skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a very relevant analogy:

The massive .50BMG rifle ammunition was developed around 1910. Its primary use was established in WWII as an anti-aircraft machine-gun round, intended to throw a lot of lead in the air fast with little concern about accuracy.

In the 1970s, precision long-range rifle shooters were looking for something that could fire with interesting accuracy at very far targets, 1000-2000 meters. They repurposed the .50BMG ammo, built large long rifles to fire it, and put it to a completely new use from its original intent. In 1980, the Barrett M82 semi-automatic rifle was created - something that the military had no interest in the development of, and which was created solely by the civilian market.

The military suddenly took notice of this hard-hitting very long range rifle that used standard military ammo, and suddenly military snipers had a new tool - thanks to civilians - to enhance US national security using this one-man gun which could take out significant targets a mile away.

Had there been a ban on civilian ownership of .50BMG guns, which some groups have been pushing for hard for decades, the M82 would never have been developed, and a lot more military targets would have been taken out with far more expensive missiles with far more collateral damage & casualties.
Ask HN: A good overseas place for a resting hacker/technomad
Hi HN. I got sick of my country of residence and I'm looking for a place to rest: live slow, work on my projects and opensource, travel.

What are good countries/locales for a resting hacker?
My priorities are:

- Lax visa requirements / allows to stay for prolonged periods of time without much hassle.

- Places for rent are inexpensive and aplenty.

- Physical safety, lack of surprises from local laws and authorities.

- Internet access is reasonably fast, unharrassed by censors and copyright activists.

- Nice weather, good food.

- Some things to see, some options to travel.

My current ideas are Thailand (obvious while already lacking some points) and surprisingly Serbia (an amazing country as I have learned).
Oh come on, have you been to Athens? Everyone drives a Porsche and wears a Rolex, but all the buildings are unfinished, because if they were they'd be taxed. Greece is a poor country weirdly full of rich people.
I think you're equating all sports with American Football. Which, granted, is more or less what the original article did as well. I totally agree about the military displays, the nationalism and religious overtones that get mixed in with Football in the US. But that's one sport. There are many others, and aside from probably Nascar, none of them come close to Football in those terms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking is the means of essentially viewing everything on someone's screen via the EM the monitor emits. It is said that Mossad has a van eck device the size of a normal suitcase that can view monitors from across a street. I actually believe it.

The same can be said for keyboards and mice as well, especially wireless ones. The solution is a faraday cage.
This bites me occasionally,

You're essentially saying here that "I don't understand the valid reason for X" necessarily means "therefore X has no valid reason".

The thing that bites me is that I can say something like this and mean it as you do, and yet the person hearing it insists on interpreting incorrectly. I find this is especially true in conversations with a lot of emotional components.

Any time the listener of an assertion on my part that I'm trying to understand fact X, treats it as my asserting that fact X is false, it raises a flag for me to check the emotional content.

In my experience, to understand the appeal of sports (professional or otherwise) you have to understand people who want other people they care about to succeed. Being a parent helped me understand that. Prior to being a parent I was notoriously confused about what the connection was between sports team's success or failure and the outpouring of raw emotion on a large scale.
That is a natural problem in our industry. It requires far more skills to write simple code to solve complicated problems than to write complicated code to solve such problems. What makes it worse is once your head is fully immersed in the problem space, the line between simple and complicated becomes blurry, and what seems like simple solution at the time may seem overly complicated to someone who has not gone through the same thought process.
uh... Russia
US Army Internal Forensics Code
You totally beat me to it :)
> A Radio Shack TRS-80 and a Milton Bradly Big Trak toy would both crash if operated near each other. We're way beyond that now.

You just reminded me of something, back in the 80's I had a ZX Spectrum (I'm in the UK) which the TRS-80 was similar to.

The HAM operator down the road eventually figured out it was me with the computer, when I was using it, the RF bled across everything.
The source of the chart data is linked just above it.

GTM Research forecasts that the market will continue to grow year-over-year until the drop-off in the federal ITC, peaking at 318 megawatts in 2016

The federal ITC is a tax credit.
To be clear, this isn't a safety feature. The noise is being piped into the cabin of the car, not out to people in the environment around the car. It's to make the driver hear a satisfying growl when you stamp down on the accelerator.
Your Product Needs an Advance Directive
> Where kids hero's are astronauts and firemen

Not sure if you've talked to any kids lately then. My son has a small freak-out if we get near a fireman. If he got to meet an astronaut, I think me might pass out.

...and no, of course sports are not intrinsically bad. They're good exercise, a tremendous amount of fun to play, and they take focus to master. It might not be a skill that you appreciate, but it is a skill nonetheless.

