skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In cases of actual terrorists, the FBI almost certainly would not contact them by leaving a business card and asking them to call. The did it in this case because they already knew that he was almost certainly not a terrorist.

First, an actual terrorist would probably have left as soon as the guards came out, rather than argue with them over whether or not photography from public property is allowed. Staying and arguing gives the guards more time to note identifying details that could lead their plans being disrupted.

Second, since they tracked him down from his rental car, and since they FBI does in fact have basic competence, they knew by then that he was a professional photographer and everything about the incident was consistent with his expected behavior based on his profession and his publication history.

So why not drop it at that point? My guess is they just wanted to make sure it really was him who rented the car in his name. A smart terrorist would use a fake identity to rent the car, and what better than to use an identity of someone who you would expect to find out photographing things like their target?
So glad these folks haven't died. If I can get one it will be a nice complement to the Zedboard.

Still need to get the bugs worked out of my Xilinx on Ubuntu setup though. Annoys me to have to run Windows in a VM to use the toolchain.
Ask HN: Did I violate the submission guidelines?
Link I submit recently get dead on arrival. Is an algorithm out of bounds or did I do something wrong?
by whos criteria?
No, reports from a security guard is the kind of instance I am referring to. If the security guard had said "an older man wanted to take pictures of this art-work which happens to be a common natural-gas storage tank, he didn't appear to be a threat", then I can't imagine that the FBI would have wasted resources following up with more than a phone call.
It's a pretty thin story of harassment. As far as I can tell, the security guards erred in that they said he couldn't take photos from a public place. From there, they took down his registration and submitted a report. The FBI gets this report and talks to him to sort things out. There's no mention of further contact after this.

It really doesn't matter how many companies he's been a senior VP of - and in fact, it's kind've unsettling that this is prominent in these stories, painting him as some sort of de facto nobility who should get treatment better than an anonymous person. Guards fucked up, pinged him for taking a photo when they shouldn't have. FBI checks the story out, and doesn't seem to have progressed after that one contact, ten years ago.

'Suspicion' is just that. It's not harassment unless it's ongoing.
Hahaha. This is so blatantly stupid.

>In order for SocialCoin to work, we need to figure out a way to create a decentralized ID system that doesn’t rely on government issuance like a Driver’s License or a Passport. This is currently an unsolved problem.

It's unsolved because it is literally impossible. There is no rigorous mathematical definition of identity, and no way to construct a generic identity-proof algorithm. Even humans can't agree what constitutes an identity, and we've had many millions of years as social animals to evolve heuristics.

Are clones separate people? Are molecular copies separate people? Are brain simulations separate people? If they are, I can just spawn 1,000,000 copies of my brain and collect their SocialCoin. And then it becomes a competition of computing power, just like Bitcoin!

And, of course, there's no non-blinded automated test that can differentiate a human and a machine, neither in theory nor in practice.

The only people who think up foolish schemes like this are those who utterly fail to grasp the genius of solving voting problems with HashCash style proof-of-work mechanisms.
You're missing the point a bit. Neocities isn't taking the position that the blocking is a bad thing. They are arguing that people should get to know what the government is blocking.

Today it's "sick forbidden sex with animals" but tomorrow it could be "your rights as a German" and if there's no transparency, the government can easily control the information that their people see. Which is a really big thing to control without any oversight or input.
Having licensed a small project or two under the WTFPL, it is delightfully permissive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
Yep, sometimes one has to part with a few quid to get the job done right and friction free. That aside, my mainstream MySQL utility is HeidiSQL which is in fact free and open source (although I did bung them a donation because I think it's a neat tool):

http://www.heidisql.com/download.php

Heidi also runs on Wine as well, so something for everyone :)

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=3326
I didn't say FoS was absolute. That's why it's an interesting debate. But the piracy part of it is fairly irrelevant when it comes to the question, "Is it illegal to host code that can be used for illegal purposes"?
Thats a tough issue, what if he was a threat. What harm is in the FBI just following up? When a 6 year old calls 911 to chat with an officer, police still follow up to make sure that it was just a 6 year old and not a distress signal.

If the officers were polite what harm is there in them following up and making sure?
Project: Conductive Ink
Old man, sign ze papers! They are merely a statement that you have not been mistreated while you have been here.
I don't see why we can't just call it "censorship" no matter what the reason.

