skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Spent some time Saturday with the designers of the blight software at the Code For America Detroit Brigade civic hack day. What they're doing is a strong example where software can help to transform a city and make a difference in peoples lives.

Detroit may lack the funds to completely wipe out blight in a few years but they're using the money they do have to attack it in a systematic way.

If you check out the interactive map you will see that not all of the city is blighted. I grew up in Rosedale and that neighborhood is still hanging in there and with a little bit of help could thrive. There are a lot of neighborhoods like that in the city. But the view most outsiders have of Detroit is the worst neighborhoods. Tearing down the worst blight may help change outsiders image of Detroit.
DataLA, the open data portal for the City of Los Angeles
Design is a Search Problem
The UI is intended to be something that is pleasant to look at for hours, since ideally we want it to be left open all day on a second monitor. So we didn't make it bright and shiny...
What do the Loon components look like up close? Here's a gallery showing the solar panels, avionics bay with covers open, and some staffers.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gallery/2013/jun/16/go...
I remember him (or someone similar) saying that scientists are easiesy to fool because they are generally honest people. It takes a cheat to catch a cheat.
Free Desktop OS is a loss leader, no way they'll make significant profit out of that. Better to make the best Free Linux desktop OS in the world, get lots of people using it, hopefully among them some engineers, influencers, and decision makers, then provide server/cloud products and services based on that same tech.

For one single data point, that's exactly why I use Ubuntu server for all my cloud deployments - because I use Ubuntu desktop and know the Ubuntu/Debian ecosystem really well.

Nothing wrong with that current business model, any problems are more a matter of execution and competing against - as you point out - heavily entrenched first movers. But focusing on desktop won't save them, especially since desktop is saturated and already peaked. Cloud and mobile is where the growth is now.
Meteor and Famo.us on mobile: why JavaScript will win over native
I think you can see the argument that putting this into the standards is a different order of lossage than simply having various implementations.
Ask HN: How does iHackerNews do GET and POST?
I know that many sites using the Hacker News API are throttled and eventually cut off by the HN server. What makes iHackerNews different? And we are even able somehow to reply to comments on it. How does it do that POST? Hacker News doesn't check the REFERER? Can we build something like that, to interface with HN?
Cut Off Glassholes’ Wi-Fi With This Google Glass Detector
Yes, it's clear from the home page that you were quoting a journalist. That's not the problem; the problem is that that title violated the HN guidelines by being linkbait. We want titles that are accurate and neutral. Happy to change it again if you want to suggest a better one.
Maybe it's just Safari in OS X Yosemite, but that animation that progresses as you scroll looks terrible. Jerky, not fluid, etc. These scrolling animations look really, really bad if you don't nail the execution, and they can actively hurt you if they work this poorly.
Katie Couric Talks to Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky [video]
Objc_msgSend() Tour
Contrast that with Detroit's blight mapping portal:

http://www.motorcitymapping.org/
It's refreshing to see an article that follows up its criticism by suggesting concrete solutions.
There are definitely advantages to being completely wireless, building permits being one of them.
Virgin births: Do we need sex to reproduce?
As bcbrown[0] says[1], you can simply click through to the comments and upvote from there. The fact that this is so simple and obvious makes me think I must be missing something.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bcbrown

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7841841
How to Write a Thesis to Communicate Customer Needs to Design and Engineering
Firefox Accounts OAuth Explorations + Gryphons
It is nice that he mentioned Light Table. I would not be surprised if Swift ends up really benefitting Clojure adoption indirectly. I think one of the big hangups for newcomers is that, if you don't have experience with a Lisp, it's often difficult to understand the benefits of interactive development. If a large amount of new programmers become exposed to it, they'll be more open to other options that provide similar or better interactivity.
Well, except the work on the new language according to the language creator didn't start until July 2010, a month after this post.
Are there any demos/tutorials on using the Swift Xcode playground with cocoa?
The timing's interesting on this one. The blog post is from 19th June 2010; Chris Lattner says he started working on Swift in July 2010, "with only a few people knowing of its existence", but presumably with some approval from higher-ups.
Not to be mixed up with Alexei Shulgin, the popular internet artist from Moscow: http://www.easylife.org/
He is well and alive.
Again, my posts here are "lost" on the typical HN sheep. The average Brit doesn't really care about GCHQ or Snowden or the fact we're wire tapping everything in sight. They. Just. Don't. Care.

