skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is a classic "Internet of Things" solution, I've book marked it to add to my presentation.

My thesis is that the surveillance state exists because it was too expensive for anyone other than state actors to create one. But the proliferation of cell phones, and their concomitant ability to record and distribute data is making it possible for individuals and small groups to do things like this rain forest project. One of the things I predict will happen is that at some point a big push will be made to prevent people from randomly disposing of their old phones, instead either rewarding them monetarily or requiring their disposal in an 'approved' way. At the recent visit to the equipment liquidator I sometimes buy from I saw a pallet with a box full of phones. All kinds from Nokia candybar phones to blackberries to off brand android phones. There had to be 2500 to 3000 phones in the box. I doubt they sold for more than breakage (0.03/lb). But a motivated individual could 'fix' that like this guy did. Buy them attach a solar power + battery source and cheap sim cards and doing nothing more than the phone was designed to do (record sound or take a picture, send an MMS message) Lots of interesting intelligence over a wide area could be acquired. Want to know who the drug dealers are in a neighborhood? Or who works during the day? Or which houses have nobody in them? You could do a lot taking 10 snapshots a day and sending them to a central server.

Clearly it's anathema to a control state to have that ability in the hands of someone outside their control, so I predict some mobilization against it, from the phone "trade in" that is too good to be true to new rules and regulations about running an unattended computing device with recording capabilities.
I'm sure you're aware that this collection of yours pertains to complaints of interested parties, and that if you'd bothered with any follow-through on these topics you'd have encountered a very different picture.

But seeing as you had a cherry picked list of the harshest (and incomplete) reportings at the ready, augmented with you're own slanted commentary my guess is that a "full picture" isn't what you're aiming for here.
People are overrating language features I believe. The thing Sun did really well was marketing. They didn't go only to the core "tech" people in the enterprise: they reached _everybody_, and made it look like every company had to "move" to Java because it was the "future" even if few people understood what it was. Soon there were CEOs and CFOs and whatever talking on Bloomberg (or whatever) about how they were "moving" to Java.

For whatever reason IBM also jumped on that ship, and Oracle, and HP, and even Microsoft (albeit reluctantly) so "nobody ever got fired for choosing Java" became a reality.

Now that Java has been around for a long time we tend to forget this, but people couldn't even define what they were talking about back then - was it a language? JEE? A runtime environment? But they sure as hell were moving to Java.

Same as this "Internet" thing really.
> I live downtown in a major city with relatively good public transport options now (Seattle),

Having lived in Seattle, Berlin, New York, Montreal, and San Francisco, I would say that Seattle's transit is unusably bad (as is SF's, the other 3 are rather good).

I think the issue here isn't that cars aren't necessary in the States (obviously they are), rather that that's a result of insanely pro-car anti-anything-else public policy in the States, and not because driving is 'naturally' so empowering. It's hard to think of a wealthy country where a city as large as Seattle would have such terrible non-car transportation, yet Seattle is even above average by American standards.
The "sequence of events" seemed pretty solid. I like how the tree grows between the 2nd and 3rd panel, and actually makes the order you read them in unambiguous.

It passes the alien test: if humans were exploring an alien world, and came across those pictures, but they were in circles instead of boxes and showed aliens instead of humans, and the trees were instead some plant that grew there, and the panels were shown right-to-left instead of top-to-bottom, and the radioactive symbol was replaced with some other symbol, I think a thoughtful human would still understand.
Right – though for this example, `->>` (http://grimoire.arrdem.com/1.6.0/clojure.core/DASH__GT__GT/) works better than `->`. I created a GitHub issue to tell the creator about it: https://github.com/xiaq/elvish/issues/17.
The thing that i'd most like to see in the web site is pictures of the shirt styles on people rather than just fabric swatches.
The hope, I think, is to warn people off before they start getting sick. (I agree with what you're saying, though.)
Yes, the website is definitely a work in progress. Most of our efforts have been focused on improving the app, but totally understand!
just some dumb ideas:

for people outside the US, you might sell the measuring app?

I'd love to print my patterns and take them to my own tailor...

besides if you could provide advice in what is the best shirt for my body shape, neck length and face...
that would be appreciated too.
I've sent both the recently expired DigiCert certs.

Could be just about anything. In my case, my keychain has followed me from one Mac to the next since before the cert that expired today was ever issued, so it could have ended up in there anytime in the last ~8 years from anything I might have had installed dating back to my PowerBook G4...

Virtualization software might be a candidate.

