skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bitcoin Across America (Running from Miami to SF) almost finished.
Hi HN,

On January 26th, I took off running from Miami Beach, Florida with the goal of running all the way to San Francisco. I did this to raise awareness for the homeless epidemic in America and Bitcoin.

I know that sounds weird, but it makes more sense when you know I run a crypto currency funded homeless outreach.

Anyway. I just made it into Sunnyvale. Will be in Mountain View soon. Frolicking up El Camino Real, as I'm not actually supposed to be in San Francisco until Saturday at 4pm (Finishing at Bitpay Office / Att Park). Anyone who wants to talk bitcoin, distance running, or homelessness is welcome to hit me up.

Now you know.

Jason
"I find it frustrating the extent to which Europeans seem to believe that their own governments aren't spying on them"

That is because they don't at the same extent that Americans.

First, although Europe's economy is bigger than the US when you consider all countries combined, each state has its own Security services. Being fractured means they are much less powerful than 50 billions a year NSA.

It also means they could decide what to share and what not with each other.

Second, they don't control tech companies like the US does thanks to the fascist(the State controlling all businesses) Patriot Act Laws. You have the option to collaborate with them or not without going to jail if you tell anybody.

Europe has the scars of similar fascist laws in Germany, Italy, Poland... and they are very careful abut them.
A diamond in the rough you are ;-P
got me too :S
His reasons for saying Snowden is a traitor boils down to "it's harder to sell stuff overseas now" which boils down to "I'm making less money because of him, therefore I don't like what he did, therefore I choose disapproving label from choices of "Hero" and "Traitor"."

He even spells out that logic in his comment. At least he's transparent about where his priorities are:

Andreessen's Morality Flow Chart:
1. Does it make me more money (-> good) or less money (-> bad)?
And WebKit was indeed kept closed for several years.
What were they doing to "convince a lot of devs to only support XInput"?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ee41...
I get that. But instead of saying "I'm upset with how the NSA's actions are impacting the revenue/growth of our technology sector, which is a major source of new jobs in the US, etc etc" he is talking about he thinks Snowden is a traitor.

This feels like a wasted opportunity.

He isn't making appeals for transparency or discussing policy ideas or legal frameworks where the NSA can continue its mission as an intelligence agency and yet not damage American businesses. Marc Andreessen comes off very badly in this interview.
Very much agreed. That fact that the consequences hurt his world is why is he wants to publicly shame Snowden as a traitor. If Andreesen can't see past investments and actually into public policy and our rights as American citizens, I'm very worried.
This is pretty interesting stuff, esp since I live in Chicago. There could be lots of neat data apps created from all this data.

One thing I found interesting is the data in "Current Employee Names, Salaries, and Position Titles." The mayor is actually the 2nd highest paid employee (surprised me) at $216,210. The highest paid is the superintendent of police, making $260,004. Pretty neat data sets, thanks for sharing the link!
Ask HN: Anyone here host a conference, event, workshop or any other gathering?
If so, I'd love to chat with you to learn more about how you organize and sell tickets.

Looking for those who host in person events (not online)
I think the difference is that people could rationalize that warrantless wiretapping would never happen to them -- it was something that only happened to "criminals" -- whereas the new revelations show that the NSA is indeed spying on all of us all the time.

(I'm not saying I agree that warrantless wiretapping is not a problem -- just that I can see how it might not grab people.)
Construct 2 r171 (Beta)
Really nice service, I'd like to use it. The support page says a few things about importing, but what about exporting? Not sure whether I overlooked it or not.
infographics are nice but as long as all platforms and commonly used clients (not just email ones) have an EASY to use GnuPG implementation this seems bound to fail.

Google's initiative seems like a good idea of course.
The command line utility itself could use some MAJOR love tho.

