skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Speaking for Germany, which is probably the "best" country after the UK, here are a few reasons

1. Almost no investors who have built a tech-company before

2. Investors are very risk averse and want business models that monetize from day 1, because that's what a business is and those are good German values. This way, there is a strong incentivization by investors of e-commerce businesses and strong disincentivization of startups that want to build a great product first and focusing on scale.

3. In the same vein, investors simply don't know the idea of growing first and delaying monetization, which is what made the majority of "unicorns" possible. This is because there are no German examples for that, so they could not experience it themselves and German investors don't know or don't care about what happens in the U.S.

4. Fundraising takes double the amount of time here at half the valuation. I have seen 3 companies of close friends shut down after having raised Series A, because of exactly this.

5. Because of all that, there is little courage or idealism of the generation of first-time German entrepreneurs left. We have enough talent, there is just not the mindset baked into our ecosystem what makes the U.S. so successful. That's why most founders have to revert to building copycat e-commerce shop, but very few of the founders (maybe 3% of those that I have met) have the goal and the idealism to build something new that can really improve our world.

However, that's why there is a big opportunity to take the market of early stage seed investments that is focused on high risk bets only. If you want to do it really well, you announce that e-commerce ideas are not allowed.
> If the ten companies interoperated, you could plan a cross-continent vacation using one website

It's not easy. Why and how would they interoperate? What stops any one of them to grow and expand to other countries?
Photoshop on linux, that’s funny ;P

But seriously, I had to use Gtk3's font selection menu today, and it was impossible to work with it.
The Drug War doesn't have a sound moral basis, so I'm okay that the banks were undermining western governments in the interest of free trade.
Here's a resource I made for Processing. Very similar. http://printingcode.runemadsen.com/lecture-form-2/
Facebook is finally developing a dislike button
UK means you can save taxes – London is the Bahamas of Europe. Many companies do so. Not necessarily a legal issue.
> In the US, you can do whatever you want as long as it's not explicitly illegal.

That feels wrong. Maybe it's just a distorted picture I get from outside the US.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3171665

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/08/03/the-inexplic...
The impression i have is that European (if there is such a singular entity) tech development is more oriented towards system wide efficiencies and disability assistance than producing the next stock market rocket.
Mathematical logic has more freedom then classical logic. I personally describe classical logic, that when its intuitive logical for you, its classical. Everybody into real logician would scream now, because that is not the definition of course, but I think that classical logic is they way our neural network learns the rules of the universe, because it's logical and we therefor inherit this logic through observation.

If things would appear and disappear from thin air in front of our eyes, we would learn this is part of how the world works and therefor would be part of our logic, nobody would say its illogical that something just appeared.

I give you an example:
You take a equation and you substitute x1 through s1. In mathematical logic, this is always allowed and you can define s1 with whatever as long as it fulfills the rules of math.
In classical logic you can't. You have to explain where s1 comes from and in case of physics, what natural law this s1 implements.

Hope that helped a bit to clarify, but from my philosophy study I can assure you, logic is a very large field with many different logics and not everything is so clear then most of us think. Very often mathematicians teach logic in the courses, but they are very biased by their mathematical one, while in reality general logic is part of philosophy and much more diverse.
Tahrir, Typography App with Arabic, Chinese, Russian, English and Farsi Fonts
Yes, but this is as simple.
It's not really my maths, it's quite standard stuff.

I'm more excited about Path2D[0] becoming adopted by more browsers.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Path2D
tea is pretty weak on caffeine and depending on the sugar you're + what's in the milk that would likely easily trump the caffeine effect. Caffeine increases lipid oxidation so you get more energy from fat. But sugar will be used up first and if it's enough to raise blood sugar, the drop will spike hunger more than the increased leptin from fat oxidation can stop it.
One very interesting difficulty for these guys is going to be deciding on mining, weighing costs and benefits and threat models..

Ethereum's current mining rates look like they would take a few thousand GPUs to fork the chain. Bitcoin's costs would be in the $hundred million+ range for a secret attack.

Edit: Most alt-mining proposals for enterprises do away with any ability to cost out mining attack vectors at all with some sort of trusted server, keys, etc.
Good points for the most part, but with regard to swapping, no one needs to own any batteries at all. You pull into an existing gas station and drive away 5 minutes later -- at most -- with a battery that was charged overnight at a centralized plant with optimum efficiency, minimal thermal losses, and no last-mile infrastructure problems.

Yes, this will be expensive, but not doing it this way will be even more expensive in the long run. It will require intelligent, government-enforced standardization of modular battery form factors, which is why it will probably never happen. We just have to have our VHS-versus-Beta and our BluRay-versus-HD DVD wars, even when there is demonstrably zero consumer benefit.
The end result being that fewer people are fit to run companies in Europe, so they run them in the US instead.
Plug.dj trying to raise money for next 6 months through users
Link: http://imgur.com/rqzbMMX

Intro:

I just returned from lunch and saw this in my mail.