The absolute peak of the Snowden story in the UK was when it was disclosed that some GCHQ "Spooks" took an angle grinder and baseball bat to some computers in the basement The Guardian headquarters. Mainly because it reminded them of some sort of comedy sketch. After that blew over and nobody cared anymore. That's why it's only tech publications like The Register seemingly carrying this more recent story.

The reaction in the UK was lacklustre, I believe, because privacy in the UK was already eroded a long time ago. For example you can't even walk 10 meters in London without being recorded on some CCTV system somewhere. Or drive more than a couple streets without your car's registration being recorded on police cameras.

I'm one of the few that actually 1) has an opinion 2) it happens to be contrary to the typical expected American view of "this violates a tiny amount of my privacy therefore let's burn it at the stake".
Launching your project to the world? Try these sites to get the word out
A normal Racket file is a straight forward text file.

In Flappy Bird I used inline images, as in
(define bird <the-bird-image-here> )
This makes it simple to distribute the source and images as a single file, but unfortunately the resulting file is not pretty.

In short: to see the source open it in DrRacket.
Swift Cheat Sheet and Quick Reference
Did your friend buy a Vista machine with roughly equivalent hardware?

I dropped $1200 on a Vista laptop (Inspiron 1520) back in 2006/2007. It wasn't slow (Kubuntu on the same HW was faster though) and I don't recall it ever crashing. Sleep worked reliably although it was more on the order of 30 seconds with a spinning disk. I very much preferred it to XP at the time mainly for the the start menu improvements. I think a lot of the Vista issues - and to a larger extent, complaints about Windows - come down to subpar hardware. It's my suspicion that if you pay less than $1000 for a laptop it's probably not very good except on paper.

I am still using that laptop today - to write this post in fact. About a year ago I replaced the harddrive with an SSD. I can't speak about Vista performance since I installed 8 (now 8.1 Update 1 or whatever nonsense MS calls the latest Windows), but sleep is extremely fast; the instant I open the lid everything is usable.
OS X Yosemite lets you video capture iOS 8 devices with a Lightning cable
Here's a screenshot of the page http://i.imgur.com/C51LXnz.png
As someone with no experience in computer graphics it's always insane to see demos like this. Especially using just around 250 lines of javascript. Really impressive.

Also on the topic, the demo scene stuff is mind blowing, too. [0]

[0]: http://awards.scene.org/awards.php
You forgot to mention that people these days are also incredibly petty. I don't see what's such a big deal about the title. Your quick rule of thumb is precisely the behavior you're pissed about.
This is fine; thanks. Sorry about that...
The ultimate guide to email design 
While a lot of online communication has moved to social media, email is still a very important part of any online marketing campaign. And when we think of marketing emails, what generally comes to mind is HTML email, rather than plain text.Designing for email is much like designing a simple webpage, but there are some key differences you need to take into consideration. You also need to keep in mind that email is a push, rather than pull, communication.
Speculation on a new language from Apple has been going on for ages. Lots of people have discussed the possibility for years. There are no details in this prediction beyond "a new language", some obvious stuff like "it'll be modern", and some wrong stuff like the implication that it will use garbage collection. This is not a very interesting prediction. Just coincidental, and not particularly so.
Eh, it doesn't look that bad. Not enough to make me question the product.
I honestly have no clue what you said and I don't think anyone else did either.
The YC Board of Overseers
As far as I can tell, as long as the DRM is in Flash or Silverlight then some people still hope that "getting rid of DRM" is a winnable fight.

