skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the issue is that there are two conflicting populations on Hacker News: hackers/geeks/nerds in the traditional sense (who are here to talk about cool technology and such, and because the place is called "Hacker News") and entrepreneurs (who are here to talk about economics and politics and such, and because the place is run by a company that funds entrepreneurs).

Being part of the first group, it's a bit strange to me to see this sort of article on a site that's called "Hacker News", and I agree with the parent commenter that the article feels out-of-place here. Perhaps if it had some nifty technical details on flash bangs and their effects on humans (more concrete references to PTSD diagnoses, descriptions of temperatures attained by flashbangs and the physical effects of those temperatures on humans, even some possible elaboration on potential blindness caused by flashbangs) - in other words, things that hook into scientific basis (which makes nerds squee) rather than emotion/"ethics" (which doesn't make nerds squee) - would improve this.

On the other hand, I realize that my demographic is not the only one worth considering (regardless of whether I want it to be the only one worth considering). It's disappointing that articles with a dearth of technical description seem to be becoming the norm even here, but at the same time I realize that it's not disappointing to all of HN's users, so the best I can do is move on to a hopefully-better article (or stop using the site and find a place that actually lives up to my own expectations of something called "Hacker News").

Take, for example, this article regarding the hypothetical effects of extreme magnetism on humans[0], which was posted on HN yesterday and was well-received, relatively speaking. Unlike this article, it focuses on scientifically-tangible effects, and even revolves around a Futurama reference to boot; in other words, it actually appeals to the hacker/geek/nerd demographic described above. Had this article been written more similarly to this one (though probably without the humor involved, given the more serious tone and subject), it probably wouldn't be subject to derision as being "utterly political", and would instead be more universally appreciated by both demographics of this site (since it appeals to the interests of both those demographics).

The article's perspective may be "consistent with the norms of this website", as you say; my point (and presumably that of the parent commenter) is that it's only consistent with - at best - half of the norms and expectations. It covers an interesting subject (for the entrepreneurs, at least); it just needs to do so with more technical detail.

That all said, us nerds do post plenty of purely-technical articles with seemingly-boring subjects (made exciting by the technicality itself, to us at least), so I suppose it's only fair that a purely-non-technical article slips through every once in awhile.

[0]: https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/how-strong...
On PC it is also "gold rush over", although we see a bunch of successful indie devs, the amount of failed ones is much, much larger.

I guess the percentage of successful devs on PC is probably on a historically low point.

On Reddit there was comments from one guy that gives from 10 to 100k to indie devs, he get 9 thousand applications per month.
They didn't have to pay child support.
And yet, American citizenry at large and the justice system in general gives the police the benefit of the doubt in all matters versus the populace. Are we really that dumb as a country? If you have to ask...
> smoke is shown to emit from the weapon, with no impact or trauma appearing to register on the body of the victim.

Not to lend credit to conspiracy theories or anything like that, but I wondered this myself when I watched the video. Can anyone explain this for someone who isn't an expert in ballistics/forensics?
> Well, I refuse to believe anyone, no matter how debased, would intentionally throw a flashbang into a baby's crib.

Read some stories of the Holocaust, then. They didn't have flashbangs, but there were cases of babies being killed by being repeatedly swung into brick walls.
Sadly, statistics back you up in this case. US police appear to have a much higher propensity to engage in domestic violence than the general population: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-o...
That's either a lie, or just poor record-keeping. I would find the poor record-keeping entirely believable, but besides the point: even if they _had_ been trained to use flashbangs, then they we not trained properly or the shouldn't have been used at all.

Just because something is standard procedure doesn't make it the correct procedure.
"we cannot conclude that the threat actor’s intent was malicious"

So you sinkhole the domain because of a fake news story and some twitter posts?
> If you can explain the monopoly without invoking government intervention, I am all ears.

