skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I might suggest that the SFMTA has become fat and lazy from lack of oversight, and continues to make the same trivial mistakes in each ticket.

I'm having a hard time understanding how this isn't confirmation of exactly what I experienced and described. I'm sure there are lots of minor trivialities that might get filled out slightly wrong a decent percentage of the time, none of which have anything to do with the validity of the ticket. So if you know all the tiny trivial loopholes you have a decent chance of finding something done "wrong" for otherwise perfectly appropriate tickets.

So yeah, you're able to point out the tiniest unimportant mistakes on a parking citation and then take advantage of that flaw in the system to get people out of valid tickets. It's impressive I suppose, but not something I'd personally brag about.
Great tutorial. Been looking to do something like this for a while. Bookmarked!
Adding Google Sign-In with Node.js to a Couchbase Mobile Application
You're suggesting we revert to Chaucer's English because linguistic drift is bad?

I'm as much a hater of overuse of jargon as the next person, but for his intended audience I don't think this is an example of that. If one doesn't know what any of those words mean, then "Hello, welcome to Hacker News."
Use diaspora or gnu social as a framework, the code is already there and open source.
Before prohibition, big brewers owned most of the bars and you could only buy their brand. Ken Burn's "prohibition" documentary explains how a single brand of beer owned all the bars for several blocks in a city.

State legislatures had this in mind and adopted the 3 tier system barring producers from controlling distribution and/or owning the bars.
The Best Books for a Better Life
How VENTUREAPP Raised Its $2,035,500 Seed Round
If I could feed this an article and have it generate headlines based on the text of that article (and they were any good), there is a solid chance I would pay real money for that service.

Headlines are an absolute pain, and as the article says, they're decidedly unoriginal most of the time. I can't see an obvious reason that an AI would be much worse at creating them as a human.
Going to Japan was a bit unnerving. The flight from the UK overflies Russia. That's not a problem politically, but you fly for hours and hours over Siberia. You can look out of the window and see nothing but icy tundra stretching into the distance. There is absolutely nothing there (3 people per square km), maybe the odd hamlet. If the plane goes down, you'd better hope it catches fire so you don't freeze to death.

I think they avoid North Korea though.

There was some interesting investigative journalism into the BUK theory back in January. https://mh17.correctiv.org/english/
... and pay taxes
This is what I was going to suggest. C is even pretty easy to parse - you can just take the ready ANTLR grammar and use it to generate a parser in whatever language you want.

Of course, he might go even one step further and specify the structs in some other language, then generate C source files from them, which would also allow you to easily generate consumers for that data format in other languages and now you're reinventing Cap'n Proto.
PeerMaze: anonymous P2P and crypto utility
Hello,

I decided to make public my project : everything is free and open source (GNU GPL v3), you can see screenshots and download files (Windows and Linux) from : http://www.peermaze.ch/ (direct download may be unavailable to users based in USA, please use the BitTorrent method in this case).

Most of the work is on a new anonymous data tranfer protocol (P2P) : development is still ongoing (finished at around 70%) but you can already get an idea of what the final result will be by reading the "overview" file in the "doc" folder of the "source" archive.
The protocol introduces security concepts not seen before to make an original approach at anonymity for people that are seeking a very high level of protection.

If you prefer applications that are ready to use, there is also a small crypto utility to crypt/decrypt/sign messages very easily.
There are other applications with the same purpose but this one was built to be as intuitive as possible, requires no internet connection (fully offline) and uses a library derived from NaCl (public keys are very short because they are based on elliptic curves so they can be easily shared).

If you have any comment or question, do not hesitate to contact me by email or by posting here, I will try to reply you as soon as possible.
Quality engineers and dead weight are not exclusive. Great people who are burnt out and unmotivated become dead weight to a company. When planning layoffs, it's normal to put people who are checked out, coasting, and/or clearly planning their next move at the top of the list. That doesn't mean they are not high quality professionals.
Vitaly talks investing, startups, his book, his startup documentary and more
I think this is a classical case of "use the right tool for the right purpose". If you want to do "classic database" stuff, use a classic SQL database. But if e.g. graph traversal is a cruicial operation for your application, then looking at NoSQL solution seems to be quite interesting.

In other words: I wouldn't call a screw driver a bad tool, just because it's not as good at driving nails into wood as a hammer.
Ask HN: What is the role of a modern business website?
I'm not talking about start-ups. Think your typical traditional SME, which is the core of the economy: cleaning service / beauty salon / accountant / dentist. Is social media presence now more important than actually having a website, or are these complementary? How should a business website be structured to properly reflect its modern role? What things no longer belong on a business website? What things have not traditionally been found on a website but should be? Any thoughts on the subject would be appreciated.
Motion UI: A Sass library for creating custom CSS transitions and animations
iMovie for Macs goes 4K, lets you continue edits from iOS
This was an enjoyable article. There is an obvious extension which is to mturk the results and feed the mturk data back into the net. Just give the turkers 5 headlines and ask them which they would click first, repeat a hundred times per a thousand turkers or whatever.

