skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a lot of disagreement about a lot of the examples you mentioned. Serpico was talking about the police receiving envelopes of cash, which is universally considered to be bad. The TSA, phone metadata and the rest don't seem to be as clear cut.

People tend to give the government the benefit of the doubt, moreso than they do the police. But unlike with the police, you can take direct action to remove bad actors in government. Vote, and convince others to vote. There's an election coming up soon. I don't agree with you on policy, but I want you to exercise your franchise all the same.
I honestly don't get it. This isn't 'Hacker News', at least, this 'Hacker News' forum is no longer occupied by 'Hackers'.

Incidentally, this reminds me -- later Summer this year, I had the chance to meet a lot Linux kernel developers. At some point a handful were speaking casually about Facebook -- and guess what, each and every one of them were 20 times more paranoid about Facebook and its intent than I am (and I'm pretty skeptical of everything FB does). I'm honestly very confused. I don't want to make the jump and say "astroturfing" -- but I don't know, maybe we have some Facebook developers here who probably work on some engineering tasks and never are exposed to the questionable side of things and genuinely think FB is up to only good. In real world, every true hacker that I personally know greatly distrusts Facebook and all that Facebook touches.

edit: ok, I think I may have said that a little too soon. Posts doubting Poitras are now more toward the bottom than the top, and my two posts are no longer negatively scored.
customer is king? With verizon? not in the US.
i think you're flipping the script here: the web isn't "shackled", it's a virtual machine that almost everyone and their grandmother has chosen to install. tell me how one could, in 1996, get any computer made in the last two or four years to run this software at this quality in under 3 seconds? virtual machines are slower in exchange for their universality, and we're now at the point where they're fast enough to do awesome things.
so does windows 8+
There is some contiguousness but they are mostly spread all over the city. Take a look at the red properties on this map (zoomable):

https://whydontweownthis.com/2014/mi/wayne/detroit#15/42.347...
Um, how is this relevant?

IANAL, but the DMCA seems to protect you from liability only if you don't examine and modify traffic. If they're looking at the protocol to see if it's HTTP and therefore modifiable, they could look at the host to see if it's going to the pirate bay and block it. This means that when someone goes to the pirate bay on the Verizon Wireless network, Verizon is liable for their actions under the DMCA.

This is like YouTube reviewing videos before they're uploaded. If they were reviewing videos, they could catch copyright violations from the start and thus should.

There's probably legal trickery they could use to get out of it but it seems like a valid point.
Presumably, Amazon is very good at SEO. If you're landing on their home page, you're an exception; most people will land directly on product pages, comparison pages, review pages, shopping list pages, sale pages, etc. The home page, then, is for people who type "amazon.com" into their browser directly, because they want to see what the site is about. Putting user-generated content there might not be putting their best foot forward, especially if it's in the form of plain-old boring text rather than eye-catching glossy product photos. Reviews are one click away from any of those product-photo links, but users have to show an initial commitment to spend at least 30 seconds clicking around before Amazon will show them anything that might bore them, like walls of review text.
In the latest version they enable WebGL by default, also in Safari iOS.
Spain is not unique in that sense. All the countries in the world have an informal sector that is not accounted for in statistics. According to a paper from the World Bank [1] the size of the shadow economy in Spain in 2007 was 22.2% of the GDP, whilst the average for the OECD countries was 16.6%. In the UK the figure was 12.2%.

So while it is true that the informal sector is somewhat larger in Spain than in other countries, the difference does not seem to be enough to explain such high unemployment rates.

[1] http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/I...
US firm fined for underpaying Indian workers
I completely agree. This needs to be fixed in Android...

This is the primary reason I root my Android device and why I buy Nexus devices (I don't do Android development). XPrivacy and other apps allow you to revoke permissions individually, which is what Google should have baked into Android itself, without the need to root.
Exactly this. It's a really great idea but a delay of just a few hundred milliseconds is enough to make even someone who uses the oculus rift frequently feel motion sick. Viewing static images in (for example: loading screens in games) are enough to make me personally feel nauseous, so I can't imagine what the delay would be between earth and the moon (a second or two?) would make this feel like.
Are you attempting satire? Is very hard to tell.

edit - just in case it isn't satire. I habitually watch trees quite a lot. I have been obsessing a bit recently with how light reflects off particularly waxy leaves making the colours change with the sky. It doesn't particularly matter that they are trees though, I can watch buildings in much the same way. Is more to do with an appreciation of light.
Cloud Foundry Foundation Bylaws and Related Docs Now Available to Public
What are the best programming interview questions
ah - I keep forgetting...US legal system.
Perhaps the NSA hopes everyone else will use it (and not, say a stock Android phone or an iPhone).
Every individual holds a short position on medical costs.