>> But what's keeping out competition is, e.g., Baltimore forcing companies to build fiber service to the 25% of the city that's below the poverty line as a pre-condition for building anywhere in the city.

The original, specific contention (exclusive cable laying rights) may be untrue according to you.

Does that matter whether the government is enforcing the monopoly through excesive coverage requirement or through limiting cable laying rights? The government is still helping to enforce a monopoly.

I think the argument is that the telecom companies need to be regulated because they're a monopoly.
So... government is helping to enforce a monopoly
FYI you wrote apathy when you likely meant empathy.
Because the cops have all the guns and a good union.
Thanks for the advice - I didn't know AngelList had traction out there! That will make it a lot easier....
They also include email with every domain, which works quite well.
GoPro stock plummets after Apple granted patent for mounted cameras
Asian American Quarter Life Crisis
The default skis carve like crap, can I rent some demos?
<IANAL>
His trial probably wouldn't be a proper venue for that. Those principles are that the laws he's accused of breaking shouldn't exist. This would be a very difficult defense to make in a criminal court, which both presupposes the credibility of the laws on the books and its own legitimate capacity to adjudicate them.

The court of popular opinion seems to be edging ever so slightly in Ulbricht's favor. Morally and politically, arguments for minimal government and drug legalization might have some merit. But no one is ever going to convince a judge that, while, the defendant might be guilty, the real crime is that there are even laws against everything he's accused of.

Although I suppose he could use the opportunity to make a statement anyway, regardless of how well it works as a legal defense. I wouldn't blame him either way, really.
</IANAL>
This appears to be a tool for generating test data, for your application.

For testing SQL database engines there is the Random Query Generator: https://launchpad.net/randgen

It was designed for MySQL, but works fine with others.
Firefox Portable Plus
There seems to be a some demand for safer flashbangs (perhaps something with really bright LEDs and really loud speakers). This[0] seems to at least address the brightness aspect of it.

I mean, if the point of flashbang use by LEOs is supposedly to disorient/confuse/distract a suspect during arrest, this seems to be better-suited to that role. And better yet, if they're electronic, they should be (at least hypothetically) entirely reusable, saving a LEA a lot of money in the long run.

[0]: http://www.bluesheepdog.com/2012/03/13/delta-light-ball-flas...
According to BLS, coders make something like $93k/yr [1], while policemen make about $57k [2], and primary school teachers make $53k [3]. How much of a pay cut would you take to accept one of those jobs? How much more in taxes would you pay to hire/train better people to do those jobs?

[1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Computer-and-Information-Technology/S...

[2] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Protective-Service/Police-and-detecti...

[3] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Education-Training-and-Library/Kinder...
No it isn't. It is a defense in at least Canada as well.
My experience with namecheap has been considerably different. Their website for managing my domains never seems to work right and 2 factor auth seems to barely work sometimes. I'm looking forward to moving away from namecheap if it means a better management interface experience.
I thought this was going to return them sorted in random order, making a joke about how unreadable the way Twitter sorts conversations is.
Folks:

Firefox Portable Plus (FPP) is my attempt to finally make a version of Firefox Portable that is independent of the host computer. VLC Media Player is completely integrated into the installation so that it will play most audio and video formats embedded within a tab in Firefox. Adobe Shockwave Flash is also built in and FPP will ingore any versions installed on the host computer. There is also the option of using Java through JPortable from portableapps.com.

I have 'hand tweaked' the skin and added over 40 extensions into FPP to make the 'look & feel' of the browser is esthetically pleasing as well as being intuitive and functional. I've also made dozens of the most popular 'under the hood' tweaks through 'about:config'.

