skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From a Salon article on US data mining, http://www.salon.com/2015/04/26/big_datas_big_libertarian_li...

"All of this is part of what I call the informational appetite. It’s our total faith in raw data, in the ability to extract empirical certainties about life’s greatest mysteries, if only one can deduce the proper connections. When the informational appetite is layered over social media, we get the messianic digital humanitarianism of Mark Zuckerberg. Connectivity becomes a human right; Facebook, we are told, can help stop terrorism and promote peace. (Check out Facebook.com/peace to see this hopeless naïveté in action.)"
TaxiOnMobile
Upboats and agreement: Picking good infrastructure that you know you can handily win the security war with is key. It almost doesn't matter how secure your MVP is, if your architecture is securable. You can't bolt on a secure architecture after the fact but you can tighten the one you build in.
What would be interesting would be a graph comparing the repeal of anti-interracial marriage laws to actual incidences of interracial marriages (adjusting for relative populate percentages of the races involved, etc.)

I have a strong suspicion that the results would indicate that America itself doesn't really change its mind all that quickly even after the legal changes take place.
Ask HN: Finding sponsorships for dev user groups (& other user group questions)?
About 6 months ago, I started a monthly dev meetup in South Bend, IN. We have decent attendance (20-30 people each month), and I have managed to attract half a dozen local corporate sponsors, as well as securing giveaway sponsorship from both JetBrains and O'Reilly. I'm hoping to take the group to the next level, and I'm looking for advice on a couple of items:

- What are some other great companies to pursue sponsorships from (either monetary or product giveaway)?
- What is the best way to find companies with dev evangelists who would want to come talk to the group? I try to source the majority of our content locally, but I think people also value guests from outside the local community. I have had a few from Microsoft, but I'd like to diversify our guest speaker pool.
- We're currently held together by a bunch of handshake agreements, and I'm planning to incorporate it as a non-profit. Any tips or cautions on this process? This is all new ground for me.

I appreciate any help and wisdom you guys can provide. Thanks!
> Recently I had to decide whether to buy books on politics for kindle. I didn't like the fact that it tracks everything I buy, what sentences I highlight, the notes I keep... I bet my libertarian books would make my score very low in future China.

This is why I keep "pirating" and hoarding books. I know it's bad for the common good and bad for the authors but I feel paranoid about corporations and national security agencies collecting and later, perhaps, analyzing what I read, including how long I linger over a page, what I underline, when I take screenshot excerpts, etc.

I started innocently enough, by scanning all my physical books (and downloading the epubs or pirated pdfs of books I already paid for in physical form whenever available) just to lighten my steps, so to speak. Then I came upon a passage in 1984 where books were altered, entire passages excised and rewritten to suit whatever powers that be. It was completely unrealistic when 1984 was written, of course, but in 2013 (when I read it), this hit a little bit too close to home. With all our devices constantly itching to phone the mothership, this is not a fantasy anymore but a possibility. All that stands between Orwell's dark vision and reality is, in fact, political will and our collective memory of times when this was not possible. Perhaps future generations who do not remember physical books will more easily acquiesce to such intrusions for the sake of "mental hygiene" and, you know, the children and stuff.

Anyhow, today I look at a 16K+ Bibdesk database which, of course, includes the files/ebooks on my airgapped machine and feel curiously satisfied. Not in a lifetime will I be able to read all this but I know that I could spend my remaining days reading freely, no matter the external circumstances. Freedom of thought! (Also, a very neat and nifty system for me personally I admit... :)
Show HN: React Native with a Meteor back end connected with a WebSocket polyfill
Hmm. This seems to focus on a few issues that neatly fall into a sense of "progress" in social change, in which something changes in a number of states culminating in a Supreme Court decision that causes that change to affect the entire country.

However, it ignores some issues that don't fall into such a pattern. For example, the issue of teaching evolution vs. creation in public schools; where teaching about evolution has never been questioned (as far as I know) in some states, while others have had laws on the books, and there is continuing pressure and laws that offer limited "workarounds" of the supreme court decision in order to promote "teaching the controversy", so it's not really a clear cut case of progress.

Another that isn't covered is capital punishment; some states have never had capital punishment, some have repealed it over the years, and the Supreme Court briefly suspended it nationwide but it was reinstated later, and many states still practice it.

Abortion, which is used as an example in this article, faces a similar problems as teaching of evolution. While abortion was allowed nationwide by Roe v. Wade, states are slowly introducing laws that restrict it so heavily that it's not available to a large fraction of people who need it. The turning point nationwide is being slowly turned back by laws that skirt the existing precedent.