I doubt that's true, myself. It'd be nice, but I don't see it happening.

My online video watching is primarily Netflix with a healthy dose of Hulu Plus, iTunes, and Youtube. Not much of it is available without DRM. That is not a technical choice. That is a commercial choice being made by the people who own the content. Since I'm not going to steal it from them, their choice matters more than mine.

So DRM stays. Might as well have it built-in, more efficient and more secure.
I visited the landing page on Yosemite Safari and all looked smooth. Could it be an extension of yours botched by the update?
Moreover, the specific predictions turned out to be wrong: Swift has no garbage collection (ARC is not GC), and is not a completely clean slate but is using the ObjC runtime.
Given the sheer quantity of people who post their thoughts about Apple, you can probably find one or two who made an accurate prediction about any product release.
> Rain is simulated with a bunch of very short walls in random places.

This made me laugh. I would have never thought of that way of doing it, but before I knew how it was implemented, I didn't even notice! That's a pretty good approximation!
Which is a better security setup, reverse proxying port 80 to 3000 via a stripped, hardened nginx/apache on 80, or connecting your unpriviledged app directly to port 80 via iptables or authbind?
I can see how this is useful if you are using a single node.js server as you wouldn't need any proxy in front of it.

However if you are using a load balancer in front of a handful of node.js app servers, does this offer any advantage over just using an arbitrary port > 1024?
There is a lot of fraud going on in the cryptocoin "IPO" space. It's strange that the SEC went after one of the cases that wasn't fraud. Maybe it was because they knew who he was. Either way they really need to crack down on these unregistered securities. People are being fleeced left and right.
Yeah I guess I was thrown by the "API is still in maintenance mode," which suggests broader implications. It would have been clearer if they'd written:

The following services are not available: app deploys (git push), scaling commands (heroku scale), and one-off dynos (heroku run). All other services are running normally.
I never book a hotel without free wifi. Problem solved.
"He who fights and runs away, may live to fight another day."

What will give him the best long-term outcome? Persisting on this issue while still in India, and getting himself arrested or killed, or preserving his life and freedom so that he may have several more decades to continue this fight?

Martyrdom is massively overrated.
MayDay.us Stage 2
The nice thing about this implementation is that the code is very clear and easy to follow. You could easily make it much shorter if that were the goal.
No Earthly Reason for MARS (probably 2010/11)
Wait, Sam Altman is both the YC president and on the Board of Overseers. If the board is responsible for both hiring/firing the president, how does that work?
A Qubit Has Successfully Been Teleported Using Quantum Physics
Very awesome. This seems like a healthy step in a direction I'm personally excited about: YC as a university (vs. YC as a mini VC).
> Not exactly sure how any of this relates to Netflix playback.

DRM is a black box with privileged access to hardware whose purpose is to download encrypted information to your computer and prevent you (the computer's owner) from reading it. It would be more effective at hiding the installation of a rootkit than at its stated purpose.

> Plus, who actually has the expertise to truly verify that a device has no backdoors? Security Experts? Well they can do the same with these devices (MSE seems to be a W3C standard).

Please identify the location where the source code to the black boxes they require can be viewed for auditing by members of the public.
No, people can condemn whatever they want. I don't think having a healthy skepticism in all things precludes having strong opinions about what's wrong with the world, in fact I agree with much of the basis of what you're saying. Heck, just a few months ago I walked away from several thousand dollars that I could've had just for letting someone put my name on a software patent. It would've been nothing to me to do that, but I know I would've felt dirty because of my views on software patents.

If all you want to do is preach to the choir, fine, but if you care about making a difference in the world by changing the minds of people who either don't know about these things or are on the fence about it, then your choice of words is going to drive away fence sitters and possibly discredit others who are on your side.

