skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In this case Google Maps has been steadily getting worse, so no worries.

Whether the UI changes are worse is a subjective claim, but the data Google has has not gotten worse. I've found all the alternative mapping solutions (Here, Bing, OpenStreet, and Apple maps) to be inferior when it comes to data quality which is the more important factor, unless you think getting directed through non-existing streets is a small concern. I'm not a Google fan, I've given up a lot of Google, but I can't quit maps or google search, although I use ddg quite a bit. Google has the most reliable map data, there is no competition and no good alternative.
You don't currently need to reveal your identity to customers when doing business online, but complete anonymity is something else altogether.

I might not know the full name and address of the store clerk, but his employer certainly does. That clerk is representing his business and should be held accountable to business for anything he does. If I have I bad experience purchasing from that store, it doesn't matter to me that it was a bad clerk - it's Local Towel Sales, Inc. that's not going to get my business in the future.

I also as a customer don't need to know that "Sally Smith" owns the corner store, but the owner of the lot that she's renting out for her storefront certainly does. If she's running her business in such a way that it affects the value of the property or will result in legal action, she needs to be held accountable to someone.

It works exactly the same online. When I buy a product that Online Towel Sales, Inc. posted to eBay, I don't care about who posted the product online or packed it up and shipped it, I only care that it came from Online Towel Sales, Inc. and will choose whether or not to do business again with them based on that experience. Likewise, if the owner of Online Towel Sales is using eBay to peddle illegal counterfeit towels or something, eBay needs to know who to hold accountable because they have a vested interest in not having their website associated with illegal activity. I'm not going to come back to eBay if it gets a reputation for being a criminal safehaven.
Disclose to whom, though? It doesn't specify 'externally' to your company, 'publish' or 'to any other person'.
Switches > CheckBox are broken in Safari 8.
Only Snowden really needed to escape the NSA and he didn't go to Germany. By the looks of it, they would turn him over in a heartbeat.
Local Reporters Nail Down Police Department on Stingray Cell Phone Tracking
Definitely Greek.
The UI definitely got worse.

About two weeks ago I was unable to switch to Street View in the android app. It simply wasn't accessible through dropping the pin, as it was in the past.

When Google's flagship app on their own platform forces me to find computer and use the web version, something is seriously wrong.
The Shame of Borough Park
Most of those cards say that payment can only happen in the United States. I wonder if that applies to online services?
Wow, now that is really a blast from the past. I'm a similar age to the guy who wrote that article and had a similar experience of trying to figure all this stuff out.

Blue Boxes (at least where I lived) no longer worked, but black boxes and red boxes worked. I don't know when blue boxes ever worked, but I have the impression it was in the seventies, or at the latest, the early eighties. A black box was a circuit you put on your line to pick up a call without dropping the voltage on the line enough for the phone company to think you'd actually answered. So, your friend could call you long-distance (even internationally) and you could talk to them without them having to pay a long distance charge. The problem was that you could always hear the ringing every few seconds in the background and their voice was attenutated. It was fun and it kinda worked, but I didn't use it that much because it was so annoying.
The red box was a device for making free phone calls from pay phones. It faked the tones you inserted for a nickel, a dime, or a quarter. You could just hold it up to the speaker of a pay phone and just hit the button. I built one off a schematic I downloaded. At most pay phones it didn't work at all, but I found two that it worked at. I'd go there and call all my friends in distant states and call them for hours. Every time the operator would come on and ask for money, I'd hold up the device to the speaker and press the "quarter" button a few times.

Later I got hold of "hacking" programs for "MCI" codes and other providers. Actually, MCI was more sophisticated that most of the other providers, and quickly shut off hackers. There were a lot of other providers that weren't so smart. The way the programs worked is by dialing an 800 number, some "user ID code" and then a known modem number. If a computer answered (i.e., you got a carrier tone from a modem), you knew that the code was good. If not, you tried another code. These computer programs would just try random codes all day using a known-good modem number and then print you a list of the successful codes.

As I started to learn more about this stuff, I did crazier stuff like call all over the world. In this era of Skype it's free to call all over the world, but in 1984 placing international phone calls was really expensive. But I'd call my teenage hacker friends in England and Australia and just chat with them for hours. At retail rates, I was running up a couple of thousand dollars a month in phone charges.

Occasionally I'd hear of someone in my circle of friends getting busted in some way, but in my teenage naivete I figured it couldn't happen to me. When I was sixteen and got a driver's license, I met some of the hackers that were within driving distance. One of them got busted at his house: the police arrested him and took all his computer equipment. Since he was a minor he got off with a slap on the wrist, but he didn't get his computers back. I knew that my time was coming soon, since there were already some hints my phone line was being tapped by companies I was stealing from.
The SprayList: A Scalable Relaxed Priority Queue http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=2091...
We're just talking about the largely arbitrary labels you choose to put on your resume. Putting "CTO", when you ran a two person startup, is objectively more dishonest than calling yourself the "Sr. Software Engineer."