This is a public version of the web browser that I use every day. Instructions on it's use, it's many, many features and how to modify it yourselves can be found on its web page.

tinker
Hardcoding the validation of the reply is an unfortunate obstacle to scaling this - the server would very quickly become CPU bound. They should really have made a TwitterSortValidationService which sends the answer out to the Twitter API, and then listens for a response confirming whether or not the original sort was correct.
the innovation is 'united states only'
Yeah, but that's less fun and would require patience.
2 words....Dynamic DNS
Most of the good mods from the last generation (CS, DoD, TFC, DotA, etc.) were less mods and more total conversions. And you don't need to mod a game to do that these days. The Source engine is free. Unity is free. The Unreal engine is cheap. We have more tools for making fully-fledged games at our disposal than we ever had in the past.
BSDCan Call for Papers Ending Soon
Sites like http://toucharcade.com/ used to be good for discovery, although I'm finding them less useful as time goes by. There really should be a weekly or monthly publication where only the most interesting and gripping mobile games are covered.. preferably ones without ridiculous ads, nickel and diming, and all the rest.
I learned how floating point arithmetic worked by disassembling the ROMs on my Commodore PET as a child. There I learned that they used a Taylor series expansion to compute the values of transcendental functions. It was fun to see the coefficients in the source.

When I wrote a set of 80 bit IEEE Temporary Real floating point functions for the 6502, I used an early version of Maple running on a VAX that I, ahem, "acquired" an account for running at a local university to compute the coefficients for my functions.

I grew up with this code; it's so awesome to finally see the source!
I mean, the often cited model of depression as a serotonin 'deficiency'--e.x. "I'm depressed because I don't have enough serotonin" is definitely not supported by the science/literature that I'm familiar with. It does seem to have embedded itself in the popular mind, but if it was the case you would see patients with depression having abnormally low levels of serotonin, which isn't, to my knowledge, substantiated--the studies I've read didn't, as I recall, show a significant correlation between serum serotonin levels and mood. Low levels of serotonin do correlate with other things, though. (impulsivity, suicide risk)

The serotonin system having an effect on mood, though, or SSRIs as treatments for depression: that's an entirely different realm. They do seem to be much less effective on people who are on the minor/moderate end of the spectrum, and are definitely less effective than they were once advertised as being. There are a lot of reasons (aforementioned side effects, effectiveness of various types of therapies, prevalence of environmental effects in many people's depression) to try other options than SSRIs if you aren't severely depressed--but the clinical evidence for their efficacy in treating severe depression isn't really arguable either.

As a side note, there's some fairly recent research from the middle of last year (see these for the summary version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianeptine and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuptake_enhancer) that shows that the only drug ever released as an SSRE probably isn't effective because of that action (if it even is an SSRE--see the second link).
Given a jury without sufficient education and a case with as much technical nuance as this and then a reasonable doubt that the same technical nuance could indicate a frame job... Seems like an ok move...
Applying Kushnick logic to another industry: if Apple raises prices on Macs and uses that cash to bankroll iPhone development, well that's something that requires a federal investigation.

Yes, if Apple claimed in an SEC filing that they hadn't raised prices on Macs to fund iPhone development and it turns out they had, I'm sure they'd let it slide the way they always do. It's not like the SEC filed criminal charges or anything when they found out Apple had mixed up a few stock option dates. Oh, wait: http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2007/2007-70.htm
Using them in a raid against a terrorist who had taken hostages is completely reasonable.

Throwing them into a crowd of people is not.

Like any dangerous tool, if you use it carelessly bad things will happen.
Nice game! (Yes, soothing and stressful.)

BTW I got a "Welcome back (some name)" message on the first play.
The trick is the algorithm makes extensive use of lazy evaluation.
"ensure"
finally ditching eNom, eh? kudos
I have no real insight, but Carmack mentioned in his talk a while back that for VR to win it has to be mobile.

I would love to see that talk if you have a link. Not really sure what mobile VR is if it isn't AR.