If it makes you uncomfortable to call it "censorship" when blocking Nazi propaganda or whatever, well, good. Discomfort is a sign that you're thinking.
Both. Original artists are easy to find and talk to. Or if a post was obviously originated somewhere, I messag ethem on whatever site that is.
What's the flip side to running down every lead though? Information overload that may (will?) miss more significant threats. Do they not have some sort of triage for this ?
Yeah, that shapes what we can offer.
Git-crypt: transparent file encryption in git
It's been running since May and is hosted on rather cheap servers (Ramnode) which limits the amount of funds that actually need to be expended to run such a service like this. At the moment, the project is rather small and doesn't require expensive dedicated servers.
Do You Feel Pressure or Do You Apply Pressure?
A lot of the documentation seems to be in a foreign language, including the comments for the examples. For those of us that don't speak Dutch[?], are there any plans to translate the entire thing to English?
> Instead of being a programmer auditioning to sling code, he was already “part of the club” (management) and just engaging in a two-way discussion, as equals, on whether he was going to join that particular section of the club.

Hmm! The latter is typically how I approach interviews (I'm a developer). I feel that if that's not the case then why am I here? Sometimes you get people that are smart in a dumb way, like the last interview in the story here. Just looking to be intellectually dominant, the "winner". But you just have to recognize those situations for what they are and not get discouraged. Developers are in demand, we get to act like it. And sometimes people get treated like shit because they allow it to happen.
Can you share the technology & methods sourcegraph use for syntax/semantic analysis?

If there is a brief comparison of tools you have tried and abandoned it would be really really helpful.

The accuracy of whatever working behind the scene is simply amazing.
We use nice shirts and printers. The shirts cost ~$5 - 5.50 (and more for larger sizes). The coverage of the shirt dictates the price of that, full coverage being ~$10 for loq quantity. Cost decrease quite a bit if the order of that shirt is high. (down to $7.50). We're using a market penetration model but really I just want to reach out and talk to people I want involved in creating shirts, voting, and selling. I am very responsive and available.
Cynk Technology, No Assets, No Turnover And A $4.5 Billion Valuation
I'm sure the FBI understands the concept of prioritizing leads when/if they get overloaded. There are generally field offices in most major cities so I doubt they had to travel across the country or anything.
In Windows Explorer it will complain if you try and create a file starting with a dot, but I suspect that it's because extensions are hidden by default, so you'd end up creating a file with no name.

Can easily create such files by other means (saving in notepad, sublime, etc).
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply I disagreed with you. When I think about what makes traditional education so valuable I don't think its the traditional education part of it. When one thinks about what makes a college a college, you think about the quality of the professors and curriculum and while I think that's valuable, I don't that's the key part.
Isnt that basically the DMCA?
Isn't the malthusian argument that either current population has already passed the "support" threshold of the planet or will do so soon ?

This is a similar, but not the same argument. He's simply claiming that taking away the brakes on population growth will cause exponential growth. That argument is simply called "evolution theory", and is not controversial at all. Theory [1] and practice [2] agree (note that logistic growth happens because there is a new limit hit. If no new limit comes then we would be on a logistic curve going to +inf. If you calculate that limit, incidentally, you get an exponential growth curve).

The counter argument "but won't population growth drop by itself" is false, because the population is not monolithic. If some group decides to limit procreation, that group will simply (and quickly) be replaced by one that won't. And if necessary, by another species.

[1] http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/how-populat...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia
>A system where people can survive and reproduce without working can't end well.

Thats bad news because very soon its going to collide with a system that produces so well that almost no one needs to work to produce enough for everyone to survive and reproduce.

Unless we act positively and intentionally as a species, I'm afraid the defacto answer is to kill all the extra people with poverty.
I'm not sure the price of a cup of coffee is a good indication of something being inexpensive nowadays:
Sexagintuple Vanilla Bean Mocha Frappuccino, $55 [1].

[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2641608/Is-worlds-ex...
Hi, PDFy owner here. I've been running a number of services for 3 years now, without running into financial problems (see http://cryto.net/, http://cryto.net/~joepie91, http://cryto.net/~joepie91/projectlist). My biggest issue has actually been lack of time, rather than money :)

I've gotten pretty good over the years at running stuff on a shoestring budget (my current hosting expenses are around 100 euro a month for everything together at a large number of hosts, and I have plenty of resources to spare), and as far as I can predict PDFy won't be running into any issues any time soon.

I should add that it definitely helps to custom-develop everything - generic solutions tend to come with a large amount of (resource) overhead, which make it harder to run it on a small budget. By doing just about everything custom, the overhead is minimal. Traffic is dirt cheap nowadays if you know where to look, so that's not really a concern anymore either.
> Information overload that may (will?) miss more significant threats.