Years ago I considered applying for DoD grant money to implement something reminiscent of all this for military propaganda. That went approximately nowhere, not even past the first steps. Someone else should try this (insert obvious famous news network joke here, although I was serious about the proposal). To save time I'll point out I never got beyond the earliest steps because there is a vaguely infinite pool of clickbaitable English speakers on the turk, but the pool of bilingual Arabic (or whatever) speakers with good taste in pro-usa propaganda is extremely small, so the tech side was easy to scale but the mandatory human side simply couldn't scale enough to make the output realistically anything but a joke.
Did you search at all because you were interested in the research, or were you just hoping to call that out as bullshit? Let's pretend for a moment you're genuinely curious.

Florêncio & Herley of Microsoft research published a paper: Where do security policies come from? http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1837124. Their finding demonstrates that uni policies require more entropy.

Cormac has done a lot of research on the subject of passwords, including a recent survey of the subject presented to usenix: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/lisa14/lisa14...

Kelley et all at CMU used a mechanical turk study to collect a large set of passwords under different policies, and observe error rates, and password recovery requests. While they found that some policies were more effective at recall than others, the general trend is more entropy -> less recalled.

Finally, experience. I worked as a programmer at a university, where I saw how this plays out: Internally, tickets are assigned a root cause; password resets were assigned to IDM, even though the system was working as requested. Helpdesks are typically 50-75 percent password reset, so we looked far worse than the rest of the teams. The Helpdesk manager is responsible for staffing helpdesk, but has no say on security policies. The CISO has limited budget, but can set policies. Our Identity Management software development team, responsible for enforcing password strength policies, password expiration notices, directory information, etc., met with both of these people regularly, and it became clear they did not.

As Cormac points out, it's likely that .com policies are simpler, because they have to attract and retain customers. It seems likely .com measures bounce rates for signups, and universities that have an adwords campaign had policies closer to .com than .edu. I forget if we measured bounce rates, but we did implement a system to track how many tries it took for people to produce a valid password. This was a while ago, and I switched to server administration shortly after this, but I recall the statistics being roughly an average of 2 tries, maybe more. Meanwhile, the security team actually ding'd us for providing a realtime feedback of whether the password field was or was not in the dictionary, in line with the rest of the real time policy checkers they requested (3 of 4 character categories, 9 characters long, etc).
In this context, "basic computers" means Commodity/Off The Shelf. Instead of buying some high-end "enterprise" server from Sun / HP / Dell, using a regular cheap (enough) box and lots of them. This started with servers, but you now see standard x86 boxes being turned into high-speed packet processors ("routers") instead of paying someone like Cisco $15k for a switch.
You can get a lot of it from the Pie Menus addon. Holding q pops up a menu, you push the cursor slightly toward the one you want and release the key:

http://i.imgur.com/zDdbrER.png

It's what I use on my laptop, but I still prefer the keypad when I can have a full keyboard.
Startup Idea
Seeing the airbag for cyclists post earlier, why not airbag for seniors as hip protectors? I have to imagine insurance companies would love this.
I am creating this small library that can be described as "jquery for streams of heterogeneous schemaless messages" which pretty much could be a lean replacement for the ugly switch at flex-like architectures.
You can sneak a working barebones, very early preview at https://github.com/constructo/neurobus
If you're interested in LiDAR data from the United states, you should have a look at this wikipedia page and its corresponding links[0]. Most states have some kind of data freely available from the most recent survey, although it's neither uniform or always clear in terms of how to access it. The structure of the program allowed individual states to tackle their won territory differently in both surveying and data dissemination, so there's no easy and official central repo as far as I understand.

I was in grad school at Indiana and working at the geological survey while they were finalizing some of the state's pieces of this, and it was really fascinating to see some of the early products some of the people in the geography and geology departments were producing. I mucked around a bit with it myself, but never really produced anything useful. I can speak to finding the data fairly easy to acquire and quite comprehensive at the time, uncertain if that's changed, but might be a decent starting point[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lidar_Dataset_(United...

[1] http://gis.iu.edu/datasetInfo/statewide/in_2011.php
Building RJMetrics Pipeline
The former: private cloud all from one shop. Don't forget that Cloud Foundry is sitting right there next to them ;).
Well, really, the world doesn't need any. But I'm curious why you think the world would benefit from fewer.
Really interesting project!