This is my take as well...I am biased though as I have an Augmented Reality startup and actually wrote about that exact thing:

https://medium.com/@Visidraft/2015-the-year-augmented-realit...
Buffet Formula – How to get smarter everyday
Why ACPI on ARM?
A facelift for the Macintosh
The officers involved most likely were following both their training and their department's policy here. That something terrible happened as a result doesn't necessarily mean they did something wrong from a legal and professional standpoint. Police work is full of situations that are ugly, even when well-thought out policy is followed to the T.

Of course, the wisdom of ever using flash bangs in policing outside of extraordinary circumstances is suspect.
Hope the jury is as stupid as OJs.
People talk about regulating telecom like the power company, but the trend over the last 30 years has been to deregulate the power companies as much as possible.

And it's not like anything has happened since then that has made people rethink power company deregulation, too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis
They do specify that it's for sorting numbers, as opposed to say, text. Do some locales sort numbers differently?
Awesome. I love data, but I love beautiful data even more. And what a fine taste in music, to boot!
Definitely sounds like a country where I'd rather not live.
A prison system built for maximizing profit can only fall into corruption. Rehabilitation, while being of the utmost importance to society, goes completely against the objectives of a business who would thrive on offenders that keep getting jailed.

What a perversion.
> I quibble with your stating that you can be a manager without some critical skills.

Why couldn't you? All that would need to happen is a company asks you to take on the role.
ProPublica is quietly doing the best journalism of the past few years.
Blu-ray 3D to 3D AVI Video Converter
Apathy fits there if you take the parenthetical to be clarifying "not apologize" instead of just "apologize".
Hacking Facebook campaign targeting for mobile apps
Apple Watch drawing UI
What Terrorists Want from You
I'm not sure what it takes for registrars to accept various TLD's but support for more exotic ones would be nice to have from Namecheap. I carry most of my portfolio there but have .ht, .sr, .as and a few others that I would love to roll in.
I suppose I ought sue you then, as you've defamed my homeland?
Spoofers Tricked High-Speed Traders by Hitting Keys Fast
Who has time for patience?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!twitter+Those+numbers+aren%27t+so...

Still no uses of this in the wild.
Data Visualization and D3.js Newsletter Issue 113
Debt Portraits
Good point, but along the same lines: Namecheap existed as a registrar when I purchased my domains, and GD did not. The interface isn't enough to make me want to go through the hassle of switching.
You can make one if you choose (most people use a USB stick, I'm using an ExpressCard SSD) - this will remove the need for an AppleID and internet access to do the install.

For the vast majority of people this will never be an issue as the machine comes pre-installed and re-installing the OS is generally not required unless something major goes wrong.
And, let's stipulate that Google's a good company - there are going to be a bad apple here and there. I had to ask my friend who was a senior-director at GOOG to mark me as "do not contact" in their recruiting database to get them to stop calling/emailing me.
Haven't you ever seen the Fountainhead? :-)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041386/

(or read it...)
I'm the founder of Strange Loop. Cloud is not necessarily a focus of the conference but it does contain some cloud-related content, for things like distributed systems in particular.
Five minutes' googling/whoising and I found at least two other domains run by the same person, who seems to be just some ordinary bloke.

e.g. http://who.is/whois/huntingnews.co.uk

Or maybe that is part of the international cover-up, and this goes deeper than anybody. could. have. guessed..?
Show HN: Recoverable Secret Generator
Easy, just use TwitterSort to validate TwitterSort. People can't be wrong twice!
Hi, I'm with Google Corporate Development and I'd love to talk about your algorithm.
My dad does not speak english...

His code frequently has english variable names because it is common words used elsewhere, frequently he does not even know the meaningof those words.

So all his code has portuguese comments.

Some people DID get pissed off with him writing portuguese comments, he always reply: "Will you teach me english for free? If you do, I will rewrite comments in english."

Noone ever replied that they would...
Yep. As long as enough of the population continues to buy into this nonsense they will have "legitimacy" to act this way.
I really appreciate the lengthy response, it really means a lot and it helps a lot getting insight from the tech world. It definitely is not an easy thing to do, but then what is right?

