skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Like anything, it can be abused, but I don't think that outweighs the benefits.

In a recent past, my great-grand-father was arrested and beaten up by the Gestapo for his political views (sorry for the emotional argument but i think it's appropriate). My point is that even if you perceive your country as a democracy where the leaders behave for the best, it may not be so forever. And as history shows, it can change very fast. It's important that we have strong laws that protect the people from their leaders.
Prolonged Sitting Linked to Increased Risk of Certain Cancers
Out of curiosity, how heavily do you tax your consumer SSDs? I have a Samsung 840 in my desktop for the system and applications (while keeping media and big files on a platter) and after approximately one year I am at 1.5TB of data written. That seems to give me another 200 years before the wear indicator reaches 0.
When I read such things ("...because the analyst reading or listening to an individual’s communication will inevitably forget about it anyway."), it fills me with deep hate against those people. How dare they take us for such idiots?
Is it really a fallacy?

Part of democracy is accepting that you don't necessarily agree with everyone about everything, and you have to compromise.
... You totally work in AFT, don't you?
It's highly debatable that you can fix eyes like that. Optometry developed historically as a practice of prescribing eye exercises for "vision therapy," but most optometrists these days measure refractions to fit corrective eyeglasses to their patients, just like ophthalmologists. I know several people, a few of them quite closely, who have convinced themselves that they are improving their vision by eye exercises or by refraining from using prescribed corrective eyeglasses, but what they are mostly doing is kidding themselves as they go through life with needlessly blurred vision.

The way to be sure whether or not eyes can be fixed like that is to set up an experiment with random assignment to treatment and control groups, and to have investigators who are "blind" (an unfortunately coincidental word in this context) to each subject's assignment to this or that group test their vision carefully. I confidently predict that any treatment effects found in such a study with the methods you read about on Reddit will be of small effect, of brief duration, and obtained at more trouble than the improvement in vision that comes from wearing prescribed corrective lenses.
Useful article, I use lxml myself. Find that this is a good resource: http://jakeaustwick.me/python-web-scraping-resource/
There are a few problems in here.

Most notably though, I find terrible the statement that "we have a democracy" when essentially what we're talking about are tools whose abuse (which is going to be very welcomed by the government[s]) is exactly to suppress the democracy itself. Not only this, but also that fact the this is put in a context where government[s] are increasingly given powers to silence dissidence and legally rape people (or minorities, at worst), in an immoral (probable cause hello!) or worst, unlawful way (Snowden docs here).

All of this, with the fact that the "benefits" are not proven, and are actually very arguable. It's naive to think that indiscriminately listening to a billion conversations is an easy way to investigate "terrorism".

I don't think honestly that it's a well informed opinion to assume that we have a democracy just because we can vote somebody; more specifically, black/hispanic low-class people would not have the same opinion, at least, in some countries.
That's actually what StreetView is required to do in Germany:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/germanys-complicate...

http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-many-germ...
The communists claimed to have a democracy too. A state can maintain all the forms of democracy whilst in reality being run on a completely different basis by a parallel internal oligarchy.

"If you have a problem with it, stand for election" is facile: First past the post electoral district representative governments are almost designed to eliminate single issue candidates from ever having any electoral power. The only way to make a difference is to convince the main parties that this matters & that takes years of ground work against a well funded group which will oppose your every move using its access to the machinery of government. It isn't called the military-industrial-congressional complex for nothing you know.

As an aside, very few people have a problem with targeted government surveillance. What I have a problem with is the dragnet sweeping up of every communication, keeping as much as possible for future use against anyone and anybody whilst keeping this policy secret from the population in question. Historically this kind of action has been seen as a signifier of a totalitarian states who are afraid of their own population revolting against them and I fear that the UK/US (and by extension the five-eyes countries) have put in place the full machinery for a panopticon, in which any dissent against the ruling cadres is quietly quashed. This isn't a road I personally wish to see my country taking, yet the politicians and public at large seem blind to the risk, handing over sweeping powers to the security services with almost no oversight or control.
having a policeman standing in your kitchen to prevent domestic dispute, ensuring security.

a webcam in all bedrooms would ensure more security and possibly prevent other types of crime.

most people wouldn't go for those - some security measures are too invasive and ripe for abuse to support.

unless you've missed it, your location and contact endpoints are now permanently stored, and some of your conversations both written and audible are.

if one of your associates is within a certain number of hops from someone deemed undesirable - so are you.

the reason the london met phone hacking scandal resulted in outcry was that the general public could understand what happened.

this is slightly beyond their ken but it's the same problem - questionable powers that are ripe for abuse.
What Various Studies Tell Us About Big Data And Its Future
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF1NUposXVQ
Palaeolithic diet: Should we all eat like cavepeople?
A friend of mine used to make a sell speech chips turned me on to them. I went to a class hosted by a Cypress vendor a couple of years ago. I was excited by the potential for mixed digital and analog designs. Unfortunately, their development tool chain really let me down. After a couple of updates it stopped working and no amount of registry cleaning or re-installing would fix it.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one who had problems:
http://failheap-challenge.com/showthread.php?4488-My-rant-ab...