For those who aren't aware what Plug.dj is just like Turntable.fm.

For those who don't know what Turntable.fm was - it was a website that let you create rooms where you could play music and other people in the room could listen to it. Similarly with plug.dj, you can create new rooms (called 'communities' I think) and can invite your friends to listen to music with them, or join rooms focussed on edm, dubstep etc. where other people will play music for you.

The main point:

I am in no way affiliated with these guys but I love their product and I use it often. I loved turntable.fm but things didn't workout quite well for them. I'd absolutely hate it if Plug.dj sees the same fate so I'm just trying to spread the word.

If you're already using them and like them, then you should consider donating. If not, you should consider trying the app out and consider donating if you'd like it.

Edit: Looks like you can only donate if you're an active user and at level 3 on the site: http://imgur.com/7smuQ0G. I think this is pretty awesome on their part. You basically can't donate unless you've actually used the site for a bit.
Three Social Login Myths Dispelled
> Explicitness and non-magicness are extremely valued in that environment.

This is not my experience with Java programs.

Enterprise Java programs often have many layers of magic abstraction, like Aspect-Oriented Programming, dependency injection, IOC.

Furthermore, people love using configuration files over code to determine program behaviour (see servlet configs, etc).
That article is interesting. I agree that if Go were just bad, people wouldn't criticize it so much. But I don't think it's an identity issue; maybe it is for other critics of Go, but that's not why I criticize it.

First off, I'm not an ML-language guy: I have written a small amount of Haskell and respect the work those guys have done, but I'm more of a Scheme and Python guy. And I'm not super ideological about functional programming either; I write a good amount of C and some assembly.

I am all for making pragmatic compromises. Part of what offends me about Go is that they've coopted the idea of pragmatism as their own when in fact the design decisions made by the Go language aren't pragmatic for most users. Pragmatism is rooted in knowledge, having thoroughly investigated solutions and chosen the best based on your goals, not just giving up on implementing stuff because it's hard to implement (which I suspect is what the Go team actually means when they say something's not pragmatic).

In the end though, I think the reason I care is that Go's popularity poisons the industry as a whole. It eliminates places I'm willing to work at, and worse, it lowers the caliber of programmers I can work with. Programmers who use `go generate` aren't going to learn how to use code generation that integrates with a type system. Programmers who unconditionally claim generational garbage collection is too heavyweight aren't going to be able to write programs that allocate larger amounts of memory. Programmers who think "goroutines" are the newest, most innovative, one true way to do threading are going to shoehorn that model into their code in other languages, the same way I shoehorn threading models from other languages into my Java code, except I have a variety of models I've used and I can choose the right threading model for the right situation. And I'm going to have to work with these people at some point, and screen them out in interviews, and I'd rather we just didn't let this shitty language into our industry in the first place.
True, but for most of us there's more than just groups and users. su is helpful to add other users' privileges to the current session, but there was no command to create a new full, isolated session other than logging in on a different tty or ssh'ing to localhost.

`machinectl shell` now implement that feature, with the added bonus of being transparently able to log into a local container (or possibly even virtual machines).
Right, I did 24-13 instead of 240-130. That's 100 billion times the power.
Is it reliable to add methods to a built-in object like CanvasRenderingContext2D? I avoid it, but perhaps just out of superstition.
Mining is only needed to prevent sybil attacks, so could be dispensed with if they code it from scratch.
Twitter Users Keep Getting 'Locked' Out of Their Accounts for Using Tor
Maybe they would go for being cooperatively-mined with bitcoin (like namecoin etc). Otherwise they need a different proof of work. It's pretty dangerous to be an SHA2-alt and not be incorporated into bitcoin's hashing power.
My first thought as well. Why restrict to C? It could be useful for many other languages.
What's happening in Syria?: Understanding the migrant crisis on a map
> Why do you consider that a key data structure?

In real world applications, it is one of the more essential non-collection types.
You'll free up lots of time and money to do better things than eating? Sex, work, sleep, punching myself in the face, pretty much anything beats cooking, eating, and cleaning.
Check whether GCHQ and NSA have been spying on you
@threatofrain You are correct in that without proper local connections your foreign business will die in China. I'm not disputing that.

My point is completely orthogonal; I'm simply saying that regardless of how business is done in either USA or China, each has its own massive market testing ground that speaks a single language, each has its own reasonably homogeneous culture and each has its own reasonably homogeneous set of consumer problems.

This is very different from, say, Italy and Sweden which are different on so many cultural levels. I'm simply supporting the point that Europe should not be treated as one market.
> so I'm okay that the banks were undermining western governments in the interest of free trade.