Actually, I just had another thought: Steam. And when I just tried to go to https://store.steampowered.com/, guess what certificate is in the trust chain?
This feels like overkill. What warning signs do naturally occuring underground deposits of radioactive or highly poisonous minerals have?

Any hypothetical future large-scale miner would have the technological capacity to detect danger and avoid an ecological catastrophe - it's not like that you suddenly go from soil to stores of uranium, the existane of a facility is rather obvious.

A hypothetical future band of explorers w/o capacity to detect radiation might die, but not cause an ecological catastrophe. Death risk for such far-future explorers exists in any abandoned facility, and is acceptable - deserves no more attention than such risks caused by abandoned firearms/munitions, structural integrity of those buildings, or risks of falling in concealed holes there. A hundred thousand abandoned apartmentment buildings will kill more explorers than such a buried waste storage facility.
Others have elaborated on historical reasons that made Java popular with the enterprise and correctly noted that the size of the existing codebase and amount of trained developers alone gives Java enough momentum to perpetuate long into the future.

However, on a different level there's a reason why people prefer Java and don't push for alternative languages. Namely, a program that would have 200 LoC in C could be re-written (assuming that you are using the right set of enterprise tools/frameworks) as a 2000 LoC program in Java. And, if you ever worked in enterprise, you know how useful that is. Think of the need to grow the development team, job security, fulfilling arbitrary goals set by the management etc.
Thanks for this. I moved from Toronto to Montreal, and am much happier for it.

In Toronto, I felt a malaise. I couldn't articulate why. When I told people why I moved, I would say "Montreal has old buildings, a mountain, bilingualism, and....narrow streets".

No one ever got the streets, and I never had seen much discussion, so I couldn't convey why that mattered. This drives it home. It's the human scale.

I now live in the plateau Mont Royal. It was a neighborhood made possible by transit, but most of the streets are narrow and meant for the use of inhabitants.

I am in the middle of a square grid; on a quiet street. A three minute walk north, east, south or west sends me to a different, bustling commercial district, each with their own distinct flavour. Side streets in other directions have their own shops, and there are residential streets extending ten blocks in any direction.

I spend 90% of my time within a 5 minute walk of my house, and yet have a world of options to choose from. And almost every bit of it is human scale.

Not accidently, rents are highest in this part of town, and this is where the tourist come to experience "charming, European Montreal".

Some people talk about increasing density by building high rises in the plateau. I wonder why they don't talk about building more plateaus.

(Note: Rents are actually quite low across the board in Montreal. A one bedroom can be had for less than $700 per month in the plateau.)
Not a user, but after being a bartender for years - and knowing many who do consume marijuana - there seems to be no logical reason to punish (let alone _incarcerate_) people for something which is ultimately less destructive than what I was allowed to push for so many years.
It's on YouTube for anyone curious https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4sqFyCHcbg
My cofounder and I spent over a year developing the measurement technology -- it's a ton of math / machine learning. The process is also easy to do (you don't need to stand as still as a statue or anything).

We also really stand behind that 20% number. We brought 4 professional tailors in and 35 people, and we were 20% more accurate than the professional tailors. If anyone wants, I can go into more detail on the calculations of us vs. tailors.
Amen. I mean, maybe I expect too much of other people, but I always try to interpret what they say in the most coherent sense possible. People talking about this kind of stuff don't usually just mash the keyboard - they have something to say and assuming that it's crap because the literal interpretation is crap is dumb.
Sorry, not yet! We've had problems with VAT / taxes, so we're US only (and we'll ship some shirts to Canada as well).
Absolutely love that ! Weirdly it reminds me of ramit sethi briefcase "technique" which is roughly research the prospect, come up with some proposal that shows you can as value and pull it out of your briefcase at the opportune time.
I actually read the paper this article is summarizing, and it's incredibly interesting. I can't find it anymore, but I did find this excerpt:

>The panel roughly defined the intended message with the following:

This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location... it increases toward a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
>if you'd bothered with any follow-through on these topics you'd have encountered a very different picture

Why don't you expound on that very different picture instead of such a hand wavy kneejerk dismissal without any reasoning or references?
I sincerely believe the only people who are against legalisation of marijuana are those who don't understand it's effects on a person and those who are easily susceptible to propaganda and fail to do their own research on the subject. I can't think of even one legitimate reason for it's prohibition. If you argue for prohibition based on health consequences or risk to society you should also be arguing for prohibition of alcohol and it has been proven beyond doubt that alcohol prohibition was a really bad idea.
We have definitely thought about licensing outside the US. However, we should be able to figure out the logistics of shipping shirts internationally in the next few months, so we should be shipping worldwide soon!