All sports, presumably, sprouted from a few folks having fun and then deciding to codify the rules. Imagining a world without sports is imaging a world without fun.
I am, for sure! Either mr.manager@blanqd.com or inline here.
the FBI's mission is to enforce federal law

what he proposed is more like defense. "cyber" defense. so perhaps better as a different agency or under DOD
Google Drive for Linux leaked in screenshots
>NFL players go bankrupt shortly after their career of being paid far more than will reflect their contribution to the future of mankind.

Isn't that supposed to be because of the mental illness brought on by the repeated concussions that players suffer, which causes physical injury to the brain? I'm not sure how you can blame the players for that.
Reviewing the car of tomorrow... 2 months late.

Here are some great reviews of the i8:

* /DRIVE (Chris Harris): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5I6xuhNgVg

* Car Buyer (lovely channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjB3tDIhl6g

* Car Throttle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkUQY1Hxnu0

* Evo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ54QP8VSvw

* The Verge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ea8_CNdJ54

My personal take, as a self-proclaimed car connoisseur, and BMW fanboi? It's my favourite car, but if I had €100k+ to spare I wouldn't buy one now, due to the iPhone effect. I'm 99% sure the next version will be way more polished. Not saying it's not an amazing car at the moment, but if there are plenty of minor quirks that will most likely go away in subsequent versions once customers complain.
How to Be the Smartest Person at Your Super Bowl Party
I love playing sports and always have. But I have major issues with categorizing everyone who has issues with them as elitist.

Some of us dislike them because they're destructive to society. I'm sure I'm not the only one who went to a high school where athletics were more important than academics, and not going to the football game was worth a couple nitpicked points off on your chemistry quiz or some teacher who became a teacher solely to coach had you spend their class taking notes from a text book every day while they jawed around with other coaches in the back room.

I feel like sports culture deprives lots of regular public high school students of an education, and I don't think it's elitist at all to dislike professional sports for their contribution to this mess.

I love sports, but every time I watch or support them I feel like I'm destroying civil society and undermining democracy and helping to destroy the last vestiges of effective public education.

And I'm not elite or upper class.
I am fortunate to have already experienced the "Do I belong here?" feeling from graduate school. The thing to remember is this - there are always people who are going to be ahead of you just by virtue of having more experience. How you carry yourself is the most important thing though.

In this context, if you see someone who is better than you at the moment, do some work trying to improve yourself and your abilities. The best don't become the best instantaneously - they do it through hard work & maybe a little talent.

My own experience probably has helped me take on the correct perspective in my own career as a developer - I do things purely because I want to do it or improve myself. I don't care about being the most popular/well-known developer or anything like that - it is a job that I happen to like is all. Stars/likes/etc. on GitHub, those don't matter. I create stuff for fun, and if it becomes popular, so be it - I work on open source stuff in the hopes it helps people and to improve my own abilities.
Some people want to cheer for academic bookish stuffiness and boo the low-brow jockiness of field games. If that isn't what sports is all about, then what is it about?
Most of these attacks can be mitigated through physical separation; the official standards specify allowable signal strengths at perimeter for spurious emanations. (Obviously attackers can use directional/high gain antennas, but there are RF limitations.) The stuff Cryptography Research does vs. Android phones to extract keys from tens of feet is pretty terrifying. http://www.cryptography.com/technology/dpa/dpa-qa.html

One interesting extension beyond the classical 1960s TEMPEST/Van Eck stuff is: If you can run malware on the target computer, you can obviously increase the effective gain through a variety of techniques.

What I'd be super interested in would be active RF attacks -- similar to the NSA toolkit with the passive external-RF-powered transmitter for implants, but ideally without modifications. Either causing specific errors or something else. Forcing resets might be enough. It'd be sort of a crossover between EMP and TEMPEST. Knowing, for instance, that the target security system controller is the only device connected to an 18.2m long wire within a facility might make it profitable to do a targeted attack on a certain frequency.
Actually, soldiers had been using scoped M2 HMGs as sniper rifles since Korea.[1] After Hathcock's success with one, Barrett decided to build a real sniper rifle around the cartridge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_Browning#M2_as_a_sniper_rif...
Tesla Model X Test Drive
Often it just means they don't follow any teams, but not always. I, for instance, don't care for any sports at all. I'm not even interested in learning the rules, unless I play the sport myself. Same goes for some of my friends.
Honestly - this is part of why looking for jobs is so very hard, which is what the author mentions right at the beginning. There are lists of requirements you know you don't meet, and often times you apply, and for reasons that may have nothing to do with how skilled you are, you don't get the job. Maybe you have a few rounds of interviews that seem to go great, but there's no offer.

You start to wonder if your language/skillset is over the hill, if you really aren't so good at code, heck, maybe YOU are too old in SV years.