I say this as someone who used to work in drug policy reform and strongly opposes the drug war: Providing money to cartels isn't exactly a noble proposition either. Banks that do that really do have blood on their hands. Between 2006-2012, over 100,000 people died incredibly gruesome deaths in Mexico alone since 2010 at the hands of these cartels[0].

I'm not going to defend the drug war, but I'm not going to defend banks that willingly funnel money to them either. And I'm not going to claim that providing money to cartels actually undermines the drug war, in any meaningful sense. The cartels are, ironically, the largest profiteers of the drug war, right alongside the LEOs and correctional facilities that enforce drug laws. Pumping money into the pockets of the drug cartels only further entrenches the current system; it does not provide pressure to dismantle it.

There are plenty of great ways to work actively to end the drug war. Funding drug cartels (or enabling their business operations) is not one of them.

[0] The number of deaths in Mexico have dropped slightly since then, but only because the violence has moved further south in Central America
I agree. Prolog isn't logic programming: it's a specific approach to first-order, logic programming. So, it's failures can't be considered failures of first-order or other logic programming by default. One has to look at the nature of the failure to determine where the blame is. Then see if there's a way to fix that. And if not, only then say "This appears to be a weakness of X that justifies using a different tool."

That said, most work that's successful avoids first-order logic in favor of tools such as Isabelle/HOL or Coq. They also support extraction to Ocaml, etc w/ certified compilers in works for them. Maybe better to use those for logic programming. I'm not a domain expert in that field so can't be sure.

For people doing first-order, though, the Mercury language and Visual Prolog app are best I know of with plenty examples.
Survivorship bias. Disruption isn't necessarily good. That's why most startups fail. The ones that thrive tend to be those that disrupted goodly.
It's art, but is it /good/ art? Its intent is to draw attention to some rather crappy laws being proposed and/or implemented, but the project's implementation instead brings discussion as to how even items photographed thousands or millions of times can show new facets based on one photographer. Is the banal art?

This project would have been better had it used much more digital processing to censor a random person, a random building, etc. That would have led to a much better discussion on the issue of copyrighting buildings.
For the full text:
http://www.cs.fsu.edu/~lacher/courses/COT4401/notes/cise_v2_...

Ask yourself, which of the 10 have you used today?
So, I worked at an internet provider up to several years ago, and we were using quite a lot of Cisco routers. Maybe something has radically changed, but I'd be surprised. Please someone correct me if that's now totally different.

A cisco router with a blank config will come up with all interfaces configured "shutdown" and with no passwords set. You access it via a serial port on the front, labeled "Console". It provides a command line almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a unix shell :-) where you enter commands (ping, show routing tables, ..) or configuration statements (config terminal // Interface FastEthernet 0/0 // ip address 10.1.1.1... // no shutdown).

If the only thing you do is to give it an ip-adddress on an interface and enable it, it will have a passwordless login via telnet.

Every ISP/network department not run by complete imbeciles will have a "standard config" regarding login and passwords: Ours back in the days was a TACACS server for running user authentication, setting access levels for particular users (and automated logins for configuration management) and logging of logins/executed commands. You can also configure access lists that logins are only allowed from specific IP addresses. Probably also have a hardcoded password as fallback when the authentication server isn't reachable, disable the console port for when your router isn't in a locked box, ...
+1 for the name
Leap, the luxury San Francisco commuter bus, is bankrupt
> Sure. But that doesn't make it "key" in the sense that, say, lists and maps are.

No, its more like "key" in the way that ints are.

Well, not quite -- less than ints, but more than floats.
Doesn't some of the blockchains security come from having a large number of players maintaining the chain? Isn't there a vulnerability that depends on someone taking over a large enough percentage of the infrastructure? Wouldn't having a handful of entities doing the majority of the transactions allow them to commit fraud, or alter the ledger?
I have scrapers built in Python that do well over a million pages per day, but that's not really a benchmark you can use. It all depends on the amount of computation required to extract the page data among other things.

You should be able to achieve > 120k per day for sure though. That's less than two per second.
The irony about the hate is that having a decentralized way to do things like this is actually going to help unseat some of the banks' powers.
> And there's a lot of weird hate towards bank on HN.

I think that's because of the egalitarian ideas readers of HN subscribe to (is that a big leap of faith?). Bankers getting new fangled tech is watching the f......s who brought the world economy to its knees getting shiny new toys. Hard to be happy about that.
How open source are these things? Can we program them ourselves?
NREL Collaborates with Trucking Industry to Prioritize R&D Opportunities
That's true of any startup. But I guarantee you in one of those venture funding pitches someone asked them "So most cities have taxi regulations that make what you're trying to do illegal. How are you dealing with that?"

