skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This may surprise you, but I am a totally blind iPhone user and have been for about 4 years. Before this, I owned a series of Nokia devices, the 6682, N95, etc.
Previously, on the s60 devices, we had to purchase a $350 screen reader to make the phone talk. Now, on any iPhone running iOS 4 or later, (so... all of them) I can press the home button 3 times, or just ask Siri to turn on VoiceOver, and I am instantly granted the same level of access to the device that my sighted colleagues expect. Apple is seriously amazing in terms of accessibility -- all of their built-in apps are 100% accessible, all controls labeled, all custom interaction elements given clear accessible descriptions/access tips.
Search on YouTube for blind people using the iPhone/iPad, I expect it will blow your mind.
Even more awesome than the iPhone's built-in accessibility is the fact that it's so easy for 3rd party developers to make their own apps accessible. All native controls are accessible by default, all you need do as a developer is add labels. For custom controls, such as chess boards, Apple provides an incredibly powerful accessibility API, allowing developers to enable access for anything.
I personally play Shredder Chess on the iPhone as the developer has explicitly enabled accessibility for it.
There are real blind people using these devices, and I hope you consider this the next time you are thinking about how accessibility fits/doesn't into your next project.
Soldiers go to war knowing they can be killed. That doesn't mean when the enemy kills US soldiers, we should just shrug and say "well, they knew the risks, who cares?", does it?
Infographic – The Future of Daily Travel
Yes, it could have. If Google hadn't managed to do every possible thing wrong with it. Seriously, the sheer number of bone-headed catastrophic screw ups involved in G+ is impressive.

The idea that Google could build a unified social network across all their platforms was good. The idea that Google could also make a Facebook-clone was good.

Every other idea they put into G+ after that was awful.
Sure there is. You just take a generic function

f :: r -> r

and you keep specializing it with whatever input you like.

f (x :: Int) :: Int
f (y :: Char) :: Char

which is essentially the RankNType trick. You could express something fancier with dependent types, but I've yet to see a real need for it.

You could also do this with a "Resumption Type":

data Resumption a where
Resume :: x -> (x -> (a, Resumption a)) -> Resumption a

In this case, each time you receive a Resumption you can open it up to receive a totally unique `x` which you have zero knowledge of except in that you are able to give it back to the "resumption function" you also unpacked in order to receive a token.

A little variation on this is exactly the Moore machine encoding I used in the Gist.
Right now most of non-neutral networks exist specially outside of the US in cellular networks. They allow Spotify or other media streaming services deliver content to the user without charging user's data plan. Most of the companies competing in media streaming space, specially those with paid subscribers are big enough to pay the ISP for the fast lane (Beats, Netflix, Rdio etc). One exception is the fast lane (or maybe VIP lane in this case) for Facebook in developing countries. I've seen Facebook let users with no data plan whatsoever use the service in Türkie. You can see how this makes it hard for other social networks to catch up.

I don't think US cable companies make a tier system for websites. It doesn't make sense. All the non-media traffic isn't much that worth the discrimination. Most of the un-neutrality will be in cellular networks and media delivery.
Ask HN: What software helps you run your startup?
What are the keys apps, services, or software that you depend on to run your company?
Retire to create less competition for them. Then spend money on software contracts to create new seats.
Male characters in games often look similar, though sometimes more ripped. Not too many non-NPCs with pot bellies on the male side in most games :-)

Who wants to see out of shape middle-aged game characters?

Somebody else mentioned practical concerns about rendering...
What appears to me to be simple logic:

If sentencing guidelines were ratcheted sharply downwards, plea bargaining wouldn't have an extortative effect, because prosecutors wouldn't have the latitude to pursue outlandish sentences.

However, if plea bargaining was outlawed but sentencing guidelines remained as they are now, sentencing and criminal procedure would remain unjust for the majority of defendants, who are ultimately guilty but don't deserve outlandish sentences.