Something about the job search process really amplifies this feeling. You never know why they think it isn't a fit - but it's only in searching for a job that you are actually getting some external feedback.

And it's tough.

Even if your skillset is in demand and recruiters are crawling all over each other to make you offers, if the companies you really love aren't among them, it makes you wonder.

It's tough. And it's easier to play the games and engage the behavior the author talks about to get "likes", hacker news upvotes, reddit upvotes, whatever, to let you know your views, your languages, your skills are valid.

It's tough out there.
The fact that NFL teams get taxpayers to foot the bill for new stadium construction and then the team retains the facility as private property, now that is what I have a problem with. Those facilities are bought with public money and should be public parks.
The 10 Best-Ever Brand Tweets During the Super Bowl
It seems the entire blog post is based on a misunderstanding of React Native's goals.

I don't think the point of React Native has anything to do with building a common UI across different platforms. In fact, they admit you'll need to build the UI separately for each platform. They're basically just exposing native components for manipulation in a React-like way, so beyond having an opportunity to make the UI in a platform specific way, there's actually an obligation to do so.
Yes, this. I want to be able to map the amazing flexibility I had in SecondLife over either physical. I want to see programmable objects or virtual objects in a "layer" over the physical world and be able to open them up and edit the code, just as I was able to do in SecondLife. The creative possibilities are vast.
Example: North Korea maintains its integrity by a viable threat that it could, using conventional (even old) weapons, level Seoul (pop.: 25M) in about a half an hour with a moment's notice.
> Focus on the athletes who do things the right way: work hard, take care of themselves physically and financially

In many sports this in non-existent. The only people not taking performance enhancing drugs are the ones not getting caught. When billions of dollars are involved it's more than just a gentle suggestion that these professionals take drugs or enhancement.

And besides, what makes you a better arbiter of what is useful to society?

Nothing. I'm not commenting on something as fickle as society, I'm commenting on the future of our species, to which I can say with great confidence that education and ingenuity will affect peoples lives infinitely longer than the contributions of any sport. The fact that some of these professional athletes contribute money is a moot point when we're discussing whether they should exist. Those resources would still exist and the chances they would be distributed to a cause that would have lasting impact would likely increase.

In fact, some of those athletes would contribute more than just money. They may be the very person who makes a mark on the history of mankind.
My thoughts precisely! I also love that official driver for js is a join to use, unlike mongodb...
SOrry, that should have been in quotes.
The "weird" tone may just be a result of the author writing in a more familiar language. If the author was already part of an academic subculture, it would make sense that this would show up in the language he is most fluent in.

It can come off as incongruous (if only because we're not used to an academic making an honest attempt to analyze his observations on sport fans, academics, and a common source of friction between the two cultures).

I could easily imagine the other way around - a stereotypical sports guy talking about academic topics in jock lingo - being exaggerated in an SNL skit or something. The way people "code switch" and just use the language of different subgroups is one of those things we're mostly familiar with and accept...even if we can see how it's a weird bit of human behavior. Stuff like that can make for either great offense or great comedy (sometimes both).

For my part, I was always drawn to more geeky/intellectual interests as a kid because I was scrawny and weird so the sports guys weren't welcoming. As I got older, being mostly unfamiliar with pro sports made it awkward when coworkers realized I was the only one who had no idea what they were talking about. I still am not a huge fan of pro sports (if only for the insane amount of hype and greed surrounding them) but I realized a while ago that a lot of my hostility toward "jock stuff" came mostly from insecurity. Nowadays I do enjoy watching football when my home team is playing. I own a couple of team T-shirts and maybe catch a baseball game in the summer or watch a few football games at the bar if the home team is playing. A big part of it was making some friends who were into computers and music and art and reading who also liked pro sports and weren't dicks about my lack of knowledge. As the author says, the social aspect is what makes it enjoyable for a lot of people and when that was bad, my thoughts on sports were negative. When my social interactions around sports became enjoyable, my general thoughts on sports became more positive.
> Sports are widely loved and not intrinsically bad.

Professional sports are also incredibly problematic in multiple ways. One can argue against those issues--from the corrupting influence of money to the homophobia (now finally breaking down just a little bit) to the willingness to use up players to the normalization of violence (in hockey, in particular). In the same way, one can argue that fast food has virtues that make up for its supposed "intrinsic badness" (which I don't see at all: nothing is "intrinsically" good or bad... it depends on how it is used for what for.)

> However, even expressing contempt for intrinsically bad activities can be interpreted as offensive and hostile.

You say that like it's a bad thing. Having strong and forthrightly held tastes and opinions is a virtue and a delight.

When I see the vast amount of money and time that is dedicated to professional sports it makes me despair of humanity. Do I want to hang around people who spend a good part of their lives on such activities? I do not. This is not a problem with my social skills.