Well, that's kinda the point of these follow-ups. How would the FBI know if something is or isn't a significant threat?
My SO is a litigator. Based on the stories I hear all the time, I can state with absolute confidence that the sharing you refer to here, which consists primarily of non-attorneys making assumptions and engaging in speculation, is not only unlikely to help the OP but could be detrimental to him if he acts based on the information he received from a non-attorney (or even an attorney who has not agreed to represent him).

Your own past experiences with attorneys are irrelevant here and do not eliminate the fact that nobody can use HN to provide the OP with the legal counsel he clearly needs. The simple truth of the matter is that the OP is unlikely to find a satisfactory resolution to this matter without the help of a competent attorney.
Why Silicon Valley's 'Fail Fast' Mantra Is Just Hype
> It's the FBI's job to follow up on these types of instances.

What types of instances are these? "I saw someone photographing a monument" instances? Don't you think that our resources would be spread pretty thin if we were investigating all such instances?

> They were heavily criticized after 9/11 that they received tips but didn't properly follow up

They were criticized for not following up on "photography of landmarks is suspicious" tips?
Heh, no respect for history. Short answer, while UNIX had its 'magic' number which looked at the first 32 bits (four bytes) of a file to figure out what kind it was (hash bang for the win) and Apple had its own awesomesauce of a 'forked' file system where the file and what it was were in two completely separate but extensible parts of the file system, CP/M (which had emulated DEC) and then DOS which had emulated CP/M used a 3 character (which is only 24 bits but still plenty) to encode the type of file in the name since it couldn't necessarily live in the file itself and there was no 'attribute fork' to stick it in.

Interestingly this is a problem that lives on, people still want to identify what a file is and that requires some sort of identifier. Embedding it in the name is just as good as anything, but the important bit is that you stay consistent. If you're web documents are .htm, .html, .www, .web, etc your configuration gets unwieldy.
I probably should've worded that better, but that text will be changed/moved/removed in the near future anyway. The Imgur comparison really only refers to the upload/sharing process, not the non-commercial bit.

As for running off donations, I've addressed that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8034529
What you say about the business card rings true.

It's a little odd that they would worry at all about the photographs, the government aerial photos there are very high detail:

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3009201,-71.0456476,291m/dat...

(there's 3 zooms left)

Looking at the layout, he was probably on that little drive that parallels the freeway (that's where the nicer photo is), and it probably isn't a public street.

edit: Looking at Street View, he must have been somewhere on Victory, that drive is gated.

another edit: The aerials in 2004 probably would not have been quite so detailed. But they would still be pretty detailed.
The world's first photonic router
Instances of this have chilling effects. I don't want FBI agents showing up at my door, ever. I might think twice about photographing something in public for fear that someone might report me. That's messed up.

You can play the "what if" game until the cows go home, and opinions will of course differ as to where the line of caution should be drawn, but IMO we're far far into the land of paranoia at this point.
Yes of course, like I've said, the number is overstated, but by how much? How many people in the country live in apartments like you describe? 2%? 5%? 10%? It still doesn't make much of a dent into 97%
I used chrome to translate it https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/173424?hl=en
For what it's worth, I haven't had any trouble on RHEL (which is recommended).
If I'm bringing up a directory listing, and the GUI tool I'm using is showing me different icons for different file types (or some other type-specific visual distinction), then I don't want it to have to read the first few bytes of every file in the directory. That doesn't scale. The file type needs to be part of the directory listing itself. Traditionally on Windows it's been part of the filename (which typically is only part of the directory listing, and not attached to the file) but it could have been stored as an attribute as well. That would have made more sense, but even NTFS was designed at a time when disk space actually cost something, and a filetype attribute probably would have wound up being a GUID registry key, which is a lot of bytes for every file in a big directory.
> So are you saying that feeding the whole IRS is LESS expensive than having an automated billing system that could track who is subscribed and who can enter a certain road?

The IRS is not a relevant cost because deciding not to have municipal fiber doesn't cause the IRS to go away. You have to pay for it regardless, unless your proposal is to have no taxes.

> Because if it's not more effective, then, by the same token, why don't we also fund air travel with taxation?

Because air travel has a significant unit cost. You have to pay for fuel, pilots and flight and ground crews, significantly increased maintenance of aircraft, etc. Moreover, governments have often subsidized the up-front costs of air travel, like airports and planes.

> I don't understand why do I have to subsidize someone who uses roads everyday, while I use it once a week, for example.