I was in no way suggesting withholding any detail in the interview, or even the resume. Of course you should be completely honest about your experience. Just don't use lame titles, that turn people off, when there's not even a good reason to.
Yes - although actually achieving this result in practice (and efficiently) takes a lot of doing right.
I take issue with the statement that depriving a plant of line power and having a UPS failure will "cause something like Fukushima". An important factor in the Fukushima accident was the infeasibility of quickly (within a day or so) providing equipment to the plant due to the catastrophe everywhere around.
> The argument is never "I've got nothing to hide", the argument is that I have no reason to hide my Amazon purchases from Amazon.

The argument most definitely is "you've got nothing to hide." This argument is bandied about a lot. With some sort of idea that your entire life should be laid bare before the whims of law enforcement/signals intelligence agencies. The idea always comes with the assumptions that:

- If you want to hide something from others is means that you must be guilty of some sort of crime, and deserve to be punished.

- All employees of said law enforcement/signals intelligences agencies are will never abuse their power for any reason, and if they do it's probably for a "good reason" (e.g. see Supreme Court Justice Scala(?) arguing law based on "Jack Bauer" scenarios).
Aldous Huxley, the Art of Fiction No. 24 (1960)
Strange this is an APK download, requiring users to reduce their security settings and download+install manually. A better way since mid-2013 is to make use of Android's alpha/beta/staged rollout setup. Ratings of beta users don't count towards the official rating if that's what they're worried about.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
Depends on the place. In some places, the OSM is better than most commercial providers (e.g. Balkan in Europe), in others it is good enough. In Thailand, I got around by using OSM maps; I didn't have neither commercial maps nor connectivity, co I couldn't compare it to other maps.
Depends where you live and what your use cases are. In many countries OpenStreetMap has road data of equivalent or better quality, and path/trail data of vastly superior quality to Google.

Unfortunately the US is not yet (consistently) one of those countries. But "there is no competition and no good alternative" is an over-generalisation.
The Fallacy of ‘Disruptive Innovation’
Servo is much faster compared to Gecko [pdf]
You can represent them symbolically, of course, as you do for instance in XML.
> But that project is actually shipping code that works

I get that this is more than just vaporware, but getting past the vaporware stage doesn't necessarily prove that something isn't too ambitious. When something is attempting to enact a paradigm shift, the final goal is adoption/usage, not just a working/functional product.
Pretending you'd written "Greek"...

Then you'd only be getting one translation - yours. With the amount of context that goes into a good translation, I'm not actually certain it's better for something like this that's more philosophical than artistic.
Show HN: Web Apps at a Glance
This is sort of a list of apps in the format of a blog. Intention is to list web apps that people may find interesting or useful, and describe them in a single sentence.

I would be grateful for any suggestions on how to improve the site, or ideas for other apps that could be listed.

Also, this is my first time posting to Hacker News, so I hope I am doing it right, and please tell me if I am not!
Last time I was at army base with a camera they didn't shoot me. Or when I was at a nuclear power plant (yes, there are actual tours. No, in last 35 years no terrorists came around... anywhere in EU).

The plans are public anyway, since the plant was paid by public money.
Show HN: Creating stub RESTful APIs from Swagger 2.0 docs
I've only read about half of the article so far, but it's pretty clear they're not talking about people the US wants extradited; that's a completely different story.

These are activists who ostensibly haven't committed any crimes, but suspect they're under surveillance, or get harassed for being activists and want to go somewhere where the culture seems to be deeply and overtly set against state sponsored spying on the populace.
While I haven't read it, yet, I see film maker and journalist Laura Poitras at the top of the article. One reason she's described in interviews for moving, is that she could not pass through U.S. border control and customs without enduring an extensive search and the likely confiscation of all her digital equipment.

Perhaps that's not directly the NSA. But it's a legitimate reason to have a home somewhere that does not constantly put you through such. And she's not the only one in such a position.

I agree with your opinion that the German government and agencies may not be the most sympathetic. A significant portion of the German public, on the other hand...

The Stasi are still a fairly fresh memory, for many.
Amazing. I totally forgot about Cult of the Dead Cow. I remember reading articles on here when I was younger.