This is exactly what RMS does, and it hasn't exactly worked well for him. Look at the phrases you use: "imaginary property", "attacking justice", "destroying the future". Those are strong words with loaded meaning- just using phrases like that is a rhetorical trick that most people are going to see through immediately. Those kinds of words should be reserved for things which are facepalmingly obvious; simple binary issues which have no gray areas, and are not things on which reasonable people can disagree in any respect. The fact that you present it in such a way is going to be interpreted by the audience in one of two ways:

(1) You really believe that all (or almost all) IP law the world over is really one of those blindingly obvious binary issues relating to basic morality that has few or no gray areas, to the degree that you don't care about changing anyone's mind; in fact, you would like to shame anyone who disagrees with you or is on the fence about any aspect it. You put it up there with pedophilia and ethnic cleansing and all the other things for which there is pretty much absolute consensus on in most of the developed world.

- or -

(2) You know how complicated it all is, and the history and rationale for it and so on, but you think that the people you're talking to are lesser minds who are only going to be swayed by hyperbolic, emotional language and loaded terminology.

Either way, it's not constructive, and may actually be destructive to the cause (again, see RMS/PETA/Earth First/etc.). I don't think that's where you're coming from- I think you mean well and are probably young and very passionate about this stuff, and for the most part I think you're on the right side and hopefully on the side of history. I just remember spending years with much the same mindset, without even realizing it, and it didn't help anyone. Another danger of using bile and invective and loaded terminology as a form of argumentation is that after a while you might start believing it yourself, in which case (1) and/or (2) become not just what you're mistakenly communicating but what you actually believe. And that is the path to the Dark Side. :(
End-To-End – OpenPGP Chrome extension from Google
I was so happy when I first heard about this. Silverlight is always really really buggy for me.
What is the technical difference between board of directors and board of overseers?
Things happen when people make them happen.
So the thesis is the only reason they would switch to LLVM is if they wanted to abstract away from Objective-C?

I'm no compiler expert but I do know Apple rolled out Automatic Reference Counting in 2011 (one year after this post), a pretty f'ing massive compiler-based feature. That was probably the biggest leap forward in Objective-C in a decade. For those not familiar, that's the thing that automates memory management but without the runtime overhead of garbage collection, instead using static code analysis to figure out where to compile in the commands to release memory. So I'm guessing LLVM had something to do with that.
Software by Africans for Africans
Interesting that PG is not there.
If you look down into the comments (on the original post), he says "My guess for what xlang would actually look like is rather close to Objective-C without the C." Pretty good prediction considering they used almost the same phrase in the announcement.
The problem is that the laws in India are very poorly worded, often misunderstood and arbitrarily applied.

All of this gives the overworked & corrupt Indian police almost limitless discretion on what to enforce & against whom.
It also provides a sufficiently motivated grudge bearer an easy way to Shut up someone (or worse) that is making an unpopular argument.

There are several laws in this ugly bucket -
"Hurting the religious sentiments of a group"

"Defamation..."

"Obscene content"

"Promoting Enemity between religions"

"Inciting Violence..."

The extremely vague "IT Act" also adds a digital dimension to this nonsense - where you have people Jailed for "liking" Facebook posts http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2013/10/03/freedom_on_...

Just a terrible mess over there legally....

As if this was not enough rationalists are always in danger in a place like India (having personally been affected by this I can attest that this is infact very real - two reasonable people can argue but it is hard to talk to some one threatening you).
One more link to put the very real threat this gentlemen faces in context:http://www.in.com/news/current-affairs/cbi-files-fir-in-nare...

Dr Dabholkar was gunned down in broad daylight, while out for a walk on a busy road.
Supreme Court rules for Limelight over Akamai in key patent test
IOS Software Engineer – SOMA Agency
It's a bit of a Rorschach test, sometimes. People see what's familiar to them.
The same way a CEO sits on the Board of Directors which is also responsible for both hiring/firing the CEO/President. Meaning that if fired he will be removed from the board meeting and/or he will have to recuse himself from meetings discussing his role as President.
Just stop coming here. Deleting your account doesn't stick it to "the man" anymore than not coming here.

