current speed, and then at the end of the month they sort those samples and take the sample at the "95th percentile", which can be understood as link utilization discarding bursts which, gives a speed, which you can multiply by the length of the month, and you get transferred bytes (or octets as network/telco people like to call it).

A 100Mbps link is ~30 TB per month. If you do business on the internet, the moment you get big enough, you can negotiate these prices.

Just buying a gigabit ethernet port is not even that expensive ( https://ams-ix.net/services-pricing/pricing ), but this is without peering, and you have to either deal with every non-open partner there ( https://ams-ix.net/connected_parties ) or get transit from someone who has a full coverage of the internet. (That is all the prefixes assigned by local internet registries are reachable via them.)
I've only been there two or three times and it was fine. Didn't hate it, didn't love it. That was three or four years back, though.
"But still, it's insane in the Bay property market again. Anyone from the Bay knows a bubble when we see one by now. When all the hipsters and their credit-cards run out, the market will crash and the locals MIGHT be able to buy something again"

Just curious, but what happened to property prices in Oakland/SF during the last crash (2008)?
Gameboy Tetris Randomizer
If you have the CD-Rom, you can try to use http://njw.name/oed2dict which is a set of scripts that convert the full Oxford English Dictionary v2 (CDROM version 3.0) into the jargon and DICT file formats.
(This is based on a comment from "a well-known Swedish sharing platform", where a compressed DICT format of the Oxford English Dictionary could be available)
Why did this post disappear from the front page?
Zuckerburg 2005 talk to CS class at Harvard
Isn't it a reasonable workaround to scan the file for content-type and make the file available once it passes the criteria for the upload? Find a php file uploaded with an extension of .jpg? "Sorry, there was a problem with your file. Please try again."
It's a classic perverse incentive: local governments profit from crime.

I think all fees (and fines and proceeds from auctions of confiscated goods) should bypass local governments entirely and go directly to the state general fund to lessen the incentive to "make crime."

One example: parking tickets. Parking tickets stopped being about fairly distributing a public good decades ago. Parking tickets are now a revenue stream for cities -- and that's it. Local governments have long since forgotten their original intent.

Confiscated goods are an even more outrageous problem. Even if you aren't convicted of a crime, a police department may decide to keep your cash and your property. Often, you have to sue to get it back.

I'm convinced that if these revenue streams bypassed local governments completely, suddenly they would be a lot less interested in their enforcement.
Citra, an early 3DS emulator (WIP)
It could hardly avoid doing that, per at least a couple of Vanity Fair articles

The blog appeared 8 years before those articles.
"Most of the techniques that have turned out to be important were originally introduced for the wrong reasons!"

How inappropriate.
I stole the "intentional" part from Joe Armstrong in turn :)
Lavabit didn't actually have the information in a format that was readable. In order to get it, they needed to change the way their system operated to decrypt the information the next time a particular user logged in. If one can force a person to modify the source code running on his servers, why can't one force a person to modify a binary distributed to clients?

From reading the arguments in this case, it's not clear to me that the judges would have been impressed by that distinction. Their focus was on whether Lavabit had the technical capability to provide the information the government demanded. In both cases, the answer is yes. We won't know the actual answer until this has been litigated. If it has and I've missed it, I'd love to see the case in question.
Sure, but you're leaving "competence" unspecified. Political connections are based upon competence at what? Therein lies the rub.
> Normal users don't have the ability to give themselves an unlimited number of email aliases.

I don't agree. No one said it had to be on the same domain as ones regular address. Sign up for a new account with Gmail or Yahoo or any of the others. Use that address when filling out a "please spam me" form. Check it for a while. Then forget it when its usefulness ends.
As a taxpayer, if that's really the problem I'd rather just pay those cops, prosecutors, jail staff etc to sit around. Maybe the extra man power could be funneled toward preventing real crime (murder, rape, fraud, etc), or maybe it does nothing.

Getting nothing for that money is still better than paying them to make the world worse.
How do you think your wireless signals get to the rest of the world? Microwave backhaul is almost dead, those cell towers (and there are tons of them in urban environments, partly for want of spectrum) are wired up with fiber.