Edit: Just found this in the apps section `08-01-1998 - "Back Orifice" by Sir Dystic` - so awesome!
Nice but damn, I'm about to implement closures in llvm, but there's only a TODO at that point ;)
> It will still need a stack of return addresses

Keep reading, further down he even gets rid of the stack of return addresses.
pretty cool to see some of the math of this spelled out. I appreciate the effort the author has put into this.

unfortunately, my issues with Interstellar have very little to do with whether or not the black hole was portrayed realistically.

edit: why was I downvoted? for saying I didn't like the movie? come on guys.
I have tried many of them (the most popular ones at least), and I found HERE to be way better -- not because of the map data itself, but the look and feel of the app and also the quality of navigation is better than the rest (imho).

I tend to use it instead of Google Maps as well.

Re. Windows Phone: I think that if a cross-platform service gains foothold (on Android) then it's good for WP. If GMaps is the de facto mapping solution (as it is more or less), then GMaps not being present on WP is a deterring factor.
AFAIK, they are using one of the AMD chips that is designed for ARM SBSA.
This is not a new idea: the British[1] tried using balloons with trailing wires during World War II (in the hope they'll short power lines). As far as I can recall (I can't find a source right now) the Japanese put lots of copper wires in their fire balloons[2] too, to hopefully cause a short when they explode.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Outward
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon
http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2014/10/28/detailed-cross-sectio... seems to be the actual source, citylab seems just to be an aggregator.
I was going to dispute this but found you are correct - late in the war Napalm was used - 1944/5. I had though that incendiary bombing (just as bad really) was what you were talking about. The bit that is most fascinating for me in that article is the bit about the treaty banning use of napalm on civilian targets. Obama signed it with a provision: "America’s ratification, however, is subject to a diplomatic reservation that says it can disregard the treaty at its discretion if doing so would save civilian lives."
Not at all. In languages that are thoroughly immutable, it's copying, not immutability, that has a runtime cost. Rust has mechanisms for avoiding these costs (moves and mutable references).

Furthermore, since the compiler's knowledge of mutability is directly related to its knowledge of ownership, one could argue that immutability actually makes code faster by dint of providing greater aliasing information (e.g. `restrict` in C) to the optimizer (though the Rust compiler has yet to actually leverage this optimization).
I've used HERE on FirefoxOS and was impressed for a HTML5 application working relatively well on an under powered smartish phone.

Majority of the work the HERE guys do is behind the scenes magic for car manufactures, they are just attempting to crack the consumer market.

I met a couple of the HERE guys in Berlin, they seem quite humble and want to play a bigger part in the mapping community whilst keeping existing clients happy.

Also to note, OsmAnd is awesome and have just traveled eastern and western Europe extensively with it.
Fwiw, there are parts of the German government who are really pro liberty, and have been actively seeking security and privacy startups relocating to Berlin.

I predict pretty amazing things due to ccc, the general attractiveness of Berlin as a place to live, cost (half of the Bay Area), less crappy immigration policies, and the privacy/security brand due to people like Poitras.
Don't use raw progress data (and get stuck att 100%)
Does anyone have any reasonable explanation for the concentration of strikes in North Dakota/Montana? I'm not American but I'm under the impression that both states are pretty much a whole lot of nothing, moreso back then. Only thing I can think of is ICBMs going up over the pole and launch sites are concentrated there?
And they have to proceed to that point quickly enough to find the fellow operating it still there. Also, if I wished to avoid detection, I'd set up a transceiver linked to a data GSM connection and leave it in a random place in the middle of nowhere. Maybe even I'd have a few of those to confuse direction finding attempts (not sure how feasible that is).
PressureNet's latest update significantly improves your weather notifications
Fast pagination on PostgreSQL
Care to share your criticism of the movie? I really enjoyed it compared to the usual superhero sequel
Love it, can't wait to use it. Although the comments here regarding how it works on some devices are concerning.
Iirc the idea was that there was a quantum black hole in the sun and the bomb needed to knock it out of the sun.
A DSL such as you describe is orthogonal to something like outshine. There is no reason why you couldn't use both.

One of the main reasons I'm interested in outshine is for seamless use of org-mode in my emacs init files. While I suppose I could stick my emacs init files in a database and query it using some DSL, I personally prefer to have it in plain text and readable with standard text-processing tools.
Three servers offline, likely seized – torservers.net blog
Batch Numeric Field Sieve [pdf]
Berlin Wall – Associated Press Archive
The MBAs are fleeing, should SF be worried?
Download Pangu8 jailbreak free with updated pangu8 Mac versionpangu8
That is nice, but I'm afraid the primary motivation was money. Which in the perfect world shouldn't be the case.