Caveat, not to take anything away from it, but I've found that my posture is mostly correlated with how much exercise I'm getting, and that I have a pretty limited ability to consciously fix it over a sustained period of time. Maybe Slouchy will help you, but if you end up frustrated by constant warnings, consider easing into a routine with some back and shoulders exercises.
Startup is just a code word for "tech company" anymore.
How can you prove to potential buyers that you're able to produce the product you're selling them if you can't create a prototype demonstrating that it works?

Let's say we take everything at face value and believe 100% they can do this and that it is not a scam. If there is no prototype it's still possible that it could not work as it's unproven.
Ah, fair enough. The user should avoid using native JS constructs on the code to be stringified, though - it is an interesting/useful side effect of the method that you are able to, but ideally you would define your functions using only the pure λ-calculus grammar.

Thanks for figuring that out!
This is not a cluster test. NoSQL databases in general are optimized for scaling horizontally on commodity hardware. That's more tricky in RDBMS.
Your statement is only somewhat correct. What complex systems need isn't a single, complex design document but rather levels of simple, intuitive design. It's like OOP--the basic principle of OOP is that you can manage (but not eliminate!) complexity by sharding it into small-ish objects that only need to know about those whom they interact with. Similarly, in a large system, you'd want a high-level, very abstract design detail, and as you peer in closer to the code, you want increasingly concrete design.

The problem of UML is that it tries to be the language of all these levels of design (and even different stages of design!), to the point that the highest-level design document is trying to be something so completely specified that there's no abstraction.
> ADHD is defined in the DSM-IV and now -5 as presenting with predominantly hyperactive tendencies or with predominantly inattentive tendencies (or combined, presenting both).

This was a little unclear to me until I looked into the wikipedia page you linked a bit more[1]. To try to clarify in case others are in the same spot, ADHD has 3 primary "sub-types:"

* Predominantly inattentive, which is the form discussed in the original article.

* Predominantly hyperactive-impulsive, which most diagnosed boys exhibit.

* Combined (AKA both inattentive and hyperactive-impulsive)

I'm not sure if the most common case for young boys is only hyperactive or if it's combined. Either way, the symptoms of hyperactivity are most disruptive, so they are what causes most people to seek medical help.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactivit...
I worked for one of those mega corporation that followed Welch's book, only they didn't have the courage to openly state it, oh and screw the top 30%. They would "layoff" 10% every year blaming the bad economy.

A friend even tried to fire a guy for bad performance and high management told him to wait for the next "annual layoff", that it would be easier.
I don't doubt that ADHD exists so much as I suspect that it is wildly overdiagnosed in the U.S. Every other developed country has much, much lower rates of diagnosis than the U.S., but even in countries like France where there is a cultural inclination to find diagnoses or interventions other than an ADHD diagnosis, there are still ADHD diagnoses (at a rate that is a few percentage points of the US diagnosis rate).

The main treatment for ADHD is of course lifelong amphetamine prescriptions, and the US has a private pharmaceuticals industry very happy to market to insecure parents. And a general American insecurity about education that results in an astonishingly high proportion of elementary schoolers who get no or minimal recess at all.

The single biggest risk factors for an ADHD diagnosis are being male and being in the youngest quartile of your classroom. This is something we have managed to pathologize.
Twitter's Servers are running autonom. We just do not need you anymore... Thanks... AI
Newer versions of PyQt have replaced the magic strings with a system that's much more Pythonic, using decorators and OOP.

I guess the author just wanted to keep backwards compatibility with old versions (or isn't aware of the change).

Edit: If anyone's interested, here's the new syntax: http://pyqt.sourceforge.net/Docs/PyQt4/new_style_signals_slo...
> I assume this is just an instance of them not being PostgeSQL experts.

this illuminates the need for "experts" in the different components in the stack. it's intellectually dishonest to claim that a technology is not up to the task when it's not been properly treated in the first place.
While I'm not making any statement about the feasibility of the Skarp, I think you might be exaggerating the size of a moderately powerful modern lasers. At my company's R&D lab I have some 1W CO2 lasers that, similar to what what you describe, are about the size of loaf of bread. They run on three phase power, have inch-thick cables and required hilariously large cooling shrouds. Two facts about those types of lasers: They are cavity lasers designed to have very good beam quality, and they are OLD.

I have a cabinet full of other types of newer, moderately powerful laser modules which vary from pin diodes to modules the size of a AA battery, to things the size of cigars. Some of them are pretty darned powerful. Any laser modules that are water cooled would DEFINITELY not be something you would want to hold up to your face, but I also don't think that's the kind of power required for cutting hair. I'm not saying that any laser running on a AAA battery at a useful power could last a useful amount of time, if you could figure out some secret sauce method for very quickly coupling a high intensity pulse (hairs have a very small area, after all) onto some hairs at a wavelength that they like to soak up then it seems.... possible. In theory the laser wavelength and power could even be tuned dynamically to match the hairs, that is if they had somehow figured out a way to fit a Mach-Zender modulator, an electro-optical modulator and a frequency comb into a razor handle--ha!