And even the best GUI clients are very confusing for new users.
When I explain the concepts behind the trust model they get it. When they have to use the UI they dont find what they need.
Gotcha - thanks so much for writing this up. I'll see about actually implementing this :)
Mhmm. "Outrage does not equal surprise" is a phrase I remember reading in comments on a Skepchick blog post once, and I thought it was a very good way to put it. I wish it was a more widely-understood concept.
I love how this forum talks about "hack/ing" but when privesc bugs come around, nothing.
Isn't it the goal of an artist to create an imaginary world? ;)
Want to highlight some of your specific pain points?
Um, what?

scolding != assaulting, no?

But of course it might have been better if the kids’ parents took up the matter between them.
Cache because it's down: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jMSHaEi...
> it allowed the high frequency traders to peek at the ballots others were sending in to the newspaper before they arrived, in turn giving them the ability to cast their votes using information not yet available to the rest of the market.

From what I gathered from Lewis's book, the crux of the problem is that people were doing their trades in multiple exchanges and that HFTs were simply noting trades in the fastest exchanges to reach (like BATS) and using that information in exchanges that were farther away.

To take his analogy, it would be like using the results published in another newspaper the day before to determine your ballot choice.
If performance is an issue, you can drop down back to JS using %x{} or ``. Good idea to do this for mathematical operations.
Graphite Series #5: Stress Testing Carbon Caches
In this blog post, I'll go through the process of stress testing a single carbon cache process and analyze the behavior as more and more metrics are published. I will also introduce the Stresser, a simple metric publishing tool.
Once the wireless dongle gets released then I will jump in. Not a big fan of having to plug it in. For now I'll stick with the 360 controller I have.
We have a bit of oversight for surveillance with the Office of Surveillance Commissioners - https://osc.independent.gov.uk/

The reports are interesting reading. I'm not sure how accurate they are.

I am less concerned by GCHQ spying (they have huge caches but access to it is supposedly controlled and they have limited searches of it) than I am by the breaches of privacy that happen every day by local authorities.

London has more CCTV than anywhere else in the world (and probably more than some entire nations). This footage used to find its way onto TV shows - trashy clip compilations of burglars doing stupid things.

People who want to send their child to a particular school are spied on to make sure they live in the intake zone. (See also applicants for on-street parking permits; London congestion charge zone; etc etc)

There are very many people spying on citizens in the UK and most of them have more impact on day to day life than GCHQ, and are very poorly controlled in comparison to GCHQ.

This is not me saying that I think GCHQ are right to slurp all this data. I think it's a weird failure of oversight and of journalism. (GCHQ are specifically mentioned in many bits of relevant legislation as being excluded from that law.)
Salaries of Fictional TV Characters
Instanomz-Restaurant Food Delivery
His insincerity is at odds with someone like Phil Spencer, and it's not a surprise that Phil is in the position he is in now.
What's your thoughts on this? I think it was a smart move by Apple because the carriers will see an huge increase in SMS and voice activity (which should = more money for them if folks have to increase their plans).

It's also a good move because it shows that Apple isn't set on completely cutting them out of the picture. They could have easily gone the "All FaceTime audio/video" route which cuts the carries out of the equation, except from a data perspective, which is probably the most taxing aspect on a network.

But, what does this mean for Apple? Maybe the carriers will be more willing to play ball with Apple because they are not trying to completely exclude them from the equation?
Looks cool. When it reaches 1.0 you might want to include Beaker: http://BeakerNotebook.com
We've been using this internally for a few weeks now and it has been really, really awesome. Currently just Python, but should be feasible for Ruby, PHP, and other dynamic langauges too.
Yep, we're building that, it will be out with the site redesign coming out in the next couple weeks. Until then, if you'd like an export, contact support and we can send you a standard bookmark export file.
Snowden is rat, he broke the code of silence. US Govt must punish him (or his parents GF etc.) severely to deter any furter incident.

