skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You seem to think that intelligence gathered in a foreign repressive country can be taken as "promises". This is deeply naive.

When you have put your credibility on the line, making certain claims, justifying enormous expenditures with open-ended commitments - well, choose a word you please if you don't like 'promises'.

> Yes there is. Even if what you claim about Cheney is true, how is he supposed to have convinced Clinton of the threat? And what about all the other nations that believed in it?

The other nations which had to be bullied into it or just stayed out of the 'coalition of the willing'?

> Even so, the Iraqi people were demonstrably better off (until the premature withdrawal) after the invasion and a vile dictator who gassed kurds (whilst not having WMDs apparently) and killed at random (certainly his children did) was removed.

Ah yes, it's all good until it isn't. The WMDs were there, and so it was justified! (Unless they weren't.) The invasion was a good thing! (Until it wasn't.) It was worth it! (Until we tote up the million of refugees, the hundreds of thousand of excess deaths, the trillions spent and to be spent.) Some other leaders made the same mistake! (Unless they didn't make the same mistake). It was a net-win for the world! (Well, unless we look at all the embarrassing bits.)

Sad and pitiable. You can't back up your initial claims about WMDs except in the most desperate and misleading way possible, so you immediately spin to other issues like saying some other people agreed with Bush or his intentions were good or maybe some selected post-invasion period was an improvement. I'm not fooled.
Someone should have informed the director and/or actor that lawyers rarely yell and rant in depositions.
It's business - you play to the limit of the rules and if you break them then you try your best not to get caught.

MS didn't crush people - it crushed companies. There's a big difference.
It's a shame they seem to be so far behind now digitally..
The Importance of Heritability in Psychological Research: Attitudes [pdf]
Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology
Distributed vectors for image recognition from textual descriptions
Strong statement and fair play to them for standing behind their operators.
I used their service for backing up my media files (music, videos, pictures, etc.). Total amount of data is about 1.7TB. This new pricing means I am in $99 per month plan vs. the $99 per year I had. I am just going to cancel and move to backblaze. The bitcasa performance was never the best but since I just ran Rsync with a cron job in the background I never really cared.
No joke just release the thing!
>Where did you get your epistemology?

Karl Popper.

>If we can't measure things we don't understand, how the heck would we come to understand them?

We get new ideas, such as the concept of distance, by guessing them in response to problems.
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That was the first thing that came to my mind too. The more I read about Uber, the more I dislike them. And it's really just that company I don't like; I think the idea of taxi alternatives like Uber and Lyft is a good one, but Uber has shown several times that they don't give a shit about their drivers, their riders, or the law. I see other companies like Lyft, who seem to be playing by the rules and treating their drivers and riders with respect, as the future of this industry.
It's a strong statement, yes. But will they follow through? They've screwed their drivers over many times in the past.
Well, ms crippled the web as an application development target by freezing ie for somewhere between 5 and 10 years, in order to support their desktop software monopoly. A monopoly that used to cost on the order of $100+ per pc. So they got probably an extra $400 from me.
A hypothetically benevolent AI would surely figure out what is "best" for us and probably redo our governments or replace them entirely with it's own rule.

Ya people might not like it at first, but what are they going to do? Fight the super powerful AI?
What is involved in becoming a cab driver in Philly? Is it medallion costs, vehicle costs (buying or renting), tests, etc.?

Another example of backlash to Uber/Hailo etc. has been the London black taxis. Their operators study for years for very difficult tests in order to be licensed operators, and pay significant costs in doing so, and as such I can understand why they would be irritated by competition coming in without these conditions, but if these conditions don't exist then it's market protectionism at a cost to the consumer.
I had the same question, for what it's worth. Why make someone feel dumb for asking?

I wonder if HN would benefit from a guideline like, "If someone asks a question whose answer seems obvious, try to answer it in a straightforward way. For example, 'You really don't know what 2+2 is?' can be shortened to '2+2 is 4.'"

There are interesting followup questions on this topic, too. If Uber won't reimburse them, why not? On the other hand, would it even be legal for Uber to reimburse them, since Uber is doing so with the intent of "transferring" the penalty of the law from the driver to Uber? One reason to have laws is so that their penalties act as a deterrent. If Uber is preventing the deterrent from having an effect, then perhaps the legal system might take a dim view of this. Whether that'd be punishable, I have no idea; the point is simply that there are many interesting questions that can be derived from the starting point of "Will Uber be reimbursing the drivers?"
It seems like Uber does this just for the headlines. They know they need to have laws changed in order to break past government-sanctioned taxi monopolies. And they know they're going to get in trouble for breaking the current laws.