It seems like picking these couple of issues, to show how "it may happen again", is a bit disingenuous without also covering major cases in which change hasn't followed this pattern, or has backslid since the original change.
That comment came about because of a licensing spat with the atheros source code.

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070913014315
The plane flies; but I wonder what we're doing putting humans in an airplane at all at this point. The amount of additional engineering that has to be done to support a human in the cockpit is crazy -- life support systems, multiple redundant flight control systems, etc. All of these have maintenance schedules, checklists and protocols that make them very expensive to operate. By the time this weapons system is operational, it will be obsolete.

I would maybe understand if the goal of this program was to produce a weapons system that was a great leap forward in performance, but the F-35 was never designed to be that. It was supposed to remove the need for 3 or 4 different specialized aircraft by creating a general-purpose platform that can serve in multiple roles. It's essentially a cost-reduction program that basically fails at reducing costs because of the additional overhead some of the requirements brought.

In its current iteration, it doesn't do that, and having a single-engine fighter jet is a colossally stupid idea. In the event of engine failure, the pilot has no choice but to eject because fighters are far less aerodynamically stable than passenger planes, and with no engine power, the plane wouldn't be controllable. You don't have these problems in two-engine fighters -- if one engine goes out, you can still limp back to base and land the plane. So your single engine has to be that much more powerful and reliable, which leads to an engine that is more expensive to buy and that needs to be maintained more often. So they ultimately fail in reducing cost and complexity.

For the roles the F-35 will be appropriate for by the time it's finished, drones will be a much better option. The F-35 is explicitly not an air superiority fighter (a role human pilots are still better suited for, and for which the F-22 is a far superior aircraft), and most of the ground support and reconnaissance roles the F-35 is supposed to play are already handled by drones today.

The program only exists because big defense programs are parceled out to congressional districts, whose representatives are loathe to lose the jobs. I don't think the military even wants it that badly at this point.
I could probably survive not using most of the standard library (I might try to do this anyway to avoid issues with deployment, as I have done in the past in C++).

I'm not a huge fan of closures in many cases (if they outlive the scope of their defining function I think it leads to unclear code), so the fact that they might allocate is not a huge deal to me. Array literals silently allocating GCed memory concerns me greatly however...

I remember hearing about efforts to remove a lot of the reliance on the GC, and I guess I was hoping that that was further along than it sounds like it is.

Still, I'll try not to pass judgement until I try it out on something small. There are a lot of other potential issues unrelated to the GC that would probably be dealbreakers for me.
You are fighting a mathematically pure interpretation of black boxes that are making no assumptions at all. Your observations are correct.
But nobody actually interprets the term "black box" the way you deem wrong.

Taken from here [1]:

White-box models: This is the case when a model is perfectly known; it has been possible to construct it entirely from prior knowledge and physical insight.

Grey-box models: This is the case when some physical insight is available, but several parameters remain to be determined from observed data. It is useful to consider two subcases.

1. Physical modeling: A model structure can be built on physical grounds, which has a certain number of parameters to be estimated from data. This could, for example, be a state-space model of given order and structure.

2. Semiphysical modeling. Physical insight is used to suggest certain nonlinear combinations of measured data signal. These new signals are then subjected to model structures of black-box character.

Black-box models: No physical insight is available or used, but the chosen model structure belongs to families that are known to have good flexibility and have been 'successful in the past'.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00051098950...
Go already has an HTTP server in its standard library ([1]) so why write another one?

[1] http://golang.org/pkg/net/http/
See also, The Treacherous Optimization:

http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.h...
From the last graph, it seems like the rate of change (if that's what you'd call it) is closely related to the time period in which the change is taking place, or at least the time period in which the change started. I wonder if this has to do with a general increase in malleability of (judicial) opinions, or faster information transfer, or something else.
The ARRL Operating Manual is excellent. It's appropriate for a complete newcomer to just pick up and start reading, but will go into more advanced topics, like antenna design and satellites.

If you're not licensed, there are flashcard apps for your phone that will prepare to completely ace the test very quickly. The manual's a good reference for any questions you don't understand. I'd also recommend finding a local club or other operator just to get a demo of a basic radio contact and the protocol people follow for conversation. Some of it's mandated by governments, but a lot of it just convention.
They probably should have left abortion out, since it's not clear that American ever changed their mind on that. Over the last 20 years, it's still roughly 50/50.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/170249/split-abortion-pro-choice-...
Given that the NSA spied on Obama when he was still a wannabe-senator, I wouldn't be surprised at all if he was blackmailed [1].

Also, just watch candidate Obama debate President Obama on government surveillance [2].