I guess the end result is still better than most movies, a paper, and some science promotion for the general public.
I guess that was one of the first but still remarkable nail in the British Empire's coffin..
Why does this need read permission for my contacts?
November 9th 1989 – best day of my life
this was a great article. extremely helpful to me, coming from a position of being a server-side application developer often tasked with getting several disparate data-stores talking to each other.

the author does a great job of showing the full depth of the field while providing useful hooks and links for further study. this one made my bookmarks folder. i'll surely be going back to check it out again.
> About two weeks ago I was unable to switch to Street View in the android app. It simply wasn't accessible through dropping the pin, as it was in the past.

The first thing you should have seen after updating and adding an address is a message telling you to pull up to get more detail. It took me 2 seconds to figure out how to get street view in the new UI. So as I said subjective.
Well said. Hate the GH monopoly.
I always heard "shouganai" rather than "shikataganai". Looked it up and found out neither is wrong [1]. Shouganai is actually shortened from shiyouganai (using the same shi kanji as shikatagani) so that can be used to get the kanji. Although apparently the meanings are almost identical according to this answer.

[1] http://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/8231/how-do-thes...
At some point in the last few years, for a small town I'm familiar with, the alignment between Google maps and aerial imagery got worse, I assume because they switched data providers (or switched what data they are showing or whatever).
Show HN: Can you spec a random dribbble in 60 seconds
http://specthis.parseapp.com

this is a simple app to keep spec writers (product managers and designers for apps currently) stay sharp through a fun spec'ing exercise.

you are shown a random dribbble image.
you have 1 minute* to give:

- a 3 word description
- a 1 liner
- a 1 para description
- tags and a name for a hypothetical spec.

it currently has 500 designs. and it takes me just a one-liner to add many more.

( PS: is 1 minute too much, too less ? )

once i have enough data, i think i'll be able to build an inverted index.
ie: given a design pattern or tag => show me similiar designs or "specs".

i was helping a friend of mine train to think like a product manager.

so i built an mvp this weekend
http://specthis.parseapp.com

flashcards for GRE/GMAT/TOEFL are well known, but even a google search for specs show practically nothing. mind games for product managers/designers/spec writers are unheard of. perhaps this could even become a github for specs. i have a few 6-7 letter domain names i've soft circled as well.

PS: a major reason for posting here is that i am looking for a designer to collaborate with. if you like the idea, help spread the word.
Definitely a good read, You can download it in audio format, https://librivox.org/the-meditations-of-marcus-aurelius/

It was easier for me to just load up in my mp3 player and digest.
Things I learned while running a bootstrapped SaaS Business
It's just a pity the apps aren't quite there on Android. I find MapFactor Navigator to be clunky and outright confusing, Telenav Scout is only available in the US, Skobbler seems to have been withdrawn (at least, it's not accessible in the UK Play Store), and OSMAnd is great for what it is, but has no traffic information, and is a bit guileless in selecting a route - certainly enough so it's not sensible to trust it for long journeys.
pangu8 1.2.1 released Now for Mac OS – iOS jailbreakiOS jailbreak
Why not use built-in Android TTS functionality?
Recreating Adam, from Hundreds of Fragments, After the Fall
Because of the Glympse integration, I suppose.
What language are you working on?

I guess for closures you simply copy all the locals that they capture into a heap allocated structure that also has the pointer to the closure code.
Personally, I find the Nokia TTS much better (UK English, if that makes a difference).
> overuse of sigils

"Overuse" is subjective. If you are you suggesting that some use is good, can you give an example of usage you think is good and usage you think represents overuse?

That said, I didn't like some specific things about use of symbols in P5 and the problems have been fixed in Perl 6.

And of course there is more than one way to do it, for example this is one way to write the Ackermann function in P6 using Unicode names (symbols) for parameter/argument identifiers:

proto A(Int \𝑚, Int \𝑛) { @[𝑚][𝑛] //= {} }

multi A(0, Int \𝑛) { 𝑛 + 1 }
multi A(1, Int \𝑛) { 𝑛 + 2 }
multi A(2, Int \𝑛) { 3 + 2 𝑛 }
multi A(3, Int \𝑛) { 5 + 8 * (2 𝑛 - 1) }

multi A(Int \𝑚, 0 ) { A(𝑚 - 1, 1) }
multi A(Int \𝑚, Int \𝑛) { A(𝑚 - 1, A(𝑚, 𝑛 - 1)) }

(Based on http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Ackermann_function#Perl_6)
"The study of databases intersects almost every topic in computer science" - I've heard this before, especially for Compilers. But it has been false for a long time, CS is far more diverse now. For example, how do Databases intersect AI/Machine Learning/Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Numerics/Simulation, Robotics, Bioinformatics, Computer Architecture or Cryptography?
Peter Thiel is known for his financial support of both neoreactionarism and various types of out-there futurism; I wouldn't be surprised if he's involved, and I'm sure he's not the only jillionaire with similar interests.