skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really can't take seriously the idea that the goal of the NSA or any other part of the US government is any kind of racial cleansing or suppression. It seems far more plausible that using race as a judge of threatfulness is a result of not having anything more accurate to go on. In which case, better targeting would actually make the program less racist.
/b/ was never good.
Facebook forcing messenger on users
Why You Always Seem to Choose the Slowest Line
Ask HN: Why Apple's photostream failed?
Clearly, Apple's photostream did not click with it's customers as it is not a mainstream product.

What you think are the reasons behind it's dull acceptance among iPhone users -
1. Badly done
2. Poor implementation
3. Bad UI
4. Nobody needs it
5. Not marketed right

I encourage your participation to understand the reasons behind its failure. Please take 2 mins to respond. Much appreciated.
git doesn't necessarily handle large binaries well (less true in recent versions). Also, when using Maven (etc) you can upgrade libraries just by bumping up the version # rather than hunting down the new jar manually. You can also use the same cached jar in multiple apps/modules rather that committing it in all of them - good if you've got a modularised application.

There are also other benefits like automatically downloading and linking sources and documentation (more relevant if using an IDE).
"American Nations: a History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures" is a more historically rigorous look at this idea. I highly recommend the book.
I think keep it as is, but use it as an opportunity to explain the difference, perhaps? I imagine this would be great for scientifically-minded kids to learn from.
The problem with weight loss and other sorts of large, daunting projects is that morale and focus tend to evaporate pretty quickly when you don't hold yourself accountable and don't see immediate results. Whether it's weighing yourself every day or keeping a food journal, these sort of small, incremental data points help you keep focused in the short term. Tracking them over larger time frames keeps you focused in the long term. When you want to learn a new language, you can't just say, "I'll look over some words this week, and if I'm not happy with my progress I'll do more next week," - you have to have a day-to-day plan to go over X number of flash cards, or talk for X number of minutes with a native speaker.

Small, manageable, tangible goals are the key to weight loss, and tracking ones weight and intake meticulously allows you to set such goals.
Incredible Images Show UCLA Campus Flooding After Water Main Break Near Campus
Google's Next Opportunity Could Spell Serious Competition for Facebook on Mobile
Exactly. And profits can be just as fictional too.
I've seen people try to spend bills that were obviously made on an inkjet printer.

Sadly, I've seen people that worked for the family owned bar accept bills that were obviously made on an inkjet printer. High rag content paper feels like real money and in dim light with an element of urgency (lots of people waiting for a drink) it's sometimes easy to miss.
That's exactly the kind of stuff we calculate at 42. Hard to see this from mountains of data in excel, especially if you're scared of the math.
Yes, World War Could Happen Again
Yeah, but then you're trusting me to do the backups for you. That's much less protection.
I'm a bit surprised that Amazon said listed "no returns" as one of the differences with ebooks. I have personal experience with their incredibly generous ebook return policy (right in line with their other generous return policies).

Is this an implicit admission that Amazon is eating the cost of those returns? Or do they mean something specific like the physical infrastructure for returns?
Why is it so hard to find cross-platform, encrypted group chat? Surely there's a market for it.
Objectively define "real dissidents" with a definition that can never inaccurate, as well as impossible to abuse by any and all that have power within such system.
TWTR traded like 27M shares in the first hour after the close today, which is roughly equivalent to the average _daily_ volume. This was not prices getting pushed around in a thin market.
They are giving people advances so that they can live while they write the book full time. An example is someone who used to be a journalist can use their success as a journalist to sign a book deal and work on that. It's similar to raising a seed round.

IMO they are going the way of the record label. Some publishing houses and record labels will continue to add value, while larger ones who used to use their brand to add value and had scaled to a point where that is their main value proposition are going to have a hard time, as we are seeing right now in OP.
> I really can't take seriously the idea that the goal of the NSA or any other part of the US government is any kind of racial cleansing or suppression.

Perhaps not consciously, no, but we're talking about this in the same lens that people use when describing the war on drugs as "The New Jim Crow"[0], to assert that the war on (some) drugs is inherently a race- and class-driven fight, even if not done consciously by most parties involved.

> It seems far more plausible that using race as a judge of threatfulness is a result of not having anything more accurate to go on.

Again, you're assuming an uncontroversial, objective, and non-racist definition of "threatfulness". This is one of the few instances in which the phrase "begging the question" can be used correctly in an online discussion.

It might seem at first that such a definition would obvious, but that's actually very far from the case, as people like Greenwald have explained.

I don't want to try and explain this reasoning any further myself, not for lack of patience, but simply because Greenwald has already written about this this very eloquently and at great length, so anything I could write in this comment would be an ersatz rehashing of what he's said.