Both policy changes are very unlikely, but for different reasons.

Plea bargaining won't be outlawed or curtailed because doing so would require allocating a huge amount of money to the court system, which is already overtaxed. Preempting an argument nobody has made: that's not "their problem, not ours", because what we'd really be talking about is years and years of delayed trials during which people will be held in confinement anyways. Look at China for an example of a system that has that problem in a big way.

Sentences won't be ratcheted down because there's never a political upside for doing that. That's obviously tragic.
During seltzer water with a spritz of any flavor your like. Healthier and cheaper.
The performance is not the only problem, the config files are just terrible compare to Nginx.
Actually, as a blind person, typing on a touch screen isn't that hard, and frankly I don't even find myself typing that much with the advent of reasonable dictation. In a majority of cases for short texts I can dash off something as fast as a sighted person, and for
longer-form material I will use Siri's dictation for a great speed advantage.
Now if only they'd offer the ability to merge G+ accounts. Somehow, I have two. Which means I have two youtube accounts, which is a constant fiasco.
Like most companies, client support is a real shitshow, with the most junior employees and fewest resources.
A lot of it depends on what kind of product you're offering. If it's more transactional in nature with high volume and churn then it mightn't be for you. If you're looking to become more enterprise oriented then it's worth the investment. Conor - Customer Success at Datahug
Completely ignoring the fact that in sane places, this isn't a problem, but this is false advertising at the very least and should be prosecuted as such.

A bare minimum standard is that a line advertised as X meg downstream should be able to reach that speed more often than not.

I don't care what the ISPs think about this. Their sales concerns are their own.
He was only making 1 request per 3 seconds. Must have been a really slow system.
Could it be a business case to open up the routing system to users?
Excuse my curiosity but I got to ask how you experience browsing Hacker News accessibility wise. Can you make out the tree-like ordering of the comments? Can you see that comments are light-grey when they have many downvotes?
> it's not being bigoted to suggest that white guys complaining that people want inclusiveness is a bad thing is an invalid opinion.

Quote me where I said that it was anything to due with preventing inclusiveness. I'll be waiting.

> I don't think you really understand privilege.

And then you proceed to say that I had a valid example of privilege (discriminatory lower pay).

> But one privilege absolutely does not imply all privilege.

I never said that, quote me where I said that. I'll be waiting.
It's discussed here:

http://www.maa.org/publications/periodicals/math-horizons/th...

The answer is something like to within 1 pixel of the bar chart.
Time for a home carbonator like SodaStream
Anyone serious about security would, and they'd be doing it now, not in a few months just because Google decided to show some different pixels on a screen from that date.
Nothing.

Quality of service will remain, at worst, as it currently is, and no one will notice a difference.

Netflix et al. will continue to host cache devices with ISPs, torrents will still work, video chat will still work, and chances are no startup will ever be forced to pay ISPs to deliver their packets.

No one will ever be presented with the option to purchase a "Social Media/Streaming/whatever Internet Package," but maybe they'll be offered the option to upgrade to a more explicit SLA with bandwidth/latency guarantees.

Maybe some kids will DDoS an ISP or two, but the effect will be nil.

That's my prediction.
A new startup podcast about starting a podcast startup from Alex Blumberg
30 years in jail is a false dichotomy and people need to quit parroting that in relation to this case, it was never ever in any way going to be close to that.
It's actually considered bad practice to omit types in Haskell for top level declarations. Unless needed, it's typically best to omit them _within_ declarations, though. I am not entirely sure why this is where the community landed, but you could get away with e.g. only providing types explicitly for exported functions, and no one would really care, I think. You can always use your IDE/repl to just tell you the types whether they are explicit or not.

