skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do you meditate? At work? How?
In college I attended regular meditation sessions (called mindfulness, or mindful sitting sessions) and I found them very enjoyable, if not as spiritually rewarding as I'd hoped.

At work, I find myself sometimes wanting to take a half hour or so and just recapture that sense of amiable focus that I had before.

So, do you meditate? Do you do it at work? What benefits do you feel you derive from it, and what methodology/ies do you follow? Are there resources you'd recommend (I sometimes visit calm.com, for instance)?
Very reasonable all in all, and it's pretty clear that he's damn tired of people's antics with regards to using his work without license and then going on the defensive about it when caught.

Some people's sense of entitlement to creative, but easily replicated, works never ceases to amaze me. Whether you like Tidal and those involved or not, this week we saw its launch being met with backlash online that included comments that amounted to "Why would I pay $20 a month for this when I can torrent it free?". People acted indignant over being asked to maybe pay for some of the works they consume. As though they had a right to have a copy of the works simply because they were technologically capable of getting their hands on one without paying for it.

And then creators and artists are vilified for going after those who steal/distribute copies of their works.

I can't imagine how stressful it is for those who have to deal with these constants acts against them.
An expiry of copyright - after which a work enters the public domain - would accomplish this rather nicely without completely disincentivizing content creators.

Unfortunately, while this is already the case in theory in many jurisdictions, it's not the case in certain others, where the duration of copyright is effectively set to "current year minus first appearance of Mickey Mouse plus twenty years" thanks to the interests of a particular company whose name rhymes with a "D" and ends with an "isney". :)
Yeah, and people who want a strong government should move to NK!

Seriously, don't you all get tired of burning the same straw man over and over again? I'm sure you don't support every possible kind of government, including Pinochet's Chile and the Khmer Rouge. It must also be democratic, somewhat respect human rights and such, no? Likewise, people who argue against them also have conditions they believe would be necessary for a stable country. You may think they are wrong, and point out why, but just saying "look at <country in shitty conditions>" is not a good argument.
Geoengineering and Climate Intervention: What We Need to Know
As long as people have a need for photographs, we will fund their development.

Fantastic! My email address is my profile. Please send me a list of your requirements with advance payment through Paypal - I'll eat the fees - as I am unable to locate any checks or money orders from you. I look forward to doing business with you!
Anyone isnt clear that there has never been a communist country on earth?...
That would've been more true 10 years ago. Now, the overwhelming majority of HN users make their living in yet another business model that exists increasingly because of the relative obsolescence of the previous business model - namely, by shifting into the $foo-as-a-service realm.
Immutable Servers, FTW
I'm not sure I completely follow on why women in a developing nation need a cellphone. The article stated that there was a portion of individuals who did not even possess a bank account. Mobile banking isn't going to do anything for that. Are there legitimate needs for a cellphone in their life? The ones who do not own one have survived until now without one.

Who is going to pay for the service for the device? How are they going to handle situations where the phones will be flipped for a profit. How are they going to handle situations where the phone becomes broken or lost?

Lastly, how in the world is a phone going to get them out of poverty? I can understand if it was like a suit, where it gives a person a better position to obtain a job. However, I would think that a library would be better suited to get them out of the position where they're at.
I think even more important would be APIs to embed the classes elsewhere.
How Bitcoin Will End World Poverty
Jim reminded me of the excellent BBC documentary "Japan - A Story of Love and Hate". The documentary follows Naoki, a former communist and now a middle-aged furita.

I don't think it is a uniquely Japanese phenomenon, but I do think that Japanese society is uniquely lacking in opportunities for people to live outside of the mainstream. It seems that if you miss out on Shinsotsu-Ikkatsu-Saiyō, you are a permanent second-class citizen, with few prospects beyond bare survival. The west is far from perfect, but it offers far more alternatives and second chances.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjqd3sIcfrY
Appreciation isn't the problem. Exploitation is the problem. If use my work to make money without my permission and without falling inside a fair-use exception, then I have a big problem with that.
Glasgow is/was ridiculously violent. American surgeons who want to learn stab trauma go to Glasgow for experience. People are stabbed in the hospital.

Scotland used to be the most violent nation in the developed world according to the UN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6415504

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/the-streets-of-sc...

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/apr/11/ukcrime.lornamarti...

Things have got better over the last five years. It's still pretty bad. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-22276018
There seems to be a problem parsing backslash escapes:

echo 'foo="\\"' | PYTHONPATH=/tmp/yapf/yapf python /tmp/yapf

Raises a lib2to3.pgen2.parse.ParseError.

Also crashes on \n, but not, strangely, on \t.