Because you're not subsidizing them, you're asking them to subsidize you. It doesn't require fewer road workers to pave the road in front of your house and the weather doesn't stop creating potholes just because you don't drive on it as much. You're asking for there to be a road in front of your house so that you can drive to the beach or call a cab or get on a bus or have an ambulance come to your house and you want to claim the advantages of having that available, when the availability whatsoever is the primary cost, without paying your share of the cost of that availability.
And this is how the Mac has worked for a long time.
HappyFunAcademy Teaches Liberal Arts Grads Front-End Web Development
How to get the full sum of the contract?
So, I have a contract in place for a 'x' amount of dollars. It's a 3 month deal, and I'm nearing the end of the third month (end of July), however, the issue is that development is nearly done as I've spent a lot of time on this project but I still have 3 payments due/3 milestones.

How do I get these 3 payments even though the project is nearly complete? Do I drag things out a bit more? I'm not quite sure how as most of the tasks are done, but I can try to think of ways..

Any other ideas? It's not that I'm taking advantage it's that I just crammed too much work in the first 2 months instead of spreading it out, so it's only fair that I get these 3 payments.

Any tips or ideas would be super helpful here!

Cheers!
I've had mild IBS-D for as long as I can remember, and I've just had a very good experience with a 7 day water fast. It's been 2 weeks since I've finished my water fast, and I've had 0 incidents. Obviously this is anecdotal, since there is very little peer reviewed research on water-fasting in general, and specifically wrt to IBS.
I don't think that this meshes very well with your previous post, where you claimed:

"But if there is a systemic-level issue, systemic-level intervention is precisely the right response. Individualist attempts to address systemic issues are mostly romanticism."

Systemic level intervention without individuals contributing to the effort will simply be fighting against exponential growth. It'll work really well in the beginning ... and fail.

I am aware that the requirement that any intervention policy must create a Nash balance is an onerous requirement. But you should treat it as a law of nature. It's a requirement that defines reality.

I am simply saying that your claim of government intervention simply fixing things is akin to saying that gravity can be ignored when building bridges. Reality just doesn't work that way. Anything that isn't a Nash balance will crash and burn, just like any bridge that isn't stable under gravity.
I did read it in a darwin awards book, so I assumed it was true, but it's such an innocuous anecdote that I never felt it was worth checking.
It's a start down the 'report your neighbors for subversive ideas, comrade' path. What disincentive is there for security guards to not just "report everything, just in case?" How many people will decide not to photograph said art-piece because they might get a visit from the FBI?

Is the answer to all this just some hand-wavy 'everything changed after 9/11?'
> It's the FBI's job to follow up on these types of instances.

It's part of their job to sanely estimate the credibility of reports. If I can phone the FBI and say something that causes them to send an agent to track someone down (or worse, to sent a SWAT team), there's a serious problem with the way they are performing their job.
> This is said to be the world's most expensive Starbucks coffee featuring 60 espresso shots and costing $55 (£33).

That's a lot of shots! How many espresso shots is enough to kill someone?
Common sense? An 80+ year old man standing on public property taking a photograph of a famous piece of artwork isn't remotely a terrorist threat. Presumably the FBI could have even figured out that he's been a professional photographer for most of his life, and done a little research on their that would make it entirely obvious that there was nothing fishy going on there.

And double shame on the security guards for even reporting him in the first place.
Use your software and files from any desktop
What is UX Design?: Getting the toilet out of your kitchen
> So city dwellers have to subsidise the country folks?

No, build out requirements are actually very stupid and we should get rid of them. It's just that getting rid of them doesn't magically create broadband competition in unattractive geographies.
Not sure if I agree or disagree here, but if I was a security guard and saw someone photographing a natural gas tank, the thought would at least cross my mind that maybe he's planning to do something not so nice with that picture. (If you don't get what I'm saying, it could very well have been that he was taking a picture to figure out the best places to detonate bombs at.) It's a valid cause for concern, and it's not like I'd go ahead and check Wikipedia on the spot. And of course if I report it to the police, it's their job to follow up (but nicely). Maybe I shouldn't report it in the first place, but then that's my fault, not law enforcement's.
I really liked the Mac "forked" file system. File types and bundles were simple and worked really well. They also facilitated "drag and drop" application installs, where the Finder did most of the work keeping track of where applications lived.

The app install process on Windows makes me weep (I think that Visual Studio installs well over 10,000 keys in the registry. What the hell? This number should be zero in a well designed system . . . but don't get me started on the disaster that is COM).

Incidentally, Windows NT has file forks. They're not often used, and lots of utilities don't know about them, but they can be quite useful.
I asked somebody who can find out what Dr. Mano did with the advice: my Dad, who still communicates with some of Tomonaga's students, but he said would have to ask around.
I do a bit of both. I quote my hourly ($120), tell them how long it will take & the lump figure. I always get 25-50% payment up-front with the remainder due on completion. I never start work without the up-front payment - in my experience, this has been the most effective way of weeding out bad clients.