[EDIT: This didn't really address your core point. I'm not sure how to do that, precisely, but here is a shot. I think the ideal Haskell use case is active collaboration between the programmer and the compiler. The lack of English language docs is seen as less important than clear contracts within that interaction. I think the descriptive statement of "If you try to operate without the compiler and reason using English language understandings, Haskell will be more frustrating for you than it is for people in the Haskell community" seems both true and fair. Suffice it to say, most understanding of actual things is most easily expressed in natural language, because most communication happens in natural languages, so that's just how we hear about those ideas.]
have you ever tried a phone featuring a sliding keyboard? is it not easier/faster then a touch screen?
This is really cool -- how does it work?

It seems to work really well for everything except the bottom E string on my guitar, I just seem to get a blur however close to tuned it is.
You might have heard of him from The American Life[1] or Planet Money[2]

1: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/

2: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/
He already has; odds are that he has sunk any chances of a Democratic presidential victory in 2016. A significant portion of the base that rallied for his presidency two terms in a row are disillusioned with the government they got.
John Carmack Speaking about VR Live
Get Bonus: Experimental game development with Racket
The problem with SciFi is that the "harder" it is the less appealing/entertaining is for mass audiences. Take Primer for example, its a great film about time travel but even the average aficionado has trouble getting it the first time.

2001 is another case of a movie that was very realistic but most people consider downright boring and confusing. I think its a great movie and while it started the trend of evil AI this article talks about it isn't even close to the worst offender.

And of course this also sells tickets, nobody wants to watch a movie about an AI solving all the problems of the world because in that case nothing happens. A deranged AI with power over UAVs is a great set-up for a summer blockbuster, Watson curing cancer is not.
Curiosity is *never something to be excused. It's to be celebrated.
Anyway, HN is actually not all that great in terms of accessibility. The tree styling of the comments, and the marking of downvotes are both indicated visually and not semantically. It means that I will often have to use context to determine where one thread ends and another begins, or when comments pass my personal taste threshold I just whack page down a few times.
Please don't vote for an HN post because someone asks you to. It will probably get the post, and possibly your account, penalized.

You should upvote something on HN because it's intellectually interesting, not because someone is promoting something. The penalties are a shame when the post actually is interesting and could have done well on its own.
Sweet! I got 20th overall: http://js13kgames.com/entries/particularism

I wrote a post today about my two entries: http://jere.in/12

Thanks for all the hard work, end33r.
Air Food One Delivers Airline Food Right to Your Door
Well according to the language, if you simply wrote a tweet saying that "Facebook patent US7827208, 'generating a feed of stories personalized for members of a social network' is riduculous and overbroad" you could then have your right to develop for Oculus effectively revoked

http://www.google.com/patents/US7827208
I wonder if the success of that "yo" app is based on this concept (even though I think using missed calls are way more effective than using the internet).
I think the design of G+ is gorgeous. I keep referring to it again and again. And as you say, the vision was great, but the execution of forcing everyone on it was odd.
Python Patterns: Linear Algebra
I imagine Siri was a life changing. Did you try the swype keyboard? So far has been the best keyboard I have tried.
Yeah, watercress is much nicer. You can make it into soup too...
Proof School Accepting Student Applications for Fall 2015
The author is presenting right now at RacketCon 2014. There's a live stream on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORQdUnUtgIA
The number of attempts to fix provisioning is overwhelming.
Shows that chef/puppet aren't cutting it, and neither are the smaller alternatives.
Assange: 'Google works like NSA'
Is it really _that_ expensive, though ?

As far as I can see the lack of competition happens mainly in the last mile part. There are myriads of community-run ISPs that specifically target this area around the world; the best example I know is the FFDN (http://www.ffdn.org/). I've listened to many conf made by Benjamin Bayart, ex-president of the association that started this movement. The key idea behind running your own ISP (at least in France) are:

- It's easy. A few forms to fill and you're official.

- It's cheap. Expect less than 100 euros

- All it really requires is involvement. People wanting to commit to it for more than the next 6 months.