I’m guessing that the backslashes get interpreted twice, somehow.
This assumes all violators are doing it willfully. I imagine most restaurant owners that make a Squarespace site in an afternoon have no idea you can't just copy something from Google Images.
Dice.com – New Skills Pages
It is kind of amazing how close the software looks and works in ports between the two systems, despite the radically different hardware. In many cases, the ST version ran faster.

And with a little hardware and software (Magic Hat IIR), you could turn your cheapo ST into a Macintosh.
> And yes, I use tablets and phones to code on, but nothing production yet. Cannot say it's that much less productive than on desktop though for what I do.

Interested in that. What's your "mobile stack"?
Privacy tools against surveillance
If you're willing to shell out tens of thousands of euros to attract "talent", why not just give already educated people money to become Germans?
Fair play to them for providing the service and here's hoping it leads to further exposure of corruption and wrongdoing.

The next step, however, is getting people to actually act on the information that comes out which is appearing to be an absolute goliath of a challenge.
A 'conversation' built on falsehoods is no conversation at all.

I am less interested in finding some sort of constructive area with you as I am keeping you from misinforming the people who might read your comment and accept it as true.

That is not a waste of time.

If you must have detailed sources and point by point rebuttals, rather than 'vacuous denials' (who's wasting time now?) here you go:

> Rather than remove the exemption, the SEC has effectively removed the disclosure requirement.

Title III created the Securities Act of 1933 Section 4A which states, among other things that "s to reduce the risk of fraud with respect to such transactions, as established by the Commission,
by rule, including obtaining a background and securities enforcement regulatory history check on each officer, director,
and person holding more than 20 percent of the outstanding
equity of every issuer whose securities are offered by such person"

Along with all sorts of information regarding the business including "(I) the income tax returns filed by the issuer
for the most recently completed year (if any); and
(II) financial statements of the issuer, which
shall be certified by the principal executive officer
of the issuer to be true and complete in all material respects;"

And

"financial statements reviewed by a public
accountant who is independent of the issuer, using
professional standards"

And "the name and ownership level of each existing
shareholder who owns more than 20 percent of any
class of the securities of the issuer; "

And "not less than annually, file with the Commission and
provide to investors reports of the results of operations and financial statements of the issuer, a
" And on and on and on.

http://www.sec.gov/about/laws/sa33.pdf

So, there is a significant discosure requirement despite your assertion to the contrary.

> The rule did not protect naive investors from themselves, it protected them from fraud

That much, at least, is true, but it suggests that the new rules will not which is false as shown above.

> and the economy from bubbles.

This also suggests that the new rules will form bubbles. While that is always a risk, the amount each business can raise and the amount prospective shareholders will be able to invest in these entities is limited, so I don't think this adds significant risk of new or bigger bubbles.

Now the record is straight and those that read these comments will have immediate access to the truth. It might not leave much room for whatever conversation you were planning on having but it is a worthy use of time nonetheless.
The True Cost of Churn
I thought this was the project that aaronsw started awhile back? Is it coming back to life?
> That doesn't prevent someone from wanting (and paying for) the photo to exist in the first place. My appreciation for a photo is not detracted by another's simultaneous appreciation of it.

If you want to appreciate the photo, the photographer has a gallery on their site you can visit and freely view. The photos are definitely gorgeous. But we're not talking about appreciating the photos. We're talking about hosting the photo yourself or using it commercially.

Making these photos is very expensive. If someone pays so much for a photo, they'll surely want exclusive rights. Why would I pay tens of thousands of dollars for a photo I'd like to use commercially, and then share it with others for free? It's better to have the licensing be cheaper, and have lots of people be able to pay for the photo.

This is like saying "bands should give their music away for free, because the record label already paid to record it."
On more serious note every resource that is copyrighted should carry plainly visible note about like warrnings on cigarette packs so mildly creative people can stay away from it.

But it generally does, and there is actually a procedure for dealing with 'orphan works' whose copyright status can't easily be established. Most work has the copyright statement right on it or in the metadata, and anyone who makes living from copyrighted works lodges copies with a repository like the Library of Congress and pays a fee for the privilege (about $50), because doing so is the only way to recover statutory damages if your work is infringed.
I enjoyed this article until they started focusing on "selfies" and social media. Loneliness and human interaction over the internet is a very interesting subject but I feel like the author has only used facebook and instagram.
There is no reason to limit this topic to communication platforms built upon exposing your own personal life and connection that with you communication.
I think that communication over IRC, blogs, reddit, comments like this and chans are more "pure" in a way and more interesting.
Digital Thermometer
I agree with the "layered" and "event driven" problem. I would characterize them as concepts on orthogonal dimensions, and not things to be compared or contrasted (after skimming over those sections)

But AOSA is a book of case studies, which is of enormous value. I don't see the problem there.
The authors don't give you the unifying themes, because each chapter was written in isolation. You have to fill in the blanks.