If medical costs and the value of medical stocks are correlated, then one can hedge that underlying medical short by going long medical stocks. I don't actually know if that correlation holds. I should have been clearer that I was guessing it might.

I actually don't know the right sort of hedging for medicine - would be great to have some help with that.
It can't be "repossessed" if you own it. (And it wouldn't be repossessed anyway since the bank probably doesn't want it back :p)
It's a very intriguing question. But yet we see examples of people with exceptional personal wealth, doing things and saying things that seem ... petty or at least beneath them in the financial context.

I think even billionaires want their causes to succeed, so even if it's a book that accounts for 1% of their wealth, they still want it to do well and will say and do things that help it to succeed.

Also, as AngrySkillzz pointed out, the "ideas" put forth in the book are more important to them (than the money earned) and they can indirectly benefit their business by having these ideas, or opinions take hold.
3 reasons why the app preload model is broken
When I was a kid in KY there was a cicadas swarm. I remember walking down the street and there being piles of the exoskeletons. It was quite surreal.
This Game Has Huge Potential. So Why Is Its Kickstarter Tanking?
Another options besides comment-based annotations is property based annotations.

Basically provide a library that contains all the possible primitive types that can be checked and functions for composing higher order types.

Then in the code do something like so:

var types = require('types');

function foo(bar, baz) {
var qux = '';

/* do something */

return qux;
}

foo.types = {
args: [types.Array, types.Object],
return: [ types.String ] // array to support ES6 destructuring assignment
}

This interface makes it trivially easy to define the types, parse the types, strip the types out on minification, etc.

This approach also makes it trivially easy to compose higher order types in a separate modules and require them.

my-geometry-types.js:

var types = require('types');
var point = [types.Float, types.Float];
module.exports.point = point;
module.exports.rectangle = [point, point];

Then in another file, you can require these type modules and use them to set the type signature of a function;

Anyways, my point is that building a tool like this is awesome, but a null contribution if it requires me to throw out all my existing tooling, especially for something that could have been implemented in a way that is composable. It may even be a net negative contribution if it gets traction and causes an unnecessary schism (e.g. JSX) in the community that reduces code sharing, interop and the ability for developers to stand on each others shoulders.

The beauty and strength of the NodeJS ecosystem is not the language it is based on (JavaScript) or its runtime (v8/libuv), but that it nailed a lot of details related to common conventions among developers and allowing modules to remain small and composable.

The modules created by people like prominent module contributors like Substack, Raynos, Izs and Dominic Tarr are usually stellar examples of publishing small, reusable module components. All of these guys have hundreds of small modules published that are very composable, easy test and easy/fast to replace if they don't meet your needs.

The tooling behind AtScript would be a huge contribution if it were made in a way where the components that make up the tooling could be mixed and matched for use in novel ways.
Very doubtful. Gilbert has only bought skyscrapers in the downtown area. He bought the buildings for what it would cost to rent that much space for a year in Manhattan. Lately Gilbert has been outbid at auction by Chinese investors so he's exhibited financial discipline.

This mystery bidder is paying $500 per house and it would cost ten times that much on the low side to tear down the house. Somebody needs a large chunk of land and for some reason wants it in that specific area. Maybe Piston's owner, Tom Gores, is planning a downtown stadium?
Banks are also counterparties to effectively all large contracts, and there's an avalanche effect that keeps most traders out of the market.
IBM Earnings Reflect Just How Difficult Transformation Really Is
The 4th amendment does not ban searches and seizures without a warrant. It bans "unreasonable" searches and seizures without a warrant. If the founders hadn't meant for the courts to try and distinguish between "reasonable" and "unreasonable" searches, they wouldn't have used the word. But they did--they embedded this balancing between privacy rights and the needs of law enforcement in the very text of the 4th amendment.

All of the programs you mentioned, phone metadata collection, the TSA, fall within the recognized contours of what the Supreme Court has recognized as "reasonable" searches.

Now, that's not to say that the Supreme Court's interpretations are the best ones, or that people can't advocate for a different interpretation. What it does mean is that the people supporting these programs can do so with the entirely good faith belief that they are not violating clearly established Constitutional law.
Really guys? It's so easy. Stream to earth local server with x minute delay, and Oculus users interact with local feed. No more latency. Really not difficult.
The creation of it? Probably not.

What the TSA actually does in practice, though?
Sure, but not all human tissue is either muscle fiber or fat. You gain other non-lipid mass in addition. Some of it is from increases in connective tissue. A tiny amount is from increased bone density. A large portion of it is from retaining more glycogen and water.

Did you see the articles about Zach, one of Mark Rippetoe's trainees? Based on skinfold caliper measurements, he gained 78 lbs in 6 months, 46 lbs of which was lean body mass, and 32 lbs of which was fat: http://startingstrength.com/resources/forum/showthread.php?t...
Clear development land in Wayne county is selling for $25,000 an acre (and more, I looked a bit for large lots, which should at least somewhat mitigate location).