His essays on this are very easy to find online, so out of respect to his beliefs, I'd encourage you to read it "straight from the lion's mouth" rather than rely on whatever summary I could muster.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Jim_Crow
I'm in NZ and have downloaded it and signed up. I've never really gotten into SnapChat because my SnapChat network is slightly too small to keep me using it regularly.

As far as I can tell, the success of these similar apps boil down to network effects. If Instagram can transition their Instagram users into Bolt users in NZ, it might be able to compete with SnapChat, but until they do, it's clearly an uphill battle to build these redundant networks.

Regarding name stealing, I recognise that a lot of people put effort into their branding and I'm not a trademark lawyer, but I haven't seen much success with little companies defending messaging-app marks against big companies.
Paper's Please has never been done. We've had a few big indie games released in the past few years which have legitimately not been done before (FTL is another big one that comes to mind).

What's so hard to believe about there being unexplored video game ideas out there? The industry is still relatively young, and it's always had a high barrier to entry until recently (and I'd argue that, for the average person, the barrier to entry is still much higher than that of writing, music creation, photography, drawing, or even movie creation).
Nice. These articles are great. Very much appreciated.
I respect Brad and usually enjoy his posts, but this one is full of s...

He doesn't give a single example of why "AWS is not the best product at anything". This is obviously true, but the same could be said about Google, Microsoft, or Rackspace. So what's the point? Who has a better offering?

The discussion of AWS being more expensive than bare metal is valid, but that's an obvious statement. Amazon uses bare metal (albeit at scale), and adds their application stack + support. You're paying for the convenience of purchasing all services integrated from a single vendor. If your business is simple enough and you can just throw hardware and bandwidth to solve your needs, then bare metal will always be cheaper. But for more complex environments (e.g., multi-regions, global distribution, auto-scaling), or when you need to quickly scale up and down (to accomodate surge in demand, for example) bare metal is not an option.

Net net, this sounded like a rant against Amazon's world domination plans, and the threat to the very existence of some of the companies on his fund. He said it best:

"We used to think of Amazon as a potential acquirer for these companies, or at least a powerful strategic partner. Now we know they are just using the bait of “we want to work more closely with you” as market and product intelligence."

If your business model depends on a strategic partnerships with or being acquired by Amazon, you're doing it wrong.
Amazon is using language like "e-book(s) sold" when the reality is that they mean "e-book license(s) sold." The difference may be subtle, but if an e-book comes with DRM, the buyer certainly does not "own" it. Amazon even makes that point themselves, as they promote e-books as having "no secondary market."

This is an important point when you consider the vendor lock-in of the Kindle "ecosystem." Instead of "e-book," a better phrase might be "Kindle software."

Amazon should be careful of throwing stones about illegal collusion as they approach market domination. It will be very easy for them to make a mistake which runs afoul of anti-trust law.
Ask HN: What do you think about “Halt and Catch Fire”?
Is a realistic picture of what was happening at that time?
Mikhael Bakunin: Wanted by the Brazilian Police
LLCs are great for the sole proprietor, which is tptacek's primary experience.

If you don't need outside money, and you don't need co-founders, sure, LLCs can be good enough. Their best use is for BIG-CORP subsidiaries, which is nearly the same as sole-proprietorship activity. Simple: one owner controlling everything, and uncomplicated capital structure.

It's really not that hard to set up a C-Corp, there are millions of them and because of that they are well understood. Compared to LLCs, if there is outside money or multiple founders involved, C-Corps avoid some issues: founder vesting and ownership-options are a challenge to draft well in LLCs and are well understood in C-corps; multi-class stock is pretty straight-forward in C-corps.
I find this just dumb.

Of course you can make arbitrary divisions but that doesn't mean they are relevant. Not that the US can't be divided, but these lines aren't it.

The central-southern part of Florida has little in common with Kentucky nowadays. Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver and Salt Lake are large metropolitan areas with cultures very different from rural Alaska.
I imagine they have an undocumented api for reverse image search. The team at Google has released this extension[1] for adding reverse image search to the context menu, which is currently the only extension that enables reverse image search for images only accessible while logged in (think if you want to reverse image search a preview of an image someone emailed to you).

I was thinking about intercepting the requests it makes and making an open source extension that does the same thing, but I haven't had the time yet.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/search-by-image-by...
It teaches the parents that they have to do something about their child.

Teachers aren't a magical fix for your misbehaving children.
When I worked at a bookstore we would ship boxes full of un-sold books back to the publishers every month (Mostly consisting of cheap Romance novels). I imagine having to track and handle all of that to be a major cost to publishers.
Pivoting my simple Android app
How to Rip DVD for 3D TV with DVDFab DVD Ripper
To be completely honest, I'm not sure. I would say charge by the total amount of time the VMs have run, but I have no idea how the costing will work out.

Good luck!
Seattle Takes Oracle’s Cloud
The writers of that show take is as a challenge to come up with ludicrous technobabble that fools laymen but causes geeks to bite through their keyboards.