I have found some open source algorithms that claim to have a decent amount of accuracy, though decent isn't enough it may be a start. What is your opinion?

Going as far as contacting the NSA, I don't know how willing they are in sharing their technology. I know they do work with private corporations which benefit both parties, I guess it would be worth a shot. That would be an interesting approach.

How long do you think it would take to build something like this? Even if we could just get sentiment values ie. Positive / neutral / Negative comments, that would be a great start and I believe much simpler.
You're wholly incorrect on #2

Digital advertising was a very big factor in the dotcom bubble. See: Yahoo's advertising bonanza, which subsequently crashed after the dotcom bubble went down, taking out a lot of their dotcom advertisers. Yahoo became one of the most valuable companies on earth briefly, solely on the back of the bubble in ad dollars.

Ad rates had skyrocketed at the time, leaving many of the consumer facing bubble companies believing they could build sustainable businesses as things were at the time (and assuming it would only get better).

Companies like DoubleClick (sporting a ~$6 billion valuation) and NetGravity were worth very large sums at the time, and publicly traded.

GoTo was part of the first boom in search advertising, and participated in the dotcom bubble. Most of the dedicated search engines at the time were trying to figure out how to monetize what they had, investing in R&D and buying start-ups.
NameCheap and GoDaddy are two expensive options. There are many registrars where you can get .com's for under $10.

$12 is really expensive...
Heisenbugs – bugs that seems to disappear when studied
Thank you I will definitely be in contact. Thank you!
> The court of popular opinion seems to be edging ever so slightly in Ulbricht's favor.

On what planet? Public opinion just shifted in favor of legalizing marijuana in 2013, but support for keeping everything else illegal is overwhelming: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/17/drug-legalization-p.... Around 10% of people support legalizing cocaine, crack, heroin, meth, or LSD. 80-85% oppose legalizing those drugs.

The transition in political thought doesn't seem to have been toward "people should be able to freely trade in whatever they want." It seems to have been a change in attitude towards the harmfulness of marijuana specifically.
Canada, Ontario Toronto :)
You are the specialist. Tell prospective employers how you'll solve their problems. Come at it from a position of strength.

In other words, use intent as a big magnet to draw people in. Intent is the most powerful word in marketing, and that's what you're doing. Find a way to make firms come to you, hat in hand.
Home invasion will never be safe, regardless of the tools they use.

If law enforcement's answer to tragedies like this is, "We'll train our people in use of less dangerous tools", then the wrong questions are being asked. The question should be, "What the hell were you doing breaking into someone's home in the middle of the night?"
> I think that's because most people aren't comfortable making the art or music for their own games.

Right, them's the 'production values'. They aren't comfortable because the quality bar is pretty high, even on pixel art, high enough that you really need an artist to do it, not a lone coder.

I think the situation isn't quite as bleak as he says in the OP anyway. The age of the lone coder is gone, I think. The few exceptions are exceptions. But the age of the prototype-in-a-game-jam-get-crowd-funded-and-build-a-product-with-a-small-team isn't over, though the bubble has definitely burst from when every kickstartered game seemed to reach its goal. So while I think he's right that the market has eliminated the lone-coder approach to game development, the ability to bring a good small game to market is as good as it has ever been.

As you said further up, it is PC that is the heartbeat of that.

Good luck on your game.
Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqzpAbK9qFk

I thought it was a really interesting talk - he's a great speaker. Can really tell how well he knows what he's talking about, lots of information really clearly described and easy to follow.
The main thing is just clutter. Google Domains has a very simple user interface. It only has the stuff you need. NameCheap and every other registrar has a million links everywhere and all this random crap you never use, making it hard to find the stuff you do need.

NameCheap is better than most, though. The only reason I don't keep a lot of domains with you is price. Your renewal fee's are significantly higher than budget registrars like Dynadot. And when you own a lot of domains, that extra 10% adds up fast.