"Designer was a great system for making PSoC's do shit, it worked quite well. Lately though, it's gone to hell leading to some wild speculation around the office of outsourcing, disgruntled employees, corporate favoritism, or a combination thereof. It's gotten to the point where Designer won't even install on my dev system, and it only actually STARTS on one machine in the office."
Downvoting for "you people", a phrase which pretty much universally seems to indicate dismissive contempt and disinterest in engaging the other party's point of view.
> I believe it helps ensure security.

Your beliefs are wrong, as we have been shown that this mass surveillance has failed to prevent even one terrorist attack since its inception.

Couple that with the immense amount of (wasted) tax payer money it costs to run and you've got a disgusting abuse of power and resources in exchange for the mere illusion of security to those who fail to actually do the research required to see through the bullshit.
Does anybody have an idea when the first Ubuntu phone will finally drop? I've been waiting for ages...
Show HN: background processes launcher and stdout(s) merger in Node.js
When you have secret laws that protect secret proceedings or as we actually have now, agencies that operate in a legal black hole and are completely unaccountable then yes, the idea that this is somehow a democracy is comical.
Noone has mentioned there that they are afraid of their loveletters to be publicly available, as a consequence of surveilance. (It is possible, but whatever)

Instead, our problem, is that surveilance is being used as a an invaluable tool for autocracy.

And the question is not whether they will use surveilance for oppressing government opposition, but when if not already.
>I consider myself an educated, well-informed person, and I have no problem whatsoever with government surveillance

Well, I don't consider that stance well-informed.

Surely its not informed of the tons of abuses of surveillance from "democratic" governments. And its also not informed of thousands of people rotting in jail, targeted by the police, tortured etc. Perhaps people who think that way, believe that all governments are like their local bubble -- or that it has to be some third-world dictatorship for those abuses to happen.

But I'm pretty sure they're also misinformed about the abuses in their local bubble too.

If you're an American for example, you might not know FBI has an attrocious record (under McCarthyism, under the the direction of Hoover, in the sixties against students and black protesters, up to Occupy Wall Street). If you're British, you might not know of an equally disgusting history. And don't get me started on places like Italy, Greece, Spain etc. Or Latin America for that matter.

Or they know those things but just don't care, because either "this time is different" ("and now we're fully and trully a transparent democracy" -- which is the most laughable ignorance one can muster), or they agree with the abuses.

But there's an even easier explanation: they only care for themselves, and since they don't ever do anything to challenge things you think they are safe.

And it might even be true.

But those that do challenge things (from civil rights activists to new political parties, and from artists to people experimenting with new ways of living), are the ones who make society better. Not the cover-my-asses. And it's those people who challenge things that very much are targeted by the abuses.

And what exactly are the benefits? Living in a nanny state?

[edit: fixed typo, child commenter: you a funny man]
I used to think similar to this, even though I was and grew up poor. But after working with a few NGOs I've found the system is designed to screen out the people that need the help. At the same time the people that know how to work the system get the most aid.

Most welfare requires that you report 0 income, so instead of searching for work working welfare becomes the job. Showing up every day to the local office, wait in line, fill in papers, come back tomorrow, and repeat.

A few years ago I had a friend quit her job as a social worker because she was expecting a baby and her company didn't provide health insurance. She was able to get Medicaid by going on unemployment as a single mother with child. Then she had to stay unemployed because the cost of daycare was more than her income. Social welfare in the US is so screwed up because you have to be backed into a corner to get it and then have to stay there because your time becomes devoted to keeping track of all the paperwork.
OpenNVM – new interfaces for non-volatile memory (like flash)
How To Write A Startup Marketing Plan
Dont forget Beer!
I think the common theme is Minecraft's ecosystem. Mojang addresses a problem (EULA-breaking monetization within the ecosystem) by changing the rules to address the problem. What they should do is circumvent the immediate problem by redefining the ecosystem itself.

Furnishing developers with a stable, predictable API redefines the ecosystem, and creating an "app store" for mods (et cetera...) could finance it, with ongoing revenue. With Mojang's current attitude I see it being more of a "google play", especially given the ease that mods could be repackaged. Still, better than having kids pull executable code off forums.
My initial thoughts are:

- Exclusive rights to the brand name. [You mean you invented the name and you're going to let me use it?]