The more rage the better.
The robot hardware was the very simple part. Each leg only had 1 degree of freedom and was binary, just contracted or extended with no in-between. It was the Stiquito robot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiquito , which is dirt cheap and uses muscle wire (nitinol) to move the legs.
DRM vs. no DRM

Sale vs. licence

These are two separate issues.
Amazon is R&D'ing and manufacturing tablet/e-reader devices

Which shouldn't that be built into the price of those devices?
While I buy into many of the arguments being made here, Some of these points don't make sense. For example,

". And that 74% increase in copies sold makes it much more likely that the title will make it onto the national bestseller lists. (Any author who's trying to get on one of the national bestseller lists should insist to their publisher that their e-book be priced at $9.99 or lower.)"

Well, that's all well and good until everyone prices their e-books at $9.99 or lower, at which point we're back to square one. Unless the objective is to then have people who want a leg up to price their books at $8.99...

Also got a bit nasty when they mention, "ilegally colluded with their competitors" - was this ever established? I thought the publishers settled before it went to court, and only Apple was found guilty.

Finally, Love how Amazon is now trying to drive a wedge between the publishers and authors - "While we believe 35% should go to the author and 35% to Hachette, the way this would actually work is that we would send 70% of the total revenue to Hachette, and they would decide how much to share with the author. We believe Hachette is sharing too small a portion with the author today, but ultimately that is not our call."

This is Amazon turning up the heat on the publishers. Remember, Amazon/Bezos are ruthless - they could not care at all what is fair - but they are going to use every tool in their kit to win at this negotiation.
2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak
C and Go without CGO
Of course it's not simple, it's a very challenging project. But in terms of providing electrical power, if it's possible to have electronics that work at all then it would be possible to power them via beta decay. This is already an established technology in the form of "betavoltaics", which have powered existing devices (such as pace makers) in the past.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaics
hmm "modern developers" == "java developers" ?
I recognize India's potential, but my answer was about the near term indeed, a 5 to 10 year window. I personally wouldn't value a company further out than that.
You can use numerous other tools to create the mobi and sell that eleswhere while you also sell the kindle mobi on Amazon.

I've yet to run into a problem sending all sorts of files, ebook or otherwise (aside from epub), to my Kindle.

That article seems to overstate issues with generating files readable on Kindle.
That's a great point. And since people aren't running dedicated machines, only paying for the requests that happen, it could even be cheaper than spinning up your own server. Interesting!
Is this around the RBA bank note printing scandal?
Check out the Four Corners doco on it.
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2013/09/30/3857148.ht...
Much like China, the top 100 or 200 million can be a very lucrative consumer market, absolutely.
Worst case. Also made the math easy.
Right, but when you rely on other services that that haven't cut their teeth yet, it becomes a problem.

For example, if you're pulling 50 MB from an API that doesn't allow multi-part downloads, you can't do it with GAE because they have a 32 MB limit per connection.
Metro Atlanta and Atlanta are two different things. The metro is like Atlanta culturally, but it's not dense at all. It's 20-30 minutes to anything, unless you live in one of the bigger cities.
Not sure about individual-scale models, but Markov Chains are common in Mathematical Ecology. You can do quite a lot in animal group modeling with transition matrices and basic probability theory. This is a good book if you can get it cheap (like most monograph textbooks):
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Stochastic-Processes-Biol...

Also, props to submission author Victor Powell. Those force-directed graphs are visually interesting, add to the article, and are even responsive (try changing the window size).
> Remember, Amazon/Bezos are ruthless - they could not care at all what is fair - but they are going to use every tool in their kit to win at this negotiation.

Does any company of that size care what's "fair"?
You would also need to put into consideration cost of living. $650 would go a long way in India.
When Raising Money Goes Bad
Good to hear from a Delphi Legend
Why is bad. I didnt say I will stuff myself after 2 months, I will just remove calorie deficit from my diet - I wont stop exercising, I actually want to regain some body mass as muscles - so I need to stop deficit and make surplus of protein etc...
Amazon/Bezos are ruthless - they could not care at all what is fair

I fail to see how the authors getting 35%, unhindered by the publisher's whims, can be unfair.
Pure LiFi Send/Receive Data Using Light [video]
How does this work for people living say in Sri Lanka (me)? What do I do with the shipping costs that would usually be astronomical? Or is this not feasible for someone living here? Or am I just not getting something?