Their answer was basically "Fuck 'em, we'll flood the market with cheap product, make consumers love it and the regulators will cave." That would not have worked in Europe if they hadn't already done it in a bunch of cities across the US.
It would be interesting to know if the NSA has explicit special access or has infiltrated the bug reporting programs for important vendors. Are browser bugs or iphone bugs important enough that the NSA has some guy in Apple or Firefox feeding them bug reports on the side?
>Apple announced drastic financial incentives for its new iPhone 6s line because the devices aren’t much of a step forward technologically.

"s" devices (4s, 5s, 6s) never are.

>It leaves Apple with not much to sell other than “new” but not noticeably “improved.”

Then again, they never played in the "specs" wars much. People have 2 years contract, and when they end, they upgrade their phones. So for them (most in the US) 6s is compared to 5s (2 years back) not directly to 6.
If they do end up using something like Ethereum, the network would be the same network that everyone uses, so the number of users would hopefully be much larger than, i.e. the 5 banks listed or whatever.
Show HN: Airoplay's Games API. Your phone is like a wii controller
> but Dan Guido's point was that the parent comment didn't have anything to tell us either

You talked to him offline? Because he didn't actually write that.

What he said is "Probably not", in reference to the NSA being involved. He then quoted a line that doesn't support his "Probably not" assertion.
I guess this basically made fsociety's approach meaningless ;-)
This level of cluelessness is par for the course in corporate IT.
Thank you. Well, I'm doing several things:

1) I check whether or not the page we just scrapped has any of the tags we are looking for.

2) We then extract any information within those tags (images, etc.)

3) We follow trough every link and if it's not in the seen/scrapped list, we add them to the queue.

Not sure if this helps to narrow it down.

Thanks!
It would also help if companies treated employees as people not some fungible commodity

Large companies can't do this: they're too wedded to the idea of "human resources", where any job can be filled by any human with the appropriate SAP title, and managing by drug tests, and other non-human-judgement processes.
US investors do come in, but make it part of the deal to relocate operations to the US, thereby killing the original European startup.
I'm curious why you say that.

You have to learn a whole new Apple-only programming language to do iOS (Swift or Objective-C) in addition to the iOS framework/libraries. Not to mention buying a Mac and paying Apple $100 for a developer account.

Android, on the other hand, was pretty straightforward to get started with for me as someone with Java experience.
Coming Soon to Facebook: A ‘Dislike’ Button
Interesting. Another way to read this is that trust between banks has deteriorated to the point where they feel that they need a blockchain -- a decentralized shared ledger -- to verify certain transactions with each other. Because otherwise a nice centralized, shared ledger is much easier to build, analyze, maintain, and secure.
That's because the article isn't about security, it's about common pitfalls and oversights when making site live.
Context (pun not avoidable): https://twitter.com/ryanflorence/status/643831687013515264
>egalitarian

Meritocratic, perhaps. HN is pretty Libertarian, and Libertarianism is the polar opposite of egalitarianism. It's the equal opportunity vs equal outcome divide.
I was always interested in glitching images - but was frustrated with the checksum/read errors. I took a slightly different approach with JPGCrunk (http://www.mrspeaker.net/dev/jpgcrunk/): instead of modifying the image then trying to display it, randomly mess with the internals of the encoder (I used a JavaScript implementation so it was easy to modify https://github.com/mrspeaker/jpgcrunk/blob/master/scripts/en...)

This way the "glitching" happens inside the encoder algorithm, and then there's nothing to have to repair!
Bombshell Could Hillary Clinton Be Headed to Jail
The pinnacle experience I've had in any X game has been through Litcube's Universe mod for X3AP. X Rebirth definitely isn't true to the rest of the series IMO but isn't a bad game on its own.
While it's definitely not my cup of tea, Glitch Art certainly has a long and twisted history ;)

http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-...
If only trustworthy entities are part of the network, this isn't much of a problem. No large financial institution will launch an attack against their own network.
The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend. If you believe the statement you wrote above then you are a gullible person.
Even better: routers should have a physical switch where flashing the firmware can be disabled. Malware wouldn't survive a reboot.
Someone sold you something if you think free trade is a beneficial condition worth striving for. It benefits a handful of major corporations at the expense of the populace.
AKA Los Angeles, Oakland, and Detroit.
1.) Lack of seed stage investors
2.) Lack of exit scenarios and later stage investors. This makes seed stage investing less attractive.
3.) Few experienced engineers, designers etc. There is plenty of talent, but it's hard to build up experience without successful startups.
4.) Part of the talent leaves Europe
5.) A vicious circle of those factors
It's legal, sure, but it's shameless and wrong to take an open source project built by your competitor, change the branding to yours, bundle it with crapware, and pretend you're innovating.
Guff can be used from the command line in a pipe?
Either way you cut it, we're pretty bent against the incumbent.
Ask Microsoft to Include Python in Windows by Default
Different members of HN have different views. It's not a homogeneous body, and different articles will draw out different groups.
NIMH director Insel to step down to join Google's new mental health initiative