- Ownership of dot-com domain. [£3/year]

- Professionally designed logo. [search for "logo" on google, find one you like, try and copy in Inkscape like I did [1]. It's not gonna be brilliant but it will probably be as good as the ones shown and you can change it later when you're earning £££'s]

- One page business plan. [Download a business plan template, fill in the questions. Fair enough though, this guy might be a genius at this stuff but I'd need to know a LOT more before spending $500]

- One hour personal consultation. [I can talk business-y stuff for an hour too. Especially if I've got a one page business plan I can go through point by point.]

And let's say that the person selling these is a professional entreprenuer with the correct experience, and that these are a bargain because you're going to get invaluable advice on starting up. Well - he/she hasn't done a very good job of conveying that on the site itself....?

[1] - http://simplyapped.com/ (haven't finished this site yet by the way)
That may have been why copyright was created, but over time, the justification has evolved, at least in Europe, into one based on the moral rights of the author.

My personal opinion is that copyright should never expire. Think about it: you can have an indefinite government granted monopoly over land, something you didn't create, something that existed before you and will exist after you, but you have weaker protections over something you brought to life? Something that would not exist without you? To me, the moral case for indefinite copyright protection is stronger than the one for indefinite land ownership.
"the Colosseum, the fountains of Florence, the canals of Venice, the Alps, Lambos, pizza, pasta, the good life in Tuscany, Michelangelo, da Vinci, the leaning tower of Pisa, opera, fashion and, of course, colorful gestures"

It's always irritating to be reminded of how the rest of the world sees my country: as a series of (mostly correct) stereotypes.
I have a probably stupid question for you regarding ECC: in general, is ECC cryptography safe from attacks such as "Dual_EC_DRBG",where the curve itself was (potentially) constructed specifically to be breakable? I.e. if I use one of the publicly recommended curves, am I safe or could the curve also be broken by its author?
We know that the security state is spending large amounts of money employing people to run 'personas' on social media sites, make blog comments etc etc. Sometimes these are spectacularly obvious, but there are plenty who are good enough at their work to look plausible.

The goal is to create the feeling amongst those who are seeking to change the status quo that the population is not with them & that changing things will be difficult, whilst at the same time creating the impression for anyone reading the comments that certain viewpoints are unpopular or contested.
GCE now support SSD Disk and Load Balancing
Very cute; but the pricing seems a bit low. I'd expect your support, your backing, your advice. You're never going to fit a good logo design + domain name + advice in there for that little money.

For example; I own videoview.com, with a cute matching logo (http://howtowriteabusinessplan.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/0... ,) which I'd be interested to hand over because of a trademark dispute for the exact thing we were using it for (recruitment video interviews.)

I'm pretty sure you can create a successful business off of that domain, but there's no way in hell it'd go for $500.
This is the 2nd dupe on the frontpage for today.
Should HN do some URL normalization?
The dupe about the SSD had an extra trailing slash, and here it is the usual problem with blogspot.com vs blogspot.<countrycode>.
Isn't it ironic that you are being downvoted?
Getting Introductions to Investors – The Ranking Algorithm
>I don't know what else to say apart from that I've seen the same coverage as you, and I'm not bothered by it.

Sure, but then again the majority of Southerners weren't bothered by the slavery or the lynchings either. It took a civil war to make them change their ways.

I mean, if we are to put "not bothered" as some kind of argument.
now in perl blead

http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2014/06/ms...
Look at the i2 instances with ephemeral storage. I use the 2xlarge one, great performance. Can write/read at 500 megabytes per second and the random seek performance is pretty good as well.
Devise coupling on Rails apps
Gulp.js Podcast with Founder Eric Schoffstall
What do you mean? Guardian is at the forefront of exposing the leaks and informing the public about the wrongdoings of the government!
I do not even have roommates.

When I was in my 20s I moved to several foreign cities in which I knew not a soul. Every time I was able to jump start my social circle through my roommates, almost all of whom were not native to the city in which we lived. We had very different national, employment, and educational backgrounds, yet the shared experience of being in these new places and doing lots of basic living things together (cooking, cleanup, paying bills, etc.) as well as fun social things (going out, celebrating birthdays, and day trips) really helped us bond.

This ties into what @mmaunder says (1):

You make friends through shared experiences and the more intense and prolonged the experience, the deeper the friendship.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7900487
It'd be interesting to see a real world test of this. I'm not sure how large the sample variation is with these units, but if you're actually hitting the write limits of your disks I don't think mirroring is going to be the most effective solution - as both disks are likely to start failing at roughly the same sort of time.

Mirroring is really useful with spinning rust, where failures are (more or less) unpredictable and you need a spare to use while the first is replaced. I wonder if there's a better solution when the failure of the drive is more predictable that avoids having a second unit sitting there all the time - especially for applications where the data isn't absolutely critical.
Mispellings doesn't count as valid expressions.