When you say advice, do you mean for off-the-rack shirts, or shirts you would buy from us?
Aren't some suburbs full of hair trigger car alarms going off all night and some people can't sleep without them? You can get acclimated to noise.

There are also earplugs.
What about when Alice wants to send to Bob, Sam, and Joe? (But not outside observer James)
Please, do tell. Is there a whitepaper or blog post somewhere about how this technology works? Also, do you suppose you could get better results from a consumer depth-camera, such as the Kinect?
The App I Used to Break Into My Neighbor’s Home
Realized I didn't actually explain the measurement process. You put the phone down by leaning against a wall (or chair or something else), stand ~10 feet away (so your whole body is in frame) and do 1 spin. The software takes care of the rest. The app walks you through in much more detail how to do it. You also need to be in contour fitting clothing, so it's recommended to be at home.
Well that is why I asked about his driving situation, to better understand where he was coming from. And my anecdote was clearly presented as such, I never said it should be true for everyone.

I did suspect that he lived in a major city with ample public transportation. Obviously the advantages of owning a car in that situation are greatly diminished. The primary reason that NYC is at the top of my list of places to move is that I could get rid of my car there. When I'm there I actually get the same feeling of freedom and empowerment that a car affords me in other places.
>English, largely through conquest and trade, has become the de facto language of technology and science

250 years ago you could have said similar things about French. These things are fleeting at geological timescales.

I'm not really sure we could do anything that would stop humans from trying to bust in and honestly the more elaborate our warnings the more people will want to see what we were trying to hide. I mean consider the (false but useful) Curse of King Tut. Big letters say "Sickness and death will come to all who try to enter this place" what's your first reaction? To try and get in there and see what the ancient people were hiding.

Anyway all this does give some excellent ideas for a sort of D&D-esque game where everyone dies at the end of the dungeon because all the warnings were true and it was just a really old toxic waste dump.
I took that as part of the argument: a "traditional city" doesn't have to eschew all cars and large roads. Putting some in to access more traditional areas is important. (I think the author suggested 20% of streets be like this.)
Use of violence to establish territory or control, or to attain freedom from oppression is human nature. There is absolutely nothing uniquely American or white about it.
It's possible you under-appreciate the amount of nuance in the underlying theory on fascism which the author is extending. Even though the author avoids mentioning who he's extending, anyone familiar with the literature on fascism knows immediately.

That theory can be dense, and this is by far the best description I've seen which is simultaneously accessible to someone unfamiliar with the literature, and also doesn't compromise on correctness.

It comes down to whether you consider not compromising on correctness important. Unfortunately, the norm in journalism is to tell the most neutered version of the story possible, correctness be damned. You can see this in most science journalism. So when someone puts the effort into a piece like this -- which explains ideas in lay terms but does not throw out correctness to the point of rendering the description of the work meaningless -- it mostly passes unnoticed as "a bit too dense" or "not TEDy enough".
It seems to me that if you're going to bury nuclear waste then you just need to bury it deep enough. The idea is that any future humans even capable of digging the material up wouldn't need any signs to tell them the material was dangerous. Instead, they be sufficiently technologically advanced that they could figure this out for themselves.
Just curious how long delivery takes. I made a test order 7-10 days ago and am holding off going to norstroms.
Help us help you get a job (StartupWeekend project)
Everyone seems to have missed the most important part of the article "this was in France, and you can't just fire someone so if you hire badly you are stuck with that person forever"

The US has the most liberal/right wing/psychotic labour laws in the Western world, and as such the best approach is to hire anyone not an idiot and fire them once on the job experience teaches you if it's a good fit.

This results in massive turnover, and little incentive to improve the interview process

I'm not sure where I am going with this but I am amazed that the local labour laws are not mentioned on this three (afaik)
Something like 5 out of the first 16 comments on this post were all from accounts (1 each) created under 1 hour ago. Weird.
In these free-form discussions I find it really important to politely disagree with some technical decision of their project to see how they take the feedback and defend the decision. Red flags are when they either cannot accept disagreement or come up with questionable justifications. Correct answers include clear explanations of what the trade-offs would be and clear rationale for their original decision process.
Influence in the enterprise you have to look at the large consultants and integrators as bigco IT is taking their direction from them. IBM made Java the base technology of their stack in the late 90s and that's the primary reason. I would note that MS is extremely widespread as well as windows server, ad, mssql and dot net are prevalent, even more so as you get into the Smb market.
> I think that nice reduction and cancellation is the largest step to a better urban environment. Being able to play guitar, at proper volume, in an apartment, without hearing my neighbor's washing dishes, the cars outside, or the newly wed couple 2 windows over is a fantasy. A fantasy that engineers and architects might be able to make real.