It would be a problem with my social skills if I did hang around with them and bitched about it. But saying, "I'm glad you're having fun, but I think it's completely crazy to spend so much time and money on the activity of being a fan" is not.

And just to be clear: no one has ever been shy about telling me how far beneath contempt I am for caring more about science, art and poetry than sports. So perhaps problems with social skills exist outside of stereotyped groups that it is currently fashionable to berate regarding them.
You sound like the type of insufferable bore this article is expressly written for; it's a shame you seem not to have read it. No doubt you take great pleasure in some other form of entertainment that "does nothing for anyone".
My indifference is not cultivated. It comes from a native disdain of authoritarianism and tribalism. Not sure why it would be desirable to make small talk with people about uninteresting things.

I do enjoy some heavy metal, though.
Better than annoying everyone else within earshot.
Ha, nice trick. I've heard of far worse so would actually be open to experimenting.

Cordova front end, hodge podge of appropriate tools on the back end such as Python/NLTK for quiz generation and re-implemented my own "readability view" for when reading the articles.
The best part is after checking some guides for disabling this ridiculous feature, it appears that for some brands of cars a minor side effect is that you also disable the car's audio system. :)
What's with the specious slam on Ruby out of nowhere?

Don't forget, Python is the community that brought us "There's Only One Way To Do It".
If you don't enjoy an activity, it is intrinsically bad for you.
I think the problem that many geeks have with sports is the tribalism and the blind devotion. We have a lower tolerance for religious fanaticism, even barring the distro and editor wars. "Your" team won? Really? In what sense are they your team? Are you the coach? Are you a player? Or is it just because your parents were fans, or you grew up near them, or they won last year?

When programmers engage in these kind of religious wars about their languages or text editors (other than in a tongue-in-cheek way) they are considered rude and antisocial neckbeards. But somehow it's rude or antisocial to not get behind this massive time, energy, and money sink that makes a few people fabulously wealthy?
Everyone? Really? Because half of my friends are unemployed, and every single one has a university degree. And who starts building and then doesn't finish it because they don't want it to be taxed?
Related: Octodad is an indie success story. They just published a numbers infographic. http://i.imgur.com/1YYPJiI.jpg

Discussion with one of the devs http://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/2u8bsh/octodad_...
The US does not have a giant supercharger network. Only some parts of it do.
I'm not blaming the players for anything. It's the institution that society has propped up and praised that puts people in a position where they feel the best way to be validated by society is to put themselves in danger doing nothing of lasting good for mankind.
Interesting overview of Edinburgh duck R&D. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bdeNuRF-yE
I'd add that .50 BMG is more precisely a "material destruction" round (aircraft being "material"), it's rather excessive for a human target except at very long ranges as pioneered by e.g. Carlos Hathcock in Vietnam (a serious "competitor" to Chris Kyle modulo the very different terrain etc.).

I've read that the Barrett M82 has been used a lot in explosive ordinance disposal, something for which a single aimed shot (at a very long distance) is ideal, whereas a full auto M2 would be gross overkill, not to mention not particularity man portable (30 pounds, a bit over the weight of our medium general purpose machine gun (but that also requires spare barrels and a lot of ammo), vs. 128 pounds with tripod).
Well of course these are the responses you hope for! Will follow up indeed.
Intellectually gifted individuals can be quite adept at rationalizing their behavior and deluding themselves (and drowning others) with logical-sounding word vomit. This is evident as they get lost in the details of their rationalizations, but fail to consider the broader assumptions/principles at work in their justifications.

For example, point number 4:

It’s not all great. Football, like most professional sports, is deeply permeated with advertisements, commercialism, and money.

We see that's really just a statement full of bullshit, because it's likely pretty easy to find counter-examples of things the intellectual individual thinks are great (Apple products?) which are deeply permeated with ads, commercialism, and money.

Intelligence is a highly-fluid "thing", but society tends to view it as book-smart depth in a few micro-niches... i.e. the less something can be understood, the more "intelligent" one appears. And yet that sort of "intelligence" defeats the compounding interest of knowledge, which occurs when we can communicate it to others in an understandable fashion. Even further, a mother who raises her children can be highly intelligent, but she often gets little honor from a society that defines smart as a Physics PhD.
I have always assumed that, like most geeks, disinterest in sports was not so much "cultivated" as it was a kneejerk reaction to the fact that the football players were the people making my life miserable every fucking day in public school.

A huge chunk of my disinterest in certain genres of music (e.g. heavy metal) come from the same wellspring.

Of course high school was many years ago for me and I have moved on with my life. But until a strong-enough counterforce is applied, football (and Led Zeppelin) will continue to elicit a vaguely negative response.