Anyhow, I might be wrong in all this, but my point is mostly that it wouldn't take a water cooled laser to burn some hair. Come visit me in Vancouver and we can test it out (on your beard).
Lesson number one of corporate life: there is always another round.
Heilmeier's Questions for Research Proposals
The Land Registry and OS maps have more data, and it's a shame they're aren't easily online.

It's interesting to compare across Google Maps.

Grid reference: SO9644600362) near Coates (Gloucestershire) is an old roman fort.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.7010323,-2.0505876,1017m/d...

EDIT: And the big lumps north of that are from the canal tunnel. These do not show on the Google map.
How to install a Theano deep learning instance on Amazon EC2
SEC runs a free TweetLonger service for public companies. They are required to use it if they make important announcements that will impact the stock.
Internet through your lightbulb?
No, it's simpler English. It's not trying to put artificial distance between speaker and audience. There is a power component to these language queues.

It's like the difference between legalese and regular English.
Or he's involved simply because he lends so much credibility to an otherwise obvious scam.
So about that idea of using ssh-keygen on untrusted input?
There were actually four microphones - captain, first officer, cockpit and observer (see page 46, Figure 9). Four receivers is sufficient to determine the sound origin at a point in space, with an associated error volume (three receivers only allows you to determine a curve in space).

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilateration
No RethinkDB?
Signs That Silicon Valley's Tech Bubble Is Bursting
I'm always surprised people can never seem to see these things coming. If I was working there, I would've started looking two or three months ago.

Maybe they had some stock options or something they were holding onto??
Not to say that you're wrong and Gladwell is right, but you're ignoring most of his argument! The core, to me, is that a lot of these young men are just highly obsessive kids on the autism spectrum. They develop a fascination with the lore of school shootings (not hard to understand - I've read about too many of these kids myself) and are just missing a few emotional checks and balances that would stop a neurotypical person from obsessing over the methods of past shooters and planning an attack of their own.

Then there's the "threshold effect", which suggests that each shooter may require less emotional disturbance/aggression than the last - for just the right obsessive mind missing a few internal checks and balances, planning and executing an attack seems more and more perversely "normal".
Airbag for cyclists: http://www.hovding.com/?utm_expid=37988497-0.onzg4jq0RsKvXrg...
Stemmed from this comment chain:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10379199&goto=item%3Fid...
Terraforming a HashiCorp Nomad cluster
> Have an independent party, who has signed an appropriate NDA, asses and certify that your product does what it says on the tin and audit it at regular periods.

This may work for safety standards or financial liability, but it doesn't work for the legal system, because "independent" parties are influenced by who pays them.
The one problem I've had with these "construct a story" mechanisms is that I have just as hard of a time remembering the specifics of the story as I do some of the things I'm trying _to_ remember.

In your example, "the ISS crashed down into $city" requires remembering the city name, and that's just a few words in. By the time the novella gets to the 50th word, there are a ton of details one must remember, aside from the story itself that houses them (which in your case seems custom made for those words; I'd be surprised if that was your general purpose loci).

This problem is compounded by the system described on ArtOfMemory's wiki (http://mt.artofmemory.com/wiki/Method_of_Loci) where they use a fixed story but with interchangeable items in the rooms. I'm sure with enough reciting of that story, I could remember the corn and milk, but the second time I need that memory palace, only this time with different items, I'm screwed because the two stories will bleed together.

I recognize this comment might sound like I'm deriding the method, but I promise that's not the case. I just want to know if someone else has the same "stories don't work for me" and to know if there is a twist or alternate which makes them work for the kind of brain which isn't helped by loci.
Apple’s New $129 Trackpad Brings Force Touch to the iMac
Roman law even.
As The Daily Show put it, "The facts have a well-known liberal bias."
The source code is available on github:

http://github.com/arguman/arguman.org
My impression after reading it all is that there may be some merit to the riot theory of escalating school shootings, but that LaDue is an outlier that doesn't fit into that theory.

Gladwell is attempting to draw a parallel between the "hundredth rioter" who would only riot if everyone and their mother was already doing so, and LaDue, who is a mild mannered and non-malevolent hobbyist in mass murder.

But an autist who is obsessed with the concept of riots in general and goes about rioting with a clinical and scientific detachment devoid of emotion fits nowhere in the social theory of rioting which Gladwell is trying to bring in.