I mean, short of someone providing a document detailing how the NSA intents on spying on the next presidents of the United States and manipulating them, I don't see any more clear evidence than this.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6m1XbWOfVk&t=3m11s

[2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BmdovYztH8
Economists: Drop the Signaling Fad
> That's why you can have big posters in China saying things like "Friends! Be virtuous and vigilant!"

I'm not sure what you want to imply, but i just got back from London where each and every public transport facility (bus, tube, train) kept repeating over the PA that "any suspicious people or parcels" should be reported to a member of staff. Or something like that.

We're not really that different -- i would be surprised if the US is.
Learnings of a virtual startup under a larger company
Google Gears?
K2KD here :)

Glad to see hams getting involved -- disaster communications is one of the strong suits of amateur radio. I still have a to-be-implemented plan of getting a portable HF rig w/ solar charger for my to-be-implemented "go bag".

One of the big challenges the whole hobby has faced is the struggle for relevance in the Internet era. When I got my license (early 90s), there basically wasn't an Internet for kids like me, so the concept of switching on an HF rig and talking to someone from Australia from my bedroom in NYC was awe-inspiring.

That isn't really the case these days (considered I'm likely communicating with a bunch of people from Australia on this thread alone.) Communication from an "exotic" place like Nigeria or Eastern Europe was rare and exciting. Now it's a source of skepticism.

I haven't been following the hobby much for the past few years -- other than disaster coms, any thoughts on what the highlights are these days?
Microsoft has had 2 Heartbleed-level vulnerabilities in its Windows code so far, that were not just 2-3 years old but 10+ years old, leaving systems vulnerable to them for much longer.

The "advantage" of proprietary code here was that Microsoft got to downplay them (surprise surprise, no scary logo made by Microsoft for them!), and that's how proprietary code owners deal with security issues in general - they try to hide that they exist to keep the illusion that the software is (more) secure.
I know what you mean. I'm always like..."Uhh! Repost." Then I re-read it and...become enlightened.
Yes. It sometimes feels like the U.S. Is a social welfare state. Except all the social welfare is given to large military contractors. Humph, I suppose that's what they mean by military industrial complex.
> People walk away from a game of Cards Against Humanity thinking that they’re hilarious.

Which people? My friends and I walk away from a game of Cards Against Humanity thinking we had a fun time coming up with stupid combinations for an hour. I can also turn the author's previous sentence around and state that there are probably many people that get too invested in elves and orcs as well.

> ... this passes once you’re more familiar with the language and are using it for real things

> ... a large enough subset of the community never reaches that stage

This is true about pretty much every programming language (and probably generalizable to most non-programming things too). The author just happened to apply it to Ruby and Haskell for some reason.

If there's a message such as "programmers should be more aware of the language's strengths and weaknesses and shouldn't feel overconfident", it's lost in the paragraphs of vague complaints.
We're currently using Splunk (and may move to the ELK stack) for logging, but some types of "application events" are really more useful as metrics. We're using Ganglia for those metrics and limiting application logs to actions that are needed for audit purposes and for warning and error-level application problems.

Using a system like Ganglia (or the Etsy inspired statsd) is an important idea since the OP's original question included how to limit the size of logged data. These systems provide a natural way to aggregate data.
Women in Technology: Why It's Good for Everyone
There is a very illuminating video on Youtube by designer of F-16 and A-10 about F-35. Please remember F-22 is a very expensive plane and great for Air superiority, but you need planes in other roles. The Airforce in their sexy trip are trying to replace the reliable A-10 with the F-35. F-35 for ground support, bad bad bad idea, but the guys in Airforce have careers and they will have to move the needle, if you think about it, the military bureaucracy is its own worst enemy.
Piggy-backing on this topic: does anyone successfully use Amazon S3 as the log store for application event logging? The low cost is attractive, but at first glance it seems like the latency is too high for it work well.
Recently, I've been thinking about how weird this is. By which I mean that many of the same people who would balk at Linux because it's not Windows wouldn't balk at a Mac and don't balk at Android instead of an iPhone.
That's not the point. Let me rephrase that:

- one of GPL's cool thing is that it prevents proprietary software from including GPL'd code without contributing back to the community

- Because BSD is not as strict as GPL regarding license derivation, GPL says "BSD is bad, you're allowing proprietary software to use BSD code without giving back"

- Some people take BSD code, modify it and distribute modifications under GPL

- Because of this, the original BSD code authors can't benefit from the modifications, only GPL projects can... doing exactly what GPL was against in the first place (preventing authors from enjoying modifications)

Theo is only pointing out the irony of it all.
I believe the problem isn't so much that DO, etc., don't support unikernels, as that they use something other than Xen as the virtualization layer; something-other-than-Xen is still on the to-do list of the unikernel projects.
[mind... blown]

I learn so much on HN! I'll have to try this next time. Hopefully that wasn't some special breed of loose-skinned squirrel.
Before you get too excited about fully autonomous killing machines, please watch this short TED talk by Daniel Suarez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sInLjERFO9Q.