Technically they absolutely depend on big names' network for transiting data. But the end point is their own; there can be competition if you want to. Plus, the big names would like to create differentiation on the end points, but they actually don't care as much about that when you're your own ISP and peer/transit through them.
well I have a family and 2 days / week would not be enough. 3 - 4 would be better. you have to have a good rate :)
What unit do farmers in europe/civilized world pay for their water in? Is it cubic-meters or cm-hectares?
The real game-changer was VoiceOver, which Apple introduced with the iPhone 3GS in June 2009. Blind people were using their iPhones with VoiceOver for over two years before Apple integrated Siri. Siri is quite convenient though.

As for alternate keyboards, Fleksy has been popular among blind iOS users.
On PACER fees, IMO a good compromise is to only charge for the actual court documents retrieved. No charging for search results, docket listings etc, and there is already a $3 cap on documents.
I'll remember about that, thanks.
The earliest material in my e-mail archives that I can find about Net Neutrality dates from 2006. Things like this:

"Major telecommunications companies are spending millions lobbying the U.S. congress to make the Internet into a private network. In political lingo this means abandoning what is called "Net Neutrality". In common sense terms it's about the government withdrawing our right to Internet Freedom, it's about the Death of The Internet."

There's always a lot of doom and gloom talk about what evil US telecoms companies will do if regulation is not enforced to quality fix internet service in one particular country with less than 20% of the world's internet users on it.

The real problem is lack of competition at an urban level in the US. It's a specific problem, quality fixing is not the solution, it will entrench the incumbents. It's not even a new problem, the equivalent of the local loop for broadband has to be unbundled to fix this.
Because it's not relevant?

I argue it is. There's no way Home Depot could have prevented this. If they took every step suggested by every article and every comment in this 'factual discussion' they would have been owned another way. And it would have received a tirade of similar articles and similar comments about what it should have done to protect its data another way.

Hindsight and backwards engineering security suggestions is easy. But it isn't productive to the overall posture of cyber security. I guess it depends on what scope of the discussion you find interesting. The root or the symptom.
this sounds like a criticism of Uber's practices not sharing in general.
I'm looking very forward to hearing from anyone there who tries out the Crescent Bay prototype.
Teardown.com Analysis: The Apple iPhone 6 and 6 Plus
I had flagged this (I'm thrilled that S&F is on the way out in NYC, but can't imagine how bad the thread would have gotten).

But then I got a nagging feeling after skimming the article and realized that this is another Mike Bostock piece --- Bostock being the genius behind D3 --- and flagging Bostock's dataviz journalism can't be a good call. So: unflagged!
In cases of misleading headlines you can look to subtitles or (failing that) a sentence from the article which describes the thing factually. There usually is one.
First off: Totally true.

Secondly: Devil's advocate, but it is a "hard problem." It is easy to look for behaviour on the system, it is very hard to look for patterns of behaviour.

I mean let's say that some of your users are normal court clerks, it wouldn't be unusual to see them sit around and pull tons of records all day every day. So how do you pick up normal requests on-mass and unusual requests on-mass?

If I was in charge of protecting such a system I wouldn't even attempt to detect this (too hard). Instead what I would do is make it impossible to get records sequentially (e.g. 1, 2, 3...9999999) instead each record had a unique randomly generated token associated with it (a UUID/GUID).

So in order for someone to gain every single record they would either need to conduct a "real" break in and steal the files, or search for every possible criteria (which, for them, becomes a huge hassle/problem).

PS - Most DDoS are, these days, against layer 3 (network). Since it is far harder to defeat a layer 3 attack (as it can literally crash a lot of network hardware). While layer 7 (software) DDoS attacks still exist, they're often conducted by less formidable adversaries and they're much easier to stop (e.g. return a JavaScript redirect instead of the normal page, most browser-users won't notice, but it will defeat a targeted attack until they re-target (and you could rename it every 10 minutes)).
I am lucky enough to work in a "internal open source environment" - I can and do search the whole code base for a major Fortune 500 daily for pieces that fit my needs. And I often find them - but the process of getting it refactored to fit my exact needs (and so improving their code and the overall reduction in entropy) is mostly impossible - because of humans
No one is really willing to change someone else's code without talking to them, agreeing, getting past thier "yes I have tests but if you change it then I don't really know ..."