The headlines always end up as The Government sticking it to The Working Man, and Uber eats that stuff up.
I think wolfram alpha has some support for tex notation.
It's a very simplistic world view to think that Uber defying regulation and hacking someone's voicemail are in the same ballpark.
Whisper Suspends Editorial Team Involved in Guardian Visit
> I'm amazed at the reaction

And I'm baffled by yours, and others' in the thread. With the PRISM/Snowden revelations, Apple still refusing to encrypt their data center links, not using perfect forward secrecy, etc, the cloud simply doesn't seem like a good default.

They could make this opt-in, as it's supposedly linked to Continuity, but it's very clearly unintuitive, as evidenced by others in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8511115 for one). If even HN people (probably at least the 95th percentile in tech literacy compared to the general pop) didn't know this, then what about your typical PEBKAC user?

And, sorry to be incendiary, but I'm sure the NSA isn't displeased by Apple's UX choice here.
Yes. I am not saying that Microsoft has monopoly for this. But they had better leverage than anybody else in the desktop era (thanks to the way IE was bundled with Windows) and did it for large scale. Which made them disliked. I'm not a supporter of Google, which is becoming more of a bad guy than Microsoft these days.
i'll say it again [1]

by focusing on old, cheap and slow hardware, they're losing out on 3rd-party dev talent that would be interested to run FxOS on more modern hardware and letting the optimization for old devices trickle down later. i would love to easily run it on my BeagleBone Black and contribute apps i make back to their market.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8433121
That's not meant to make him/her feel dumb, it is an honest question.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8500970
Can someone explain to me how can software be "free as in freedom"?
I think if you had presented exactly the same data as the results of dispassionate research, you would have gotten a somewhat tepid, but appreciative response.

Because you presented it as a personal violation and unconscionable shock, many people are reacting with incredulity.

I don't think you did anything wrong, tactically, and I think this is an important discovery. I do think you need to rethink your strategy around private data though, because the course of user experience is at odds with your desires.
With lots of providers you only need the PIN if accessing voicemail from a number that isn't your own, eg "dialling in" to your voicemail from a payphone/friendsphone/etc (dial your own number, press *)... if it detects it's from your own number, it generally just lets you in without the PIN.
And I hadn't visited settings page yet.
How is this not an unmanned aerial vehicle?
> But he also writes, in a later commentary article, "Heritability isn't an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size."[2]

It is true that heritability does not logically imply immalleabillity. But, leaving aside the many cases of untreatable or fatal genetic diseases as possibly too easy, I am struck by how often heritability does turn out to be about traits which are difficult or impossible to change; we are familiar with the case of intelligence, of course, but it shows up almost anywhere heritability does. Consider the case of politics: political affiliation is highly stable over lifetimes, impenetrable to argumentation, people will tie themselves in knots to preserve their beliefs (consider the people who argue that WMDs were successfully found in Iraq), increasingly linked to fundamental differences in cognition (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8512400 ) - and political attitudes are highly heritable (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8512399 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8504593). This pattern pops up over and over again: if a study calculates the heritability of a number of traits, the traits which are high on heritability and low on shared environment will strike one as things which are hard to change. If you don't like attitudes or politics or intelligence, consider personality like the Big Five construct: OCEAN are all highly heritable (~40% avg), and yet, largely unchangeable. Do you know any way to increase Conscientiousness aside from dopaminergic stimulants? I don't. Do you know any way to increase Openness besides possibly psychedelics? I don't. And so on.

> Associations of candidate genes with psychological traits and other traits studied in the social sciences should be viewed as tentative until they have been replicated in multiple large samples. Doing otherwise may hamper scientific progress by proliferating potentially false results, which may then influence the research agendas of scientists who do not appreciate that the associations they take as a starting point for their efforts may not be real. And the dissemination of false results to the public risks creating an incorrect perception about the state of knowledge in the field, especially the existence of genes described as being 'for' traits on the basis of unintentionally inflated estimates of effect size and statistical significance."[3]

It would be nice if, in your constant citation of Chabris, you would incorporate any of the information I've given you in my other replies to you.
If YCombinator don't kick these guys out, it's going to demonstrate that these all apologies are disingenuous and exist only for PR, and that that in the future the line to cross does is only imaginary.
The legend says the image has been modified.
And, of course, a string of previous versions of this sort of rc plane. Without anything except that footage, I can say with 100% certainty that this is not the first rc plane that pilot has flown. I'd be quite surprised if his list of planes before this one didn't approach or exceed 100... (I'm nowhere near ready to fly something like that, and I could list 30 or 40 models I've built and flown).
Emergency preparedness radio communications cheat sheet
Oh. My apologies.
What does the new BB do?
> I know I have to trust them to do what they say they do, anyways, but if they do not have the keys, they cannot change their mind (say in response to a visit from the NSA)