At those rates, you could maybe expect a nice return with a simple tear down and wait strategy.
Fully agree! I prefer reality (though, this is one of my favorite philosophical arguments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA3WGf9pX0A). You're right, the bubble is something to avoid going too far with. Personally I don't "get it," but I can see why others might want it and don't discount it as a possible (likely) future.

A personal theory (though, I limit myself from saying it because it sounds kind of nuts) is that the world we're in currently (i.e. our "real world") is merely the advanced simulation of a past civilization. In essence, the Matrix is real and we're hooked into a machine somewhere. Though, I can't say I fully agree with dystopian humans-as-robot-fuel theory.
As a long term Android user and a mostly happy one at that, let me just say that Android's permissions are terrible and basically not fit for purpose.

I'm going to ignore third party solutions that require root, because those aren't part of the equation for 95%+ of Android users.

Android should have three levels of permissions: Implied (i.e. all apps get these), explicit (at installation), and prompted (user is asked at runtime).

- Implied ("freebies"): internet connectivity, store data, get a unique device ID (per app?), store the app's own accounts within the accounts API.

- Explicit (installation): Run in background, use GPS, use the camera, use the microphone, etc.

- Prompted ("personal information"/"cost you money"): Access your cellphone number, access your contact list, access your calendar, access your email, read/send texts, make calls, etc.

Users in the current Android ecosystem learn to ignore permissions pretty quick as most are for trivial stuff (e.g. internet access, store data on the SD card, store an account, etc).

Worse still a lot of users will skip apps that ask for too many permissions which is bad for both the app developer AND users. Most developers want to offer functionality (e.g. share to contacts) but don't want to do so at the cost of losing users ("Why is this asking to see my contact list?").

Android needs to drop a bunch of "silly" permissions that have no inherent cost to the user. They're clearly created by an engineer who just wanted to slap permissions on every kind of API for no good reason. It benefits nobody.

They then need to take permissions which have a cost (either literally or to user privacy) and set them up rationally so they're either something you get when installing OR something you'll be prompted for.

Lastly Android needs to add a description field to the permissions manifest where the developer can put in a short explanation for why they need permission XYZ. Limit it to 128 characters if you wish. The app store can display these.

I install less apps on Android largely because many ask for too many permissions. If Google makes it really easy for me to protect my personal information (e.g. prompts) I'll literally spend more money on their store because I'll feel more safe to do so. As a developer I'll also offer more functionality to my apps as there is no permission "cost."
A government agency that routinely searches and seizes the property of every citizen who passes through its doors, presuming guilt on each of their behalves, and subjecting you to advanced body scanning technology -- that jibes with the fourth amendment to you?

Edit: I think I read too much into it. I agree that the GP should clarify that the routine execution of the TSA's mandate is (in my opinion) clearly unconstitutional, but if the federal government had simply created an agency that did nothing, that would not necessarily violate the fourth.
Mars One plan has potentially deadly flaws, scientists say
That may be true, but why would anyone invest in new infrastructure if it didn't seem like a better option than buying existing infrastructure?

Both alternatives include the additional value that AirBnB creates and I'd expect both to result in increased investment in housing across the board, both new construction and improvement.
Demos are not typical and in no way demonstrate the general usage of a GPU. They use very dirty tricks to render out a specific output, and are practically useless otherwise.

Here's a list of actual software that was released in 1996:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_in_video_gaming

Notable entries for this conversation:

* Duke Nukem 3D
* Civilization II
* Quake
* Command & Conquer: Red Alert
* Diablo
* Quake

These were good games, but not necessarily what anyone would consider graphical powerhouses with a modern frame of reference.
In the UK this looks like a clear criminal offence under the Computer Misuse Act -- currently carries a maximum 10 year prison sentence.
Seeing this led me to investigate WebGL security vulnerabilities, since the shader code runs out-of-sandbox.

Interesting discussion: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/13799/is-webgl-a...
I've thought about this a bit, but how can you achieve 360° stereo? If you have two 360° cameras side by side, as soon as you look 90° L/R, you no longer have depth and one eye would just see the side of the other camera. If you just have one 360° camera, you don't have any depth.
"but they are mostly spread all over the city"

6000 homes spread out also means you can also create a mini company town by essentially luring people (for a new company) to the city and giving them a choice of different properties, renovated and ready to go with efficiencies gained by having so many to deal with. (Similar to when, say, Levittown was built (all in one area of course but same concept with construction).
The entry-level 15" MBP with the 1TB SSD and AppleCare is $3,148 and the higher-level comes to $3,348, which isn't even close to his desired budget ($1287-1930 USD) and your answer is to simply get two of them...
I wonder what the property taxes, per year, will be on the 6000 parcels.