I agree. I don't know how much money or effort that goes into this kind of thing, but it seems like the absolutely most bang-for-your-buck investment if you want to create more liveable city apartments.
The one thing I would like is for all functions to be pure by default and we could have something like "impure def" for functions with side-effects and functions that take mutable objects as arguments. It's basically my only complaint about the core language. Well, I would also like iota and defer from Go, but that's minor.
That's this bug:
https://code.google.com/p/end-to-end/issues/detail?id=121 , it will get fixed after weekend.

Disclaimer: I'm a member of E2E team.
This seems partly a straw man. I don't think the author would say not to build open plazas. They're very much a part of traditional cities.

That is a nice street in London. I expect housing prices are high. I also expect housing prices are even higher in areas with narrower streets.

We can talk in the abstract about what people "would prefer", but looking at actual choices is more instructive. Residential privacy is one of those things you can learn to do without. Many people would say that London street has no privacy.

People have different preferences, but I've seen no evidence that people don't like narrow streets, even narrower than the one found in your image.
> Why not aspire to levels of completeness and rigor comparable to civil engineering?

Because it takes 11 years to upgrade one feature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_span_replacement_of_th...

In all seriousness, you could have any level of 'rigor' you want, but you probably don't want to pay for it. I used to work at a hardware company that used custom ASICs. Each new hardware platform used a handful of new ASICs and took around five years to develop. And if you made a mistake in an ASIC it was costly to fix--sometimes you could modify a metal mask, but a full respin was approaching $1M. In that environment, you do everything you can to not make a mistake.

I was always glad I was in software. I used to joke that if I made a mistake, it cost around one cent of electricity to recompile.

But over time, they started to treat software development like they did ASIC development. It took forever to get a feature implemented, Seriously, even tiny things that were like "I've got an UI idea that I can code it in a couple of days and see how it works out, if it sucks no harm no foul" were turned into six month orgies of spec writing, endless meetings, multiple layers of buyoff, and just overall inefficiencies.
What if these aliens was standing up when they were sick and lying down when they were healthy?
I thought it was for the other kind of logging, what if we left a bunch of old cellphones on with random noises.
Personally I do think Google is not perfect but I never liked things such as Scroogled.
That's a very bleak and, unfortunately, accurate observation. Our curiosity that has given rise to such greatness may well be the double-edged sword of our undoing.

As horrible as this may sound, the best we can hope for is the radiation will act quickly so those venturing in will provide ample examples to those that didn't.
Great point about the y2k but. My aunt was a systems engineer at CSX and was one of the people that led their Y2K group (partially because she was one of the only people they had employed that was still expertly proficient in COBOL) and a lot of what she did, in addition to fixing the COBOL bits, was rewrite stuff in Java and build out Java connectors.

It's funny, I remember learning J++ in 1998 when I was like 15, around the same time she was knee-deep in the y2k thing. And we would email an call one another commiserating, because she was learning Java too (albeit at a much higher level and with real stakes).

As shitty as Java is for a lot of things, it is a godsend for dealing with legacy apps and code. And the thing is, those legacy systems are some of the most important systems around (banking, transpiration, health care records, major utilities like water and power, etc).

If I ever need to give myself nightmares, I just start to contemplate the infrastructure of our most important entities.
> ...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

Sounds like a great place to hide a treasure.
This looks very cool - enough that I finally created an account to ask you a question. Can you tell me a bit about the production process for the shirts? Are they made in the US? If overseas, what kind of assurances do you have about working conditions, etc in the factory? If you can vouch for decent working conditions, it would be a big selling point for me (and, I think, for many others).
Some people might be too curious to leave it alone, as in a few determined explorers won't be deterred, but maybe they'll avoid settling right on top of it at least?

Personally my first reaction to the Curse of King Tut would be "well, better safe than sorry" as I turn right around :)
Ok, some more of the statistics on the 20% number.

We had each tailor measure each person across 17 different measurements. Across those 4 tailors (on each person and each measurement), you could see a standard deviation. So then we also looked at the standard deviation of the average of those 4 tailors vs. the MTailor software's system. Our standard deviation was 20% lower.

Happy to go into even more detail if people are interested!