"capiche" or "capisce" when you meant "capito?", "hai capito?" or "capisci?" are obviously wrong to anyone you talk to (in Italy).
Ha, I emailed my rep about that exact same thing 12 hours ago.
It would be interesting to know what benefits Buffer has experienced from opening their salary information!
I think you're a bit arrogant for assuming they give a fuck what you write to your girlfriend on iMessages.

This is absolutely not why people object to pervasive surveillance. The democracy that you harp on about above as the justification for your position is fundamentally incompatible with pervasive surveillance and secret trials.

The problem is not whether they can see pictures of my cats on twitter or imessages to my girlfriend, it's that with pervasive and universal surveillance of our communications which GCHQ is engaged in (collect it all, mastering the internet), those in power would become almost omniscient and able to manipulate our markets, our economy, our politicians, our judges and every other branch of our society. This activity is currently not significantly limited by law, but only by technical ability, which is fast changing. For example all SMS messages in the UK are stored, and all internet traffic crossing the kingdom (which is almost all of it) for as long as possible (Tempora), probably some phone calls too. We also don't even know who they share it with - probably the NSA given their subsidiary relationship. In the wrong hands, this would be a terrible weapon, and even in the right hands, it's likely to pervert those given the power.

If you had access to the private emails of judges, lawyers, accountants, politicians, in retrospect and forever it would be incredibly easy to make and break careers and manipulate everyone else in the country to bend them to your will. Now imagine this power in the hands of a select few, and the rise to power of someone ruthless enough to use it for their own ends. Perhaps initially they'd simply nudge a referendum on independence, or a presidential election by releasing inconvenient emails at the right moment, maybe they'd ensure their continued funding with blackmail (has this already happened, would we ever know?), maybe they'll decide they could run this place better after all - again, we wouldn't even know our democracy had been entirely subverted until it was too late.

IMO the time to oppose this sort of surveillance is now - surveillance should be one-off and controlled by independent judges on a case by case basis, not pervasive and eternal.
Just going to throw this out there, but the software division of amazon fulfillment is always hiring. I'm a developer here and I really enjoy it. Interesting problems, and you get to visit places like PHX6 fairly often. Based in Seattle, Toronto and I believe Bangalore.

My username at Amazon. Happy to answer questions.
GameOver Zeus – Two Week Period Is Up
NVMKV: A Scalable and Lightweight Flash Aware Key-Value Store
Say you were born in 1850, but had the understanding about race and slavery that you do now. Slavery makes you angry (I'm assuming here) and you make an impassioned post about the evils of slavery. In reply you get, "We have a democracy, and obviously only a minority consider this to be an issue of concern."

Is it "sad that it makes you 'angry' that some people simply disagree with you"? Is it ok to dismiss your anger because you don't "stand for election"?
Filesystem needs to shutdown and sync correctly. I think best way is to make writes slower and slower. FS can still close, and admin will notice something is wrong.
Show HN: Interestik – An information aggregator for your interests
App screenshots on all Android devices
One difference is that mods are meant to be linked against the proprietary implementation. In the discussion of GPL linking, this is really murky:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Lin...

But I don't think either of those are really similar. Android is emulating the Java API, without Oracle code being involved. Programs that link against GPL libraries are intended to make runtime calls to copyrighted code. And game mods modify the copyrighted program's runtime behavior, having the program make calls to the modding code (in place of its own). I can't think of an analogue of the last situation.
Yeah, ATLauncher is about the best thing around, since it lets you roll back to a working state.

But really this could work so much better if Mojang implemented it.
Yep... here's the commit on the Github mirror - https://github.com/Perl/perl5/commit/09edd81111f67b4331309c8...
"Notched Right Semicircle With Three Dots"?

I'm not sure I want to know what this would be used for.
I've googled this a bunch out of curiosity before and everybody, including a bunch of courts, seems to argue that fleshed-out fictional characters are in fact covered by copyright even with the serial numbers filed off. IANAL either, obviously.

I mean, you'd be drowning in published, unauthorized fanfic of Batman and Harry Potter and whatnot otherwise.
There is also iftt.com that can poll a specific CL search and email you when something hits.
What else would you be focusing on when you're working on a product?
You should integrate this in weboob [0]

[0] http://weboob.org/
> We have a democracy, and obviously only a minority consider this to be an issue of concern.

I think those are separate things -- being in a democracy means the majority decide what happens; it doesn't mean that the majority are well-informed rational deciders of objective truth.

If the government were kicking puppies for entertainment, and nobody knew about it, then the majority wouldn't use their democratic powers to vote against that either :P
This. You said it better than I could.
PewDiePie: On Being the World's Biggest YouTuber [video]