And, since many cities allow you to challenge the stated value, it could be very expensive, in time, to challenge 6000 parcel values.
I imagine that as the number of programmers is growing exponentially a lot of wheels will be reinvented unnecessarily, but this is a security product from a top-tier company selling products at premium prices.
I'm a self taught developer and I have built my own algorithms.

This is probably the most important resource: http://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-on-programmers-20...

If you really are coding what you want, you will figure it out. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. CS degree is not needed.
"That doesn't mean chickens need to start running at axes the second a known case is identified and isolated."

Which is being advocated by precisely who?

My major theme here is that people, and most especially "authorities" should not be lying, e.g. not making absolute statements about things which aren't. So fat that that has resulted in a constantly changing the party line as preceding versions have turned out to be lies. But there's worse, in the most brazen example I know of, http://cnsnews.com/news/article/brittany-m-hughes/cdc-you-ca... contradicting yourself in consecutive sentences.

You want "panic"? Convince the American people the authorities responsible for keeping us from getting an epidemic of Biblical proportions are systematically, even routinely lying to us. We're well along the road to that.
"Class actions are less about compensation and more about forming big enough sticks to beat misbehaving corporations about the head with.
"

Class actions were never about this until recently . The original purpose was to make it easier to manage the case (vs 50 separate cases) for the justice system. It was about "the efficient administration of justice". Nothing more, nothing less.

When they were created (out of thin air) in the US, this was the goal. AFAIK, nobody thought about, or wanted, what has happened now. It's not even a good vehicle to accomplish "beating misbehaving corporations" , because when used for that purpose, it mostly makes money for lawyers, encourages nuisance suits, etc.
> and yet people are willing to believe police are corrupt but so unwilling to believe it about politicians

My impression of most citizens is the exact opposite: that police are seen as mostly good people stuck with a hard job (and a few bad apples here and there), and that politicians are seen as two-faced snake-oil peddlers (with a few good apples here and there).

My take is a little more nuanced, in that I'm more interested in good and bad systems and institutions, rather than good or bad people (as if there's such a thing).
No. I wish we were just paranoid. This stuff really happens.

""Here we report results from a randomized controlled trial of political mobilization messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 US congressional elections. The results show that the messages directly influenced self-expression, information seeking, and real world voting behavior of millions of people. Furthermore the messages not only influenced the users who received them but also the users' friends, and friends of friends." - Robert M. Bond, Christopher J. Fariss, Jason J. Jones, Adam D. I. Kramer, Cameron Marlow, Jaime E. Settle & James H. Fowler

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8476106
I stare at leaves because sometimes, they really do change after 30 seconds. If you have a wind blowing, it can be "snowing" leaves, which does bring me some level of enjoyment to watch. It's a good way to clear my mind and think about things without really trying to think about things.

Multiply that "goddamn tree" by say, a forest, and then stare at it, looking at the different patterns created by the mixing of trees. Then come back the next day and see how things have changed. Or, just open up you editor and stare at your code. Same diff.
Do you have any thoughts on how a junior engineer can improve their ability to write maintainable code? This is the main problem I struggle with as a self-taught developer. I can write code that works for the most part thanks to googling all the things, but my projects tend to turn to spaghetti the longer I work on them, and are greek to me when I return to them in 6 months.

Part of the issue is that it's much more rewarding to add a new shiny feature than it is to refactor the existing mess, but another part is I'm not really sure what goes where. Most online courses targeted at inexperienced programmers teach x feature of y programming language, instead of practical software engineering... as a result I feel like I've learned how to build a fancy stained glass door for a house that has an unstable foundation.

I've often thought I'd like to hire a senior dev to sit with me and help me work through building an app the 'correct' way... but short of that I'd love to know of any books or web resources that would help.
My suggestion would be for him to learn FORTRAN or COBOL, if he doesn't already know. At least banks still need programmers for these languages, and I can assure you that not many youngsters learn those languages anymore. The work might be monotone, and he'll be fighting a 40 year old mainframe, but chances are that he won't have a problem finding a job.

He should send his CV here: http://www.geoban.com/es/estaticas/index.asp?wm=320&id=95
Isaiah Berlin's Message to the 21st Century (1994)
After giving this some more thought, it's no longer clear to me that a simple {vendor, product} id pair is even "protected" by trademark. It would be protected by contract terms, especially if at some point in the supply chain someone had signed a contract with USB-IF. However it's quite clear that no entity is entitled to commit vandalism in order to enforce contract terms for a contract to which that entity is not even a party.
Are There Native Advertisments in Hacker News?
I just saw a link to https://www.drchrono.com/jobs/ posted as #16 on the front page. It did not have any upvotes shown, nor any comments. Is this a native advertisement?

"16. iOS and Django hackers needed, change healthcare with drchrono (drchrono.com)"