Thanks :). Also, kudos on this. Seems like a pretty sweet idea if it takes off.
The ABC has a writeup today about WikiLeaks publishing the suppression order, but gives zero information about what was in. I think that gives a good indication as to what the ABC's legal team thought about publishing the contents of the suppression order:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-30/wikileaks-publish-details-of-suppression/5634800

It's going to be interesting to see what the papers say tomorrow. But even more importantly, it's going to be really interesting to see what MediaWatch has to say about this.
At Behest of Judge, U.S. Shortens Man’s 57-Year Mandatory Sentence
I'm not the person that did this analysis, but if I recall, for file storage, somewhere just shy of $30k/mo was the magical point at which it made financial sense to move from S3 to a few stout SoftLayer storage machines at my company.
So reference [1] says:

> in the case of a proceeding suppression order or an order under section 26(1), must specify the applicable ground or grounds

"applicable" would seem to be the operative word here. The problem is that the grounds are not applicable to the stated purpose. You would have to concoct quite an elaborate story to rationalise that saving some foreign politicians from embarrassment is supportable on grounds of national security.
And that is still not a business model.
Prosecutors offered him an 11-year plea deal that he turned down after his lawyer persuaded him that he would be acquitted at trial. Mr. Holloway lost.

For the first conviction on the gun count, the law required Mr. Holloway to receive five years. But for the second and third convictions, the law required 20 years for each one, served consecutively, in accordance with the stacking requirement."

I frequently hear an argument from people on HN who insist that Aaron Swartz did not face a long prison sentence, and that the use of "stacking" makes it seem longer than it really is.

Here's a counter example of stacking resulting in a long prison sentence.

Also - more on the use of "Stacking" by federal prosecutors:

http://rt.com/usa/swartz-computer-law-cfaa-010/
What if a public function is very complicated—too complicated to be considered a unit—and it calls several simpler private functions? Those helpers should be tested with their own unit tests, but shouldn't be exported.

It's not just about coverage in terms of code execution; you also want the right test “resolution”, so you can quickly find the level of abstraction where a bug is, and so you can prove correctness of the parts of a complicated function as you build it.
One tool that should have become more common but isn't is Rob Pike's structural regular expressions, which are a fascinating generalization of awk for non-line oriented data.

http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/

Many people have tried to generalize unix pipes and homogeneous data, few have succeeded.
+10 Years in the Creative and Strategic Digital Marketing Business in Chile
"What could possibly go wrong?" I mean, besides the fact that it runs on iphones.
This was on HN front page recently:
http://mariusandra.com/blog/2014/07/why-i-dont-eat-on-monday...

Fasting is popular in many cultures for religious reasons and so far only theoreticians can prove its bad. You see people from fasting oriented cultures live long and healthy till their 80s even with worse healthcare.
I have read a lot about it - but cannot find links now - just look it up and make your mind. For me it was finally first step to force me to diet - extremely successfully as well after all the attempts.
Maciej finally bought an iPhone! When I met him last year in Australia he uses his 15" laptop to check his tweets.
On top of which gravity is going to lessen as you get to the center of mass, so even a little resistance will eventually become extremely significant...
The post states that tungsten "...has a low corrosion rate at elevated temperatures." This is not accurate.

Tungsten oxidizes in air beginning around 600°C and as the temperature increases, the tungsten oxide layer scales off, exposing underlying metal to further oxidation. (see, for example, http://labfus.ciemat.es/AR/2011/C_004/AM_4x.pdf)

Tungsten is great for high temperature use in vacuum, neutral (the inert gases) or reducing environments (hydrogen, for example). You can use it nearly up to its melting point in those conditions if you aren't too dependent on structural integrity.

In oxidizing environments (air, oxygen, water, halogens, silicates, etc.) it fails quite rapidly. Molten rock is replete with chemical species that react with tungsten at elevated temperatures.

At 2000°C, the tungsten blanket covering the Co60 heat source would be corroded away, I'll guess, within a week of launch on its journey to the center of the earth.

Although it would be incredibly costly, they might have better luck with iridium or rhenium.

Nevertheless, a fun mission to think about.
You don't know. That is why you ask.
Is there going to be a big freeing up of lots of obvious patents in the late twenty-teens? I feel like a lot of this started in the late 90's, and I believe they only last twenty years. So will a lot of this just go away soon?
Where'd you get 4mph? 12 miles in 45 minutes is 16 MPH, a decent speed to maintain on a bike.
If it was, there would be a healthy e-reader market with competing devices and choices for consumers, which would deprive Amazon of business leverage over content distribution.

Barnes & Noble had a brief moment of glory when their first Nook color tablet was cheaper, better and unlocked. Devs were selling rooted Android SD cards on eBay. If BN had opened up the hardware, they had a chance of gaining the scale needed to compete with Kindle. Instead, BN went the other way, locked down Nooks, created their own App Store with poor selection and the rest is history.

Apple has managed to charge premium prices for devices (enabling a market for many cheaper competitors) AND keep leverage on app/content distribution.

Digital publishing needs to separate distribution from payment. Convert "pirates" into "free logistics services" and focus on customers connecting more closely with authors. Why can't authors accept elastic (value-based, pay-what-you-want) bitcoin payments?