He should be in FBI's most wanted list and Govt should offer some prize on his head.

capisce!
Which part? Andreessen taking his anger out on Snowden or the NSA's tampering? To the latter, yes, yes I do. If for no other reason than the consequences of such tampering are obvious if ever discovered and nothing ever stays secret forever. They made the decision and we can only assume they did it knowing full well what would happen should it ever come to light, leak or not. Would things have been much different if this was discovered 5 years from now? How about 10? Can we assume they would stop tampering with equipment at any point without disclosure?

IMHO no agency that is being funded to fulfill American public interests should be making choices that override, or put at serious risk, the needs of the public just to make their job more efficient/effective. Even if we accept reinterpretations of what public "needs" might be, this was a decision who's risks would be extremely costly should disclosure ever occur and it shouldn't have happened, perhaps even outweighing the benefits (to the public) they offered, which we may never get a straight answer as to what they were.
Nope. What would blow my mind is watching you engage in a non-passive aggressive manner with people. Let's see if you can!
> The fallout from the Snowden leaks have hurt U.S. technology firms' ability to sell their products overseas, he added.

It's pretty damn weird that an avowed and successful capitalist is arguing against a buyer's right to get an honest evaluation of a product. He'd be talking out the other side of his face if the same information had leaked out of China.
Facebook Banned This Guy From Running Ads Even Though He Has A $500K Budget
An open letter to women and men in tech
My wife does event planning professionally. I've organized a few hackathons. email me at amfarrell [at] mit [dot] edu.
Without corroboration, you couldn't really talk about this too much in a public setting, because you'll sound like a conspiracy nut.

There were enough hints out there to realize that there is mass surveillance, but if you suggested the size and scope of what is actually happening in say 2008, people would think that you are a nut.
City of Los Angeles Data Portal
7 reasons America will fail on climate change
Some Thoughts on iOS8
How a Chatlet works in SVYFT.
Europe has no scars: They still have the laws. Germany is doing a big push to bring all their cloud hosted data back in the country - because the German process for requiring data on German citizens requires no judicial oversight, and they regularly request vast swaths of data for minor crimes.

No international company will host German users data in Germany. Germany has plenty of protections for citizens of other countries from being spied upon, but views it's own citizens as it's slaves.

IANAL, just a tech worker frustrated by what my lawyers are telling me.
Although I agree with most of your assessment I have to disagree with this:

>> They had so much potential when they launched and in the last year or so they have just fell behind.

Fallen behind who or what? They are pretty much the YouTube for audio now. If you browse any of the major music sites of even small blogs they embed SoundCloud. When an artist releases an album stream a week before the release and publishes is on Rolling Stone etc. - it's nearly always with a SoundCloud embed.

I agree they really get to fix the product because it's very buggy and missing features that would make the playback experience better (as someone with music on it the artist side of things is quite good) but I don't see anyone coming and overtaking them anytime soon. There aren't really any viable competitors.
I don't see how this meshes with the facts of the matter. The line of thinking that leads you to the conclusion "Apple will surely open-source Swift" could just as easily lead one to the conclusion "Apple has surely already promised to open-source Swift," which is obviously not correct.

The fact of the matter is that they haven't and haven't expressed any interest whatsoever in doing so. The fact that it has no downsides for them and that keeping it closed will alienate people has clearly not been a compelling reason to even talk about open-sourcing Swift up to this point. So the question is, what would cause it to become compelling to Apple in the future?

I don't think it's impossible that Apple would open-source it, but I don't think the evidence clearly points in that direction.
Presumably 0, since there are already people who can legitimately claim multiple years of experience with Swift.
Vonjour Curating the Next Phase of BYOD Movement
A couple of months ago, we received great feedback from hacker news, so I wanted to share what we are up to. Recently, we crowdsourced salaries of fictional TV characters and we published the results on this blog post. We created anonymous profiles for the fictional characters and asked Salary Fairy members to predict their salaries. If you have any questions about this project or Salary Fairy in general, I'm here to answer any questions. Thanks a lot!
I don't see this as similar?

overtone = Composing with code (Something Music Suite isn't really doing of itself

Music-Suite = Creating, processing or analyzing music (Also notating from my point of view)
"Secret" is far less secret than you think.
HFT provides liquidity, and extracts a price for providing that value.