But really reading alone isn't enough. That book gives you a taste, but if you really want to understand an architecture, you have to make changes in the codebase. There's no book that can give you that information.

And I feel like I know what software architecture is. It's about 1) how a piece of software is divided, and 2) the relationships between those parts. This book and I would say any other book about architecture can be described like this. Whether the architectures are good or described well is a different matter.

That doesn't mean it's easy, or application-independent, or that every piece of software even has an architecture. But software architecture is quite well defined.
Props for using the word "askew".
In terms of performance you really need to minimize contention. If you build something that sends things round-robin to different spliterators you are going to have horrible performance, you really need to batch 10,000 or so lines and send those to different spliterators.

Also for anything that is pipelined there is ultimately going to be a bottleneck at the weakest point, which could be the spliterator factory.
What a shitty argument. On the contrary, the fact that somebody writes a non-free book about a piece of software that comes with a free manual with the expectation that he can actually compete with the free manual tells you much about the quality of the free manual. Everything else is just normal, healthy competition in a free market.
>Well consider the alternative: only rich people could get a higher education otherwise.

No, that's not the alternative at all. The alternative would be to have people from other countries pay their own way and provide free education to your own citizens.
Have gone through the setup for Android, manage to make calls but they're not secured, TLS and ZRTP enabled, STUN server correct.....
Absolutely true in my experience. We had a service with free and paid tiers. The paid customers were uniformly respectful and even helpful. The free users were usually demanding, sometimes abusive, and would spend hours trying to convince you that they can't survive without your service but they also shouldn't have to pay for it.
Your timelines are off.

What youre referring to is that the early FB IOS app essentially wrapped a webview in order to display its stream, but the webview performance at the time was atrocious and they quickly abandoned it for natively build components.
More recently(2013), post Instagram acquisition, Facebook developed a virtual dom framework named react and its currently used in several places of their web app.

Similarly with Angular which was introduced ~5 years ago, they decided that for the new rewrite it makes sense to use a virtual-dom like technology at the render level. The change is evolutionary.

FWIW Polymer is an effort by a completely different team and at this point is independent of Angular.
Surely people here are not so short sited that they actually think these 'not useful' cases are really not useful or that these are the only use cases.

Right now you could travel around Thailand and bring only your phone and passport. There is a service that allows you to give btc and get a code that can be used at any ATM of a major bank and get cash. You can cut down the 8% spread of changing money at the airport to 1/3rd of that at least. That is something you can do right this second.

Not only that but paying for something online is fantastic. No excessive information, no transactions cancelled because of a companies' opaque fraud protection system, no chance of your card number being stolen, no need to generate a temporary card number, no need to worry about your bank's opaque fraud protection...

Seriously, if you think bitcoin isn't useful, try using it.
In Europe, Apple's Music Streaming Service Is Scrutinized
The Sales Funnel Explained
I don't believe there does have to be advantage/gain, if the retail value of the work exceeds $1_000. [1]

He seems to be taking a very reasonable tact by going after genuinely commercial abusers, if his description is correct.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506
This is prettier but I made http://www.serializer.io for the similar purpose of keeping track of these 3 sites (and some others).
People aren't infectious with Ebola for very long before either becoming extremely ill (and likely not up to having sex). If you're reducing the number of sex-related Ebola transmissions in a population by encouraging condom use, I think that's a pretty good thing.

At any rate, HIV is a much much larger virus than Ebola, and cannot get through micropores in the condom as easily. This contributes to the high rate of transmission prevention.
Here's a list: http://mesos.apache.org/documentation/latest/powered-by-meso...
To be fair, nfoz seems to understand and accept that this is how copyright law works (in the U.S. at least; in many other countries copyright is treated as a natural right, akin to property).

He also states it's reasonable to agree with such law, which it undoubtedly is.

But I think he's being reasonable too, suggesting there could be alternatives. Like most of us here, I make my living out of copyright law. But I'm far from sure it the best way to deal with compensating creative, trivially reproducible work.
My reading of the article is that it is supposed to be an art project / innovative entertainment.
This guy is the “Alton Brown” of mobile developers
Scaleway has done a nice job utilizing what is available now for 32-bit ARM compatible chips.

AMD, Applied Micro, and Cavium all have ARM 64-bit SOC's due out in servers in 2H2015, from a variety of OEM's.
These SOC chips are designed for servers, with ECC, integrated SATA, 10Gbe, network accelerators, etc.