Apple absolutely holds the keys to everything stored on iCloud. See their iOS security whitepaper [1], in the iCloud section:

> iCloud

> iCloud stores music, photos, apps, calendars, documents, and more, and automatically pushes them to all of a user’s devices. iCloud can also be used by third-party apps to store and sync documents as well as key values for app data as defined by the developer. An iCloud account is configured via the Settings app by the user. iCloud features, including Photo Stream, Documents & Data, and Backup, can be disabled by IT administrators via a configuration profile.

>The service is agnostic about what is being stored and handles all files the same way. There are two components for each file. The first is the file’s metadata, which consists of its name, extension, and filesystem permission settings. The second component is the file’s contents, which are treated by iCloud simply as a collection of bytes.

> Each file is broken into chunks and encrypted by iCloud using AES-128 and a key derived from each chunk’s contents that utilizes SHA-256. The keys, and the file’s metadata, are stored by Apple in the user’s iCloud account. The encrypted chunks of the file are stored, without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as Amazon S3 and Windows Azure.

[1]: https://www.apple.com/ipad/business/docs/iOS_Security_Feb14....
Can't you just record the audio via whatever computer the mic is attached to?

Syncing video to audio is always a pain, but I wouldn't mind desync to see it.
I found this earlier poll interesting, and since it is 937 days old I thought it would be interesting to run it again:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3786674
> no one has ever duplicated it

But it is Free, so why are you duplicating it? I must be missing something.
> ...when you have emails or documentation to write...

I totally agree. Every editor or typing speed article is accompanied by posters claiming that it's not important for programming, and I just have to think that they haven't spent a lot of time working in a team.

Typing and thinking about code is never more than 2/3 of my job. Writing emails, commenting code, creating procedures (e.g., for releasing), documenting our infrastructure... These activities require a bit less thought and are always limited by my typing speed, even with vim and 100+ WPM.

Getting through them slower would mean spending less than half of my time programming, or worse: a pile of undocumented code and systems, and increasing irrelevance in team discussions.
Discovering Jigsaw, the new major java 9 feature
Executive Order 13295:Revised List of Quarantinable Communicable Diseases (2003)
Thanks.

"Deplorable charade." Are they referring to their own actions? I mean "charade (n.) something that is done in order to pretend something is true when it is not really true." The PPA regulations are true, are they not? It's the legality of driving an UberX which is the charade, no?
Because it is not actually science.
One thing missing from the list is "being born and raised in the right part of the world". And I'm not talking about being able to raise capital, but simply being in a society that embraces and promotes entrepreneurship, as well as having easy access to numerous basic amenities such as food, water, health care, Internet (at decent speeds etc).
Good for the PPA. Regardless of the laws being stuck in time or not, uber has repeatedly defied laws especially in California where they specifically are told your ride share is illegal shut it down, and they don't. Sad for the drivers but they themselves should also be more aware of the laws that apply. Bad on uber for not even explaining the possibility which of course they know about.
RoboHash: Generate Unique images from any text
private video?
OK, Play appears to be pretty strict about xrefs for some reason. I'll look into it. You can track the issue here:

https://github.com/progit/progit2/issues/111
Not entirely. I certainly expected the answer to be "no", but I was surprised.
In my experience this is something that I do subconsciously but it's often justified. People who write in word do so because they are unaware of LaTeX or because they don't know how. The first means they are usually not familiar enough with the field to understand that LaTeX is the default. This lack of understanding is then also present in the content. The second reason is usually indicitive of someone who is lazy or is writing junk. If they can't write LaTeX then it is unlikely that they can write other code.
Nikka – Digital Strongbox (Crypto as Service)
Voicemail hacking has a sordid history. British tabloid News of the World, one of the oldest newspapers in the UK, was revealed to have accessed the voicemail systems of possibly over 4000 people [1]. The scandal was such a hit to the newspaper's reputation that it was shut down completely in 2011.

It's incredible that a YC founder would think it "an interesting social experiment".

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11195407
The latter point is the reason I stopped using LaTeX even though I was proficient enough years past to type up lecture notes in realtime during class with little thought (lots of math). Collaboration with it requires everyone involved to know it.