HFT seems like stealing only because they are using advanced technology methods to make money, whereas in the 1980s and before market makers routinely manipulated the spread and pocketed likely a similar percent of trading profits.

At least the online brokerages and pioneers of HFT broke down the antiquated 1/8 stock price ticks and lowered the spread and per share transaction costs.
One of the nicer public data portals I've seen.

I'm not surprised to see that salaries are the the most popular data set by far. I was working for a public agency during the first year they made salary information readily available.

There were two main types in the deluge of complaints:

1.) The significant others of people who had been lying about their income.

2.) People dripping with rage that 'uneducated' people (jobs that don't require a degree) were collecting 'outrageous' (lower middle-class) salaries.
Simon Says, but different (works better on smartphones)
Some of Snowden's claims (and some of Greenwald's) strain credibility

Maybe, but he's so far been a much more reliable information source than his opponents. Lacking real efforts of transparency from the NSA, I think that it's prudent to give Snowden wide latitude.

Of course Snowden wasn't a traitor.

Snowden was faced with a staggering ethical dilemma. There was no "right answer" to what he should have done because the system was/is fundamentally broken.
Flash was already in decline before iOS had a significant impact on it. It was in decline for the same reasons Apple did not allow it on iOS: poor UI, terrible performance, and huge energy usage.

Both WebOS and Android had every intention of using Flash as a feature to differentiate themselves from Apple. If it were a matter of sheer marketshare, that should have been enough--Android has more customers than iOS.

But Adobe could never deliver a Flash runtime with acceptable performance, and even Android does not ship it anymore. Apple did not force them to drop it; it just wasn't good enough.
I can't see how that would be good at all for Twitter. Spotify makes no money. All their revenues go to paying for the content and that's unlikely to change soon. Twitter would just be purchasing a really cool, really heavy anchor.
My team and I run a number of events each year - happy to share my experiences. Email address in my profile.
The clustering Just Works, with autodiscovery via unicast, multicast, Azure API, EC2 API, or Google Compute Engine API.
"In the Java space" meaning deployed in a Java servlet container. Both are stand-alone search servers, exposing their API for search and indexing through HTTP using XML and/or JSON.
The second-largest religion in each state
Netflix-Verizon feud flares up again
Microsoft Opens Kinect for Windows v2 Sensor Pre-Orders at $199
Agreed - one might think Snowden misguided, but his reasonings seem to hold up given certain prior assumptions (e.g., allegiance to the constitution).

I would also be quite shocked if other major Powers didn't have a really good idea of what exactly the NSA is doing: they probably know better than most publics. Spies are gonna spy on spies, and that should be expected. The question is the limits on the spying the law & polity have put in place. I agree with Snowden that the polity of the US has a right to understand the scope of what's being done in their (our) name (specifics I think are quite fine being kept to trade secrets).
That used to be true, but these days IE is pretty aggressive about disabling things, and telling you when they're slowing you down. Doesn't help everyone but seems to help some.
> If the US spies on a German citizen, the US can't go and arrest said citizen without the German government's consent.

What isn't true anymore (replace Germany with Pakistan for an extreme example) and don't really matter anymore, because it looks like all the mafias that own governments are supporting each other nowadays.
where's the page to join the boycott of Andreessen companies?
It's unfortunate to see this, but there are so many constantly reinforced stereotypes regarding geeks and 'geek culture' that very few want to embrace it.

Take a look at the (terrible, imo) TV show Big Bang Theory. The main characters are purposely socially awkward and distant.