It's a fundamental problem - good well maintained tests help but this is cultural not technical problem.
Of course, right next to this on the NYT homepage is another article entitled "'Stop-and-Frisk Ebbs, but Still Hangs Over Brooklyn Lives": http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/20/nyregion/friskings-ebb-but...

As part of a new strategy called Omnipresence,
the officers now stand on street corners like
sentries, only rarely confronting young men
and patting them down for weapons.
How does that look?
Ditto. And to the point BashBooster 'requires nothing'—it still requires bash, so good luck with cross-platform provisioning :)

On a more serious note, you should know how to use bash scripts effectively, but also know their limitations (true idempotence is hard, testing is annoying, error handling is hit or miss, etc.); there's a reason most infrastructure moves towards a higher level of abstraction/convenience like Ansible or Puppet.
I'm not sure I fully agree with the earlier poster, but it's an interesting and useful perspective and I can't see a clear reason for it to be downvoted. Certainly not just because it "bring[s] social justice theory into a factual discussion", yeesh.
Nobody said 'reverse racism'.

The person you replied to was clearly talking about racial stereotyping. The objection was to the stereotyping.

A video that debunks reverse racism is not an appropriate reply to what is (at worst) effectively a typo. s/ist/ial/ and done.
> how hard could it be to write bash routines to download files, unpack them, install packages, etc.

I haven't used Gentoo for a long time but wasn't part of it's package system a nice little DSL for writing scripts that would "download files, unpack them, install packages, etc".
> Actually creating alternative competitor networks are insanely prohibitively expensive,

Luckily, you don't have to. Just nationalise the last mile (and maybe some more infrastructure like the DSLAMs, I'm not sure), and have ISPs lease it. And don't offer bulk prices.

That way, barrier to entry drop, there are less advantages to being big, and the environment is less prone to monopolies.

The idea is simple: let free market and competition run wild where they actually work, and let the state have the inevitable monopolies.
> Advocates say misdemeanor marijuana charges, which require that the drug is in plain sight, are a bellwether, because the police ordered thousands to empty pockets, and arrested them.

Stop-and-frisk in NYC is very closely linked to marijuana laws. To give some context on the ridiculousness of marijuana laws in New York:

Marijuana has been decriminalized in New York since the 1970s. It was originally included as part of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, guaranteeing lengthy mandatory minimum sentences, but after a bunch of kids were getting caught with dime bags, the PTAs[0] lobbied to issue an exception for possession of less than 25 grams[1].

Unfortunately, they included a loophole: if the marijuana is either burning or "in plain sight", it receives the same penalty as if it were over 25 grams, regardless of the amount. So, police can simply tell people to empty their pockets, and - presto! - the marijuana is 'open to public view'.

This loophole is so widely exploited that, despite the fact that marijuana is decriminalized in New York, New York City arrests more people for non-violent, low-level marijuana possession and more people per capita for non-violent, low-level marijuana possession than any other city in the entire world[2].

[0] I kid you not!

[1] Not a full ounce, just 25 grams: http://norml.org/laws/item/new-york-penalties-2

[2] https://www.drugpolicy.org/news/2011/02/2010-nyc-marijuana-a...
You can't stop killing civilians by developing a machine that kills people. I'm pretty sure some margin of error aka collateral damage, will be given to the machine.
Ask HN: Good labor lawyer in SF?
Help! Theres some shit going down where I work. It's come to my attention that I've been mentioned within disputes and I want to talk to a lawyer to protect myself. Does anyone know a good labor lawyer in San Francisco that deals with HR/diversity related issues?