"how did the downvote-jury chosen? why are they superior? what's the rule for them to downvote? for me I just feel they are a group of jerks lurking, if you call this democratic, fuck it."

I thought this was pretty well documented. You have to have a certain number of points to get the downvote functionality. This is to prevent the exact kind of shit that you're complaining about. The people that are here for 3 months and then angst for "the gold old days", then downvote everything. I've not even been around here for that long, but I've been a member of the internet for long enough to know that communities are fluid.
This is MDMA we're talking about... not psychedelics. I've known people (SWIM and all that) who have taken it purely to abort a bad LSD trip. Pure MDMA is not going to produce anxiety. You can even be fairly functional on it, depending on the dose.

There are plenty of "I really wish this was over" drugs, and MDMA simply isn't one of them.
"I wish we were in a field with genuine professionalism, but I don't see much sign of it."
There are 9 people, I guess they vote, but there could be a split board about the President, hopefully that will not happen anytime soon.
The "same DRM" is inherently fragmented because of CDM plugins. But, yes, this is the W3C's EME.
It does actually. That looks like a great bookshelf to me.
Why not suited for this forum? I am interested in this information and how, if at all, it has been used by government actors.
Biggest Facebook page for Swift News/Help
Well, yes, that's certainly the hope. But it's not necessarily a guarantee. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, and the thing about addressing it from the egg side alone is that not all eggs are chicken eggs. Even if you make Linux games, it's not guaranteed to result in chickens. Valve hasn't managed to come up with a single value proposition to make gaming actually better on Linux than Windows, or to come up with any games that run significantly better on Linux than Windows, or any exclusive Linux games.
That's really impressive.

I've seen some people suggest that voxels are like sprites for 3d programming (as far as sheer simplicity goes), but this strikes even more so as that. How does this compare to using actual 3d/voxels? Can you still have interesting physics or do you miss out on a lot?
I can CHOOSE to not use Silverlight or Flash. I know it seems like an RMS way of thinking, but with plugins I can choose not to use them.

Now, I have no choice. And the EME spec branches out beyond HTML5 Video. If additional working groups dictate it, soon you won't even be able to view page source or take content.
Hubble takes the most comprehensive picture assembled of the evolving Universe
I don't think I need to say C++ has been used to build great things. The web browser you're using is very likely built in it.

But it's also been the security nightmare of the century. And been used to build the most horrible messy codebases in existence.

C++ encourages coding style that leads to very complicated execution flow. Multiple inheritance. What's the actual concrete method this thing is going to call? Fire up the debugger and set a breakpoint...

Operator overloading. Yes, there are good uses for it. Like math code. Or some container implementations. Unfortunately it's often just hiding what's really going on or worse, bugs. Yeah, you're so clever overloading /-operator for building file paths...

Exceptions - there to provide untold number of possible execution paths making a typical C++ program flow nearly impossible to comprehensively understand. Exceptions seem to discourage from actually handling the errors as opposed doing something about it at the call site. There's often little you can do five nested calls above, where the exception is caught. Handling means almost always a some sort of logging function or user notification, not actually doing something about it. It's easy to forget it's not only about resource management. Side effects matter too! RAII doesn't undo IO.

Those features hide bugs and make C++ maintenance a true challenge.

Of course one can earn a steady income writing C++...
Well, that may be true for GCC but Ruby, Python & co are well integrated into many third party IDEs. So that point, at least, is moot.
obviously i'd recuse myself from a vote about me :) and it's a big board anyway.
RepRap 3D Printer for our worker owned cooperative
Why not call it "Board of Directors"? The word "overseer" still pretty much only refers to the middle-managers of slave plantations.
Agreed.

Also, EME isn't limited only to traditional Movie & TV uses of video. It could be used for web-like content (rendered and encoded at the server) with un-blockable ads.