In the mean-time, 64-bit multi-core ARM dev boards are becoming available via www.96boards.org. Price for these is around $100 each instead of the $3K early access reference boards with the the server grade chips. Expectation is that 96boards.org will be offering boards with server grade chips in 2H2015 to further spur the SW ecosystem.
2^30 sandpile
Great App!
This is blurry on Firefox, the whole thing UI and all. O_o
Alt-J doesn't care if you listen to their songs on your phone
Fair enough.

For what it's worth: I'm not sure it's the "best" way, but I'm more sure that it's the optimal way in a market economy. Things should cost what they're worth to buyers, and coercion (which is what infringement is) should be taken out of that equation.
Lets assume that this fellow isn't rich beyond belief. I'm sure he's not.

Say he can take a really nice photo. To take this photo he has a number of expenses, he needs a certain amount of training, he needs to take a certain number of bad pictures before finding the good one.

Now right now he makes a living selling 1,00 copies of this photo to various organizations and publications.

Now say he can't do that. He can only sell it once. Two things happen. First is, to make the same amount of money, which is enough to cover his expenses and his failed photos, he needs to charge 100 times as much money. A $400 photo is now a $40,000 photo. The second things is, while before there were maybe 1,000 people willing to pay $400 for the photo, right now there might not be anyone willing to pay $40,000 for it.

There would especially be nobody willing to pay $40,000 for it when they know that as soon as someone else paid the $40,000 for it, they could get it for free.

In fact, even the people who had a budget to $400 for it before might not be so eager, because most of the photos they would get are now free. They just have to wait for someone else to get it first.

So this guy, who before was making an alright living taking photos, and a couple times a year getting a great photo that can sell a hundred copies, now has no means of supporting his photography.

Previously he could take photos that 100 people would be willing to pay $400 for and get by. These are very high quality photos. Maybe the majority nobody cares about. But if he can only sell them once, he can't afford it, and nobody can afford to buy it. Because of this he can't afford to take it, and the picture never exists.

Right now, de facto, anything that's released on the internet, licensed or not, is going to be there forever. Copyright's existence doesn't change that. For the commons this is a good thing. He can take legal action against people who are using his works without license, but he isn't targeting blogs and international sites and other places he can't reach.

Because of this scenario he is able to produce his works, and at the same time his work will be available across the globe. The only places targeted are companies who are trying to make money and think his work might be a free way to do this.

This isn't "So your blogger has been found using Alex's photographs" or "So your art project has been found using Alex's photographs". It's company.

If we are in some communist utopia where the companies using those photographs for free are also giving their goods away for free, then I don't think he would care.

But if an airline uses your photograph to advertise without credit and still charges you full fare to fly, and profits off them, why is that right? Shouldn't those profits go to the commons too?
How would that work? If the site is sending you a redirect, then they aren't sending you the content.
Why BTC Jam is an insecure investment
From the DOJ Criminal Resource Manual:

There are four essential elements to a charge of criminal copyright infringement. In order to sustain a conviction under section 506(a), the government must demonstrate: (1) that a valid copyright; (2) was infringed by the defendant; (3) willfully; and (4) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain.

The language in (4) is actually the subject of a good deal of discussion, because it changed (to that) relatively recently.
Then all the hard work that flipboard did to achieve 60 fps rendering speed was not required?

Reference - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9029159
Best to stick with Java.

It's noticeable that some companies are switching back from Scala to Java e.g. LinkedIn, Yammer and after using it for a while it's not hard to see why. It's awfully complex and obtuse in many parts.

Clojure simply isn't that popular and likely won't be.
If you're having a hard time finding the "Turn on HTTP Nowhere" option:

In a normal tab, left click the HTTPS Everywhere icon in the top right of the browser and click the "Turn on HTTP Nowhere" checkbox.
It's depressing walking into the average computer retailer and seeing practically every shelf stuffed with slow HDs and salesmen trying to pitch the huge importance of minor differences in processor speed

As far as I can tell the computer market is bifurcating or has bifurcated into people who give a shit about their experience and will pay for better (in which case they tend to buy Apple, or some select PC brands like Lenovo (until the certificate fiasco) or the Dell XPS 13"), and people who buy solely on price. I can't imagine many sophisticated buyers going through a conventional retail store, and, furthermore, if price is the primary consideration then saying "It's a big drive and a cheap computer!" is better than trying to explain why an SSD is $50 more or whatever.
No one can ever arrange bits in that order because I was the first one to do it.
It's a good overview. But you can only touch on things at an introductory level in 45 pages, so don't expect all the issues to get explored.

I had one of those "So THAT'S what he was trying to do" moments when I realized that the architecture of an Android API layer that a client was having trouble with was attempting to be a microservices architecture. Instead it bollixed up the way Cursor objects work by trying to pass them across an AIDL-based remote API.

I bet that's not the last time I see that misapplication of a pattern.