Real-world geeks are typically far from that: far more exist on the socialable side of the spectrum than those who are constantly portrayed in the media. :(
Something like Google Alerts could be designed easily with elasticsearch. There's probably no other technology (off the shelf) that could be used for an use case like that.
IMO it's cooler that Berlin has a company like SoundCloud that makes money! I don't know the numbers but base don what they're charging and the number of people I see with pro accounts they've got to be making decent revenues. Much cooler than a company that makes no money and gets bought by one of the big tech companies.
I have worried about this incentive too, but they've just yesterday released some software that moves in this direction (though characterizing it as a special case for people who need extra security). But in the past I feared that they would even periodically update Gmail in ways that would break compatibility with browser-based encryption; I think the fact that they're publishing their own end-to-end browser-based e-mail encryption software shows that they're at a minimum willing to accept it as a supported feature.
Amazon's 3D smartphone may finally be set for release
Why did the author have to hire someone abroad to come in? We have so much talent sitting right here in the US.

For example, I live in a small town with 3 high end customer service call centers that I know about (there's probably more I don't), and the rates they pay are well below national average because the cost of living is low here. In my area one could build a team of world-class customer service reps in a matter of weeks, pay them better than any place in the area, and have an experienced and high quality staff immediately available when more staff are needed.

Of course I'm not knocking Santiago; having the ability and the qualities necessary to build a quality customer service team is extremely valuable no matter where you are.
Right, the unsafe is an implementation detail. I guess I still consider that 'using' unsafe even if you didn't write it yourself.
You don't gain much at that point, and that's the aim: a process that allows the best libraries to smoothly progress from community projects to official components, without any major disruptive events along the way.
It's funny you should mention Poland, what with Operation Hyacinth.

And Italy? Their former PM was convicted of wiretapping his political opponents and arranging to have transcripts published in the media, which he controlled.

Basically, the simplest response I can give to your comment is that I don't agree and don't believe this argument.

You are right that Germany is more limited in its capabilities than the NSA is.

But your belief about the limits of European surveillance presupposes that EU governments aren't colluding to pool their resources and circumvent their own statutory boundaries, when there is in fact evidence that this does happen.

Further: the aspects of NSA surveillance that seem to have people most up in arms are also not hugely expensive. The NSA's targeted exploit programs are not multi-billion-dollar investments. Can NSA decrypt things that the BND can't? Almost surely yes! But direct cryptanalysis attacks, the sort that are abetted by huge data centers in Utah or wherever, aren't the problem. What happens instead is that sovereign SIGINT services have organized to take advantage of latent Internet flaws.
I would argue that the underlying activity that leads to a cryptocoin being awarded has been the single point of flaw that prevents it from being reliable. If running a tor node and you are able to contribute to the greater good, I think that is a far more valuable proposition than calculating increasingly complex problems across multiple graphic cards that produces absolutely no value other than consume electricity and generate pollution.

I can definitely see the problem if an incentive was offered say on a stackoverflow type of website, because it would directly hinder the quality of the questions but in the case of running a Tor node, it's only a matter of turning it on or off. If someone decides to run it on a better hardware, they would be compensated more.

I'm really excited for TorCoin, it is a serious alternative to Bitcoin.
>Without Any Interesting Semantics

You don't use a drill because of how interesting it is that the shape of the drill bit combined with its rotation lift material out of the hole. You do it because it works, and is efficient. A programming language is a tool, not a toy.
>If the US spies on a German citizen, the US can't go and arrest said citizen without the German government's consent.

why arrest when we can blackmail them. (evil laugh)
On http://www.kifi.com you can select a Keep an on the right hand side you'll see a button to "Unkeep". http://bit.ly/1kNnQpg

Also if you are on a page that you want to unkeep, you can click to unkeep from the keeper tile.

You can also unkeep when you are on the page, by clicking on the keeper in the lower right hand corner.
I can't wait until this is available for Ruby!

Can we exclude certain arguments so we don't capture sensitive data?