Executive Summary: Just having a bunch of autonomous machines that are licensed to kill is bad for things like democracy and political stability.
The importance of curation in mobile
Not saying you have it, but this is a common symptom of ADHD.

I'd recommend the book Driven to Distraction, it's pretty informative!
Abortion and gay marriage were changed in the courts, so I don't know if that counts as America changing its mind. That being said, I would posit that any increase in the rate of America changing its mind is due to the increase in the rate of information exchange due to advances in communication technology.
> What would be interesting would be a graph comparing the repeal of anti-interracial marriage laws to actual incidences of interracial marriages

Not quite, but close enough: http://xkcd.com/1431/
PCI DSS v3.1: SSL and early TLS no longer considered strong crypto [pdf]
Simplified DSL / Routing
GitLab CEO here, we indeed see more and more organizations starting to host their own GitLab server to become self reliant.
How Facebook's GraphQL Will Change Back End Development
"Mr. Obama, on a trip to Stanford in February, had expressed sympathy with those who were striving to protect privacy, even while saying it had to be balanced against the concerns of the F.B.I. and other agencies that fear “going dark” because of new encryption technologies."

"Expressing sympathy" means absolutely nothing when concrete actions have been taken to undermine privacy and security.

I hope that the tech industry can organize around resisting the government to provide security and privacy for their users.

The more robust anti-spying measures we have, the more secure we'll be from malicious actors who would use our communications against us for their own gain.
Wat is het gezondste eten om snel 8 kilo af te vallen zonder dieet
Defending your time
Would the F-35 be a good example of The Swamp of Commitment? [0]

* [0] http://www.amazon.com/Sway-Irresistible-Pull-Irrational-Beha...
Lets raise our mugs for complete, global, saturation...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjVNlG5cZyQ
Gory details are at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/14478...

It actually mounts root correctly, but them fails to mount home which has exactly the same details except a different subvol parameter.
When Emotional Intelligence Goes Wrong
Here's what ICT should really teach kids: how to do regular expressions (2012)
I'm in this industry. Two comments.

First, if you are going to law school, the ROI of a better LSAT score is astounding. Likely $200000 in scholarships and then who knows how much in future earnings. That is what justifies the high fees.

But second, the market for LSAT tutors has actually shrunk dramatically. It's been cannibalized by an explosion in free/affordable online resources that are as good or better than a tutor.

I know johnathan, the tutor in the article. He has his own platform that generates clients. It's very, very hard to be an LSAT tutor now if you don't have that. Only the visible minority can consistently charge $100+ an hour ar enough volume to do it full time.

For anyone curious about these online resources, the main company in the field is 7sage. They've done the most to destroy demand for tutoring (this is a good thing!). They have free explanations for the logic games section. This used to be what everyone asked tutors about. Now almost no one wants logic games help.

While I do tutoring, I mostly focus on products and on creating free/inexpensive resources. This is my own contribution to eliminating the need for people like me: http://lsathacks.com/explanations/

(They're free explanations for a bunch of LSAT practice tests.)
[Cfrg] Poll results: Elliptic Curves – byte order
Curation is becoming an increasingly important trend for mobile apps. KptnCook curates recipes from around the world to local grocery stores.
There are things in this world that are not a business.
The hardware has state that is exposed more or less directly, but texture management is all just plumbing and easily wrapped. Most of my experience is with directX though, which seems to have a much cleaner API.

Anyways, immediate mode UIs abound for game stacks given the ease at which they can be mapped to the GPU directly.
> Isn't trying the arrow keys / keyboard navigation an instictive thing to do?

Evidently not. My position is that a web page that is impossible to navigate via mouse is broken.
"Going dark" is exactly what should happen. The only secure system is a secure system.

For all countries X, the government of X is absolutely untrustworthy.
Its analysis is also perhaps weakened by not accounting for the backlash from states that passed new legislation to block gay marriages and the recognition of gay marriages.

An interesting contrast might be the UK, which in the space of 10 years moved from a government eventually winning a legislative battle to revise a local government act to remove wording prohibiting "the promotion of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship" in 2003, via civil partnerships the following year to full gay marriage in 2013, introduced by a Conservative Prime Minister who had once supported attempts to block the removal of the ban on "promotion of homosexuality". Opinion polls suggested that majority public opinion shifted in a similar direction over that period of time.

I suspect American attitudes towards perceived culture war will be a little more stubborn...
Only 22 percent of Apple Watches delivered on first weekend