With my adviser and collaborators, I ended up compiling PDFs, printing them, and then they would mark them up by hand because that was fastest. It was not ideal by any stretch.

Word has it's faults (cough figure placement and cross-references), but track changes and adding comments to the manuscript is just spot on and easy. Getting comments and revisions done in Word is just an order of magnitude easier, and just leaves me at the end to make sure all the figures are positioned properly with captions. And now that Word finally seems to have gotten Styles and sections working properly (so many horrible disasters with this in previous iterations) it's pretty workable for technical documents.

Even the equation editor now very nearly straight up accepts latex markup for the math to the point where it's good enough for all but heavy theory papers.

But with LaTeX, asking your busy adviser to look at the compiled output, and then mark up a separate file they have to parse in their head to comment on is just too much effort.
Out Of all the noise, this is the only comment he should be paying attention to.
What DRM bullshit? I thought it was Apple that implemented Palladium?

>As such, it is quite reasonable to disregard the "millions of people his foundation and charity work have touched", as many others would have done the same in his place.

Steve Jobs quote:

>Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology

Also, throwing money at charities is far less effective than try to affect change by working full time on it. If money was the solution, the tens of billions given to Africa would've solved the issues.
That's not arithmetic, though. That's logic represented as a one-liner... Not the sort of change I'm talking about.
Most higher level languages do have wrappers around these calls, but you rarely have to worry about things such as async-signal-safety or EINTR, for example. Knowing why such things are problematic isn't of much interest to the average Python programmer, while essential for writing correct and safe C code.
Medical devices for low-income and developing countries have never been closer
User-perceived characters are not graphemes, they are grapheme clusters.

You can look at unicode stings in at least four different levels of abstraction: bytes, code points, code units and grapheme clusters. Only advantage UTF-32 has over others is that allcode units fit into single code point (atleast I think so)

If you want a vector where each user-perceived character and whitespace matches one element in the vector, probably the easiest way is to create vector where each element is short unicode string that matches grapheme cluster.
Well, here, the PPA is deplored almost absolutely, for constant abuse of power. Over the weekend, an insurance company went bankrupt leaving about 1/3 of Philadelphia's taxi fleet without insurance. The PPA decide to allow taxis to continue to roll despite their insurance company being bankrupt[0] and then the next day did this to an UberX driver over insurance woes.

This is why it's a big deal here in Philly. The corruption of the PPA knows no bounds.

[0] http://mobile.philly.com/business/?wss=/philly/business/tran...
Didn't he do just that by making it public on his twitter?
Recapturing a Life, in a Lost Picture of Bill Gates and Paul Allen
Because, to begin with, the idea that we can measure intelligence is still under debate. There are people on HN who will tell you it's not, which is only true if they choose to ignore everyone who disagrees with them. And because we know how the media likes to spin/exaggerate medial studies, someone one will eventually link it to race. And it's happened before[1]... . And, similar to how BMI wrongly turned into an individual indicator of obesity, some very mild affinity over a large sample size for a dubious metric will turn into the absolute brain-points and politics will take over and it'll just be a big mess.

In short, society is not mature enough to handle this area of research right now. The consequences of getting it wrong, or even right, is severe.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so. -Thomas Jefferson

This has never been more true when it comes to ride sharing companies.

Monopolies benefit next to nobody, while Uber benefits a lot of people.
I didn't downvote you, but I think your downvotes are probably from people who read your summary as a diet based on a flawed appeal to nature. I'm not sure if a carbhead advocates a high carb or low carb diet, but I imagine most of the downvoters would probably also downvote a post advocating a high-carb or low-cab diet that appeared to use poor logic as a starting point.
The best ways to beat jet lag (EU/US edition) – Wunderlist
Try https://popapp.in/ to show the interactions. It only requires sketching the screens.

For more tools check: http://despreneur.com/best-tools-to-build-your-app-prototype...
I think you're completely missing the point. First, I'm not blaming Microsoft. Second, there are more people using XP than using Macintoshes or Linux. I'm simply pointing out that we're still paying the price for the IE domination of the late 90s early 2000's. At this point Microsoft is paying a price too. Hopefully windows 10 will garner enough support that they can move away from their past also. Their latest versions of IE are actually quite good.
YC founder ethics policy here: http://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/

As well,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UacbJ72dluU&feature=channel
US Ignite: NSF funding for gigabit Internet access development and deployment
Amusingly enough, I'm fairly neutral on him. His good is